The text offers a glimpse into the conversation between two of the three organizers behind the training school titled ‘The Planned, the Unplanned, and Everything in Between’ held in Tirana and Kamza in March 2023. Three months before the training school, the two correspondents, Willie, visiting Albania for the first time through an STSM, and Dorina, temporarily located in the Netherlands, exchange daily thoughts aiming to interpret the two cities’ urban situations and sociopolitical conditions. Albania’s historical position at the edge of Europe has seen a remarkable shift in recent times, turning into an emerging discovery. Simultaneously, a burgeoning self-awareness of subverting narratives of representation has begun to take root among the Albanian youth – a phenomenon that adds depth and complexity to the ongoing dialogue. The transformation of the cities and the country is explained as multivocal while acknowledging protests, loss and destruction as part of a glorified urban project. ... Read more

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft. ... Read more

The training school The planned, the unplanned, and everything in between was held in the cities of Tirana and Kamza, as a fieldwork event of the COST Action Writing Urban Places on March 24, 30-31 2023. As the title suggests, the aim of this training school was to understand more and reflect upon two major concepts that have played an essential role in the formation of these two cities: the planned and the unplanned, and to potentially challenge this dichotomy. The professional way of planning the city is often understood as an organised arrangement from the top, showing a vision, a projection towards the future of an urban area. This is a technical but also political procedure, usually reflected in documents and maps, signed and agreed upon in between the professionals and officials in power. There are different levels of how much a city is regulated, and Tirana, like every city, has its particular relationship with incorporating planning in its formation. The professional planning in the city was mainly imported and is relatively recent starting from when the city was declared a capital in 1920. Nevertheless, beyond the need to regulate and facilitate livability of a built environment, planning is often related to the idea of control, over a certain territory, over the bodies that populate it, and over the activities they do. During this training school we saw how in Tirana the need for planning has come along with the need from the top for a certain political ideology to express its face in the city. We also noticed how there is a resistance to centralised forms of planning the city, and how the unplanned has always remained part of spatio-temporal activities in the city. Kamza, on the other hand, is a city created during the last three decades of transitioning from the totalitarian regime, when there was a wave of migrants from the north-eastern part of Albania. Developed in times of anarchy, when the state was absent, it is known for its autonomous character, often seen, portrayed, and stigmatised as a sort of wild urbanism outside the boundaries of the discipline of urban planning. When having a closer encounter with Kamza one can actually understand that what is usually understood as unplanned, is often a co-planned or a semi-planned process of creation; a common endeavour based on relationships of kin, family, and community. [...] ... Read more