Urban Regeneration of Industrial Heritage, Tirana Case

The gradual delocalization of production activities, in the last decades of the last century, led to the progressive disposal of a considerable portion of the industrial heritage present in the periphery of the urban areas. Places originally characterized by a great productive fervor gradually have been transformed and now are presented in conditions of almost total abandonment and advanced degradation. Characterized by strong potential, many of the abandoned industrial sites were not perceived as resources to be used by their very existence. In the Albanian context, the industrial heritage is being completely or partially demolished, or alienated transformation, limiting the conservation interventions to a few isolated fragments, without any links with the context in which they are inserted. Tirana city nowadays is crowded with numerous used and unused buildings—such as former industrial buildings—which are the heritage of almost 50 years of the communist period. The process of de-industrialization and the late spontaneous development in Albania led to the depopulation and abandonment of entire industrial areas. With the phenomenon of Tirana city sprawl, former peripheral industrial sites are becoming degraded areas inside the city, now unable to communicate the relationships that originally existed between what remained and the disappeared activity, results meaningless today. This research aims to highlight the interest and the potential of the industrial heritage, with a focus on Tirana city, on the former industrial sites, with the challenge of how to develop and regenerate the former industrial sites. The assessment intentions at eventual acupuncture urban regeneration and to adapt and reuse these structures taking into consideration their former uses, for new future functions, and the influence these interventions have on a larger scale.