Counter-Geometries. An Alternative Urban Lens to Address Congestion-Driven Singularities in Tirana.
Author
Fulvio PAPADHOPULLI
Sadmira MALAJ
Affiliation
PhD IDAUP/ Polis University, Tirana, Albania
Abstract
The urban trajectory of Tirana speaks of a city both devouring and displacing itself in one entangled spiral of congestion, collision, and centrifugal growth. At its center, the mobility system is driven and affected by a set of triple singularities: geometric, economic, and cultural nexuses; magnetizing the lifeblood of the city, asphyxiated by the centralized pressures of its gravitational pull. A network of infrastructure and roads radiating from it ought to have the effect of diffusing such pressures. Collapsing inward, it amplifies systemic congestion and spatial inequities. This research proposes a methodological framework that constructs and maps counter-geometries as an alternative potential to reading and formalizing decentralized latent centralities. Rather than extending the city outward in straight lines, this approach reads its growth as a new interdependent recursive model. The research employs hybrid computational models and spatial analytics to develop the design of one such illustrative prototype, demonstrating its scalability across the north-west peripheries of Tirana. The circularities, both geometric and infrastructural, shift from abstraction into form, materializing as a matrix of systemic equilibrium by acknowledging the current asymmetries deriving from informal developments throughout the last three decades of transition. The paper concludes by arguing that these emerging methods offer a pragmatic potential, articulating as a visionary framework far beyond normative planning logic, ultimately recasting single-core congestion into an archipelago of flexible circulatory zones.
