Coronavirus-resilient Neighbourhood will Appear in Albanian Capital

"This is the first neighbourhood in Europe to be designed in agreement with the government and the city authorities able to respond to the new needs of the post-Covid 19 pandemic phase as well as meeting all the sustainability requirements required by the current climate crisis," said Italian Architect Stefano Boeri, permanent partner of such projects, as ADD AWARDS and St. Petersburg Design Week.

Territory close to the Tirana River is designed for 12,000 residents. The idea was to create a walkable "neighbourhood city" that focuses on exercise and will include smart technologies and extensive roof gardens to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.

"This moment of great difficulty has made clear the need for a change of perspective in which humanity is forced to deeply review its relationship with nature and with the spaces it inhabits and transforms. We must think of a new era, more ecological and without fossil fuels, far from the normality that we knew before the spread of Covid-19: the normality that sadly contained the contributing factors of the situation in which we find ourselves now," said architects Stefano Boeri and Francesca Cesa Bianchi.

Close open green spaces are accessible to all citizens, reducing the need for large movements with private petrol vehicle. To create resilience to coronavirus, residents of Tirana Riverside will have access to all "essential services" within a walkable distance. Along with offices and housing, the