Speech of Prime Minister Rama at the donors’ conference  “Smart City, Go Tirana”, organized by the Municipality of Tirana:

I actually have to give an explanation for what I told Ms Ambassador, who would speak on behalf of the European Union, and it’s up to the European Union, primarily, to make us stop dreaming, because we dream a lot about the European Union, we dream so much about it, to the point that we annoy our European fellows.

I would like to start this speech, not by addressing to their excellences, but by addressing to Stefano Boeri who has come from the European Union to help us dream more, not to encourage us to lower the intensity of our dreams. I hope very much that Stefano’s experience in Tirana will be much more successful that the one he had in Milan. I assure him that Tirana is ahead of Milan in the desire to get closer to the future, without being a hostage of the past. And for the sake of truth, Milan’s past is much more severe in terms of tradition than Tirana’s past, which should be completely overthrown.

Actually, a change has occurred which I can personally testify. There was a time when the World Bank used to go to the Mayor’s office only to take notes on what he thought about the development of the country as a whole. The mayor’s question about what could be done for Tirana was answered with a standard reply: “There are many things to do, you have many good ideas, but they do not comply with our program.” It was pretty much the same situation with the others. Not to mention OSCE, who would come and talk about democracy, and never forgot to say in the end: “We do not have money to support these projects”.

There is an important difference today. Everybody here is ready to support this transformative vision of the mayor and of the new administration of the Municipality of Tirana, which needs more support to materialize, and no doubt, more work and more time.

What is important today is that everybody is here. None of the Albanian partners and friends who have accompanied us in our hard path, making along with us a lot of mistakes, is missing.

I believe that what may be considered today as an important and solid base to think about sustainable development and to have the courage to believe in this new vision, is the result of the administrative and territorial reform. Today, Tirana is not a city surrounded and pressed within its limits by completely uncontrolled development of all the surrounding municipalities, but it is a seriously large and organized municipality to lead change in the territory. This is the difference between the era that we leave behind and the era that we open with this reform.

From an era when the pressure of development form below would impose the solutions and the elections, to an era when interaction is conditioned by the municipal leadership, to transform pressure of development into a force of sustainable development. If we looked at what has happened to Albania’s body in all these years, we would actually see that cities have been forgotten and disappeared for more than two decades.  I mean here the city as a basic notion, as the shared house of a community. I don’t mean Tirana, but the city as a whole. For more than two decades we have had across the territory of Albania a development that has led us towards communities, towards places of residence, but never towards the cities. If the city is in the immediate imagination of each of you a place where there is a square, and where there is a set of administrative, religious and cultural institution, and of course, of neighbourhoods, this image cannot be aligned with any of the cities of Albania in the last 20 or more, excluding Tirana that somehow, has saved in its heart the city of the past.

Our cities, generally speaking, were developed on the basis of communist planning, and their squares have never been public squares. Worse, in the last 20 years, those squares that have never been public, were transformed in massive parking lots. Just think about Lezha, a city that no serious and normal state would ever abandon, considering its history so important for Albania, and its cultural heritage so important for that region. The city centre, next to one of the most sacred places of our history, the Mausoleum of Skanderbeg, was transformed into a big parking lot, and the sheep would graze in the area between the parking lot and the mausoleum. While to enter the mausoleum, people had to pass through a former canal filled with trash.

What fatally happened is that the counter response of the Albanians to a 50-year long period of collectivization and freezing of any opportunity to move freely, was transformed into a bombastic demographic growth, which could not be accompanied by the state, not to mention to be led by a clear planning policy, and later by the implementation of the plans.

If you see Albania in the closets of ministries or agencies, we will find many plans, generally financed by our friends and partners, but we will find that very little or none of these plans are implemented in the reality of our territory. On the contrary, our territory experienced what was called and constantly greeted as economic growth, but actually it was an economic growth at the expense of the future. A completely unsustainable economic growth that recalls a beautiful quote of an American writer, who said: “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

A cancerous growth that, of course, provided endless settlement opportunities for Albanians, but at what cost? With the cost of deforestation, the destruction of riverbeds, the destruction of beaches and many fantastic assets for the development of our tourism, with the cost of destroying the system of water supply and canalization, the destruction of the drainage and irrigation system, and the cost of dramatic contraction of the agricultural land surface, not to mention them all. It took this cost to have this development, a development that was based on construction without criteria and without moderation, and that was made possible mainly by remittances.

In fact, what we are facing us today is a tremendous challenge to give sense to development, to give sense to sustainability, and to align development of the territory with the development of knowledge. For, while Albania had this great transformation, which in my view was a cancerous, and unsustainable growth, the cost of which we have just begun to face, on the other hand no one ever though seriously to develop knowledge and to have a generation that, after 25 years of freedom and efforts for democracy, was able to meet the challenges of the country and the challenges of further development through knowledge.

