This blog has been neglected for about a year now because Ive been in the Peace Corps and have started a new blog.
I wrote a post recently about what I love about living in an Albanian City: how urban places in Albania look and feel different because of their population density and their walkability.
Let’s talk about the population density. My little city in the middle of nowhere is roughly one square kilometer yet holds14000-18000 people. To put this into perspective, this is half the population density of Manhattan, 5x the population density of the City of Los Angeles, more than double the population density of the City of San Francisco!
How did this happen? Almost all housing is apartment blocks which were built under the communist era. People had no choice of owning a new single family home because the only builder was the government and the only thing the government was building was apartment blocks. The lack of government control that followed the fall of communism only lead to greater population densities because people filled in spaces left “empty” (parks, gardens, yards, pedestrian paths) with new, taller apartment buildings.
Car-free life here in Albania is the default, rather than in America where it is impossible except for some exceptions. Why is this so? Not just because at these population densities the rates of car ownerships in America would be physically impossible, but because personal cars were illegal under communism and Albanian cities were simply not at all built with cars in mind which is a legacy of the built environment that persists. Until 1991 there were an estimated 2000 cars in the country of 3000000 people. Even today, it is fair to say most Albanians have no need for a personal car, given such high densities of both housing and employment, and most are simply status symbols for men.
Check out the rest of the post at Albanian Urbanism, A Love Story
