Tirana, demolitions in the name of urban development in the 5 Maji neighbourhood

On 26 November 2019, an earthquake struck northwestern Albania and caused over 50 deaths and around 3,000 injuries, as well as damage to buildings throughout the country. This area was also designated to accommodate families affected by the earthquake.

However, the urban development project was in planning well before the earthquake, and follows a series of institutional decisions whose documents have not been made available to the public. “The earthquake’s disaster response allowed the government to implement exceptional state legislation, bypassing regular procedures for project approvals and public consultation,” write Goci and Harris-Brandts.

Demolitions in 5 Maji began in October 2021, reports journalist Elira Kadriu in the independent newspaper Citizens. According to the Albanian authorities, some residents have agreed to be relocated. However, journalists on the ground have found no evidence of this agreement

Like other areas on the outskirts and in the hinterland of Tirana (including Kamza), 5 Maji is the product of internal migration following the end of the socialist regime in the early 1990s.

Among these internal migrants is Gjin Nikolli, who has lived in 5 Maj since 1991 and is originally from Rubik, in the north of the country. His case is exemplary of the neighbourhood’s history: after the end of the regime, he left northern Albania to settle near one of the country’s major urban centres, in his case Tirana. During that phase of legal and social limbo between the end of the socialist regime and the formation of liberal democratic institutions (and the transition from collectivisation to private property), Gjin Nikolli built his house with the money he earned working as a plumber, welder, and electrician in Greece.

Like many Albanians, he then embarked on a long and costly process with the public administration to regularise the house he had built. Begun in 2006, his application concluded in 2021 with the amnesty of the house – but not the land on which it stood – in exchange for the payment of €29,000 to the state.

The stability was short-lived: on 22 February 2022, the bulldozers arrived, accompanied by the police. The two apartments in which Nikolli’s family now lives were allocated for three years after the demolition. In the meantime, the family has to find a home and pay part of the rent out of their own pocket.

Today, they live in two units in one of the new apartment blocks. As the total area of the two units is slightly larger than that of the demolished house, they have to pay the difference. They were never asked if they agreed to move house or be relocated elsewhere.

The eviction was unnecessarily brutal. There was an agreement to leave the house on the day planned for demolition at 10am. The police arrived at 5a.m. and forced everyone out. “My mother was 92 at the time, my daughter had two small children.”

Nikolli and his family now have the keys to their new flats, but no title deeds. The utilities are registered to the municipality. This situation is common to all those who reluctantly agreed to be relocated. “You feel like a person who wasn’t registered at birth. You have to wonder if you even exist,” says Nikolli.

Gjin Nikolli is one of about 400 people who protested for six months following the demolitions.

Ndue Marku participated in the protests during the 2022 demolitions, even though his house was not destroyed. “No one feels safe,” he tells us in perfect Italian, “because what happened to the others can happen to anyone.” Marku arrived in 5 Maji when he was 14 years old. The house in which he lives with his family, including his 82-year-old mother, was built in 1996. Marku emigrated to Greece and then to Italy, but returned to Albania in 2010.

“Difficulties in life are normal,” Marku continues. “But we never expected the state to come and knock down your house.”

Marku is concerned about his own fate and that of the community, especially the fact that no one has title deeds, combined with the fact that the utilities are in the name of the municipality: “Maybe the municipal council will decide that it is municipal property,” and, as a result, “will be able to evict those who are there now and reassign it.”

As he shows us his house, which stands a few steps from the ruins of Nikolli’s former home, Marku talks of the precarity of the population. “We live with the uncertainty that tomorrow, at five in the morning, they will come and tear down our house. Then we can take legal action, of course, but we are not the kind of people who can afford to go through long and expensive trials.” Marku says he is prepared to take his case as far as the European Court of Human Rights.