I want to bring to your attention just one figure. Albania has inherited, we have inherited, 28 national strategies only for water in less than 25 years, all funded by donors. 72 strategic documents for the water sector. Meanwhile, we do not have enough water in our homes. We do not have enough water in the fields. We do not have any full sustainability to withstand the excess of water that nature has given us.

I believe that what the director of the World Bank said today is absolutely connected to the new possibility that this reform gives us. This development and this great pressure which the state never managed to channel in view of sustainable development for everyone, – instead, it was followed by nonsense plans and strategies, by mountains of useless papers, for which endless amounts of money were spent, – had another component. This component affected dramatically the destructive power of this transformation, and was the fatal fragmentation of Albania in some 360 local units, who made a mess with the property titles, with water supply systems, sewerage systems and the service systems. And obviously, they had a fatal impact on cities, because every city of Albania, if we look at them from above, even those that are world cultural heritage, look like settlements surrounded and pressed by a barbarian army, by buildings that seem as if God had scattered pumpkin seeds across the country.

To conclude with an optimistic view, not for a formal optimism, but with conviction, I believe however that we have today a real opportunity to look at what happened, and to treat what we have inherited in the territory in terms of their potential. For instance, if many agricultural territories around Tirana today are a mix between agricultural lands and settlements within the city, this should not limit our imagination to deal with these agricultural territories like urban agriculture, as it is called. If residents of New York have started to plant bio products on the rooftops of the buildings, and this has become a trend seen in many cities, we have these territories as part of the city, and we do not need to plant tomatoes in our terraces, because we have fields of tomatoes where towns have playgrounds, we have greenhouses where cities have gyms.

I believe that with the reform, we have the opportunity now not only to launch after 2 years of preparation, but also to implement a real reform of drinking water. By transforming the old and ruined structure of water supply into a structure that functions as an enterprise, and not as a background structure of the political parties.

A reform in order to have every plot irrigated, and to transfer responsibility to the municipalities, as we did, and support them so that will have their fleet and succeed in what we couldn’t succeed in over 20 years, despite the colossal spending and all the money given by donors, in terms of agricultural land, water and drainage canals, and to protect ourselves form erosion which, besides climate change, was created by us due to the destruction of embankments, and of all natural balances.

In addition to water reform, there is the reform of services. Today, we have another advantage that poor or less developed countries have compared with developed countries, in order to overcome many years of backwardness. This advantage is the opportunity to use high technology through a program on which we are working together with the World Bank, and which we believe can transform the quality of services. No later than yesterday, 27 out of the 54 services provided by the mortgages office can be obtained without going there, but by going to the notary. This has halved the endless lines to get the certificates, or the confirmations of the property titles. In other words, the entire bureaucratic procedure that couldn’t be carried out due to the lack of access to technology.

Obviously, funding remains a major challenge. I have always believed that our path is the building of partnerships with privates. We do not have the opportunity to take more debts. We are not able and do not want to raise taxes further. It takes money to do all these things. Therefore, the only way is partnership with privates. Countries that are more developed than us, for instance Germany, which is known by everyone and where everybody wants to move, a leading country in terms of public-private partnerships, they are a great lesson for us. They teach us that no matter how big the financial opportunities of more developed countries, they still refer to public-private partnerships as an indispensable instrument, not only for financial reasons, but also for the quality of services.

I am convinced that the Municipality of Tirana can become a locomotive in building public-private partnerships, with courage and determination, and without any complex, and much less without stepping back in front of any dark reaction according to which any partnership with private businesses is something that deserves only to be accused and covered with mud.

I started this speech with Stefano Boeri, and I will conclude with Stefano Boeri, by thanking him for undertaking this challenge. I am convinced that Stefano’s approach, and also the approach of the school of a new architectural thought that Stefano represents – which is not the school of rigid planning and maps that actually have no chance to find development opportunities in a country like ours, not to say that they have been abandoned by countries that are much more developed than ours, –  but a modern approach of looking at the city and the territory as a body, and the approach of conceiving the future of this body on the basis of its metabolism, is a great opportunity for cooperation between the Municipality of Tirana and the Stefano Boeri group. This is a new opportunity to transform weaknesses into strength, and to transform what we have inherited as problems into potentials of a new and sustainable growth, and without the slightest doubt, an innovative one, because, if it is not innovative, it cannot be growth.

Thank you!

 

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The “2016-2026 Smart City, Go Tirana” conference was held today in Tirana. This initiative of the Municipality of Tirana along with the UNDP brought together the private sector, investors and donors.

After the administrative and territorial reform, the population of the Municipality of Tirana has tripled, and the municipality provides a range of services to a territorial area that is 25 times larger than in 2013. The projects presented in the conference concern five priority areas, such as rural and economic development, social development, life in the city, and transportation.