Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper focuses on the problem of the "informal" city, consisting of large nuclei of houses built in peri-urban areas, for private initiative and without planning, in often fragile territories from the environmental and social point of view. The absence of a recognizable and identifiable form in contemporary urban development leads to theoretical reflections, highlighting the crisis of "architecture without architects" and the spontaneous growth of cities. It also leads to considerations of method: how to recognize the "spontaneous" logic of these settlement forms, how to bring them back to a recognizable principle. Above all, it poses a design challenge: how to give a structure and an order to these parts of city and territory, how to deal with the regeneration of these edifications, with which procedures and techniques of the project, between demolition, reconstruction, recovery, renaturalisation. Albania presents this phenomenon in macroscopic form, due to the uncontrolled urbanization as a result of the massive migration from rural zones to cities and coastal areas, after the fall of communism. The paper reports the studies conducted by the Master Degree Workshops at the Degree Course in Architecture of the Politecnico di Bari on informal widespread peri-urban development in some Albanian cities. The aim was to find general principles that could be generalized through these specific cases. The settlement logics have been recognized: the original urban layout and its development over time, the relationship with orographic forms, consolidated city and territory, the recurrent building types and the aggregative forms. Then the Workshops have experimented mechanisms of action in a procedural perspective, the design strategies on a territorial, urban and architectural scale, up to the housing forms, that have been traced back to a case study adaptable to similar contexts. The projects have attempted to conceptually bring this widespread horizontal city back to the settlement forms and spatial principles of the Ottoman tradition, which characterized the Albanian cities and architecture until the end of the nineteenth century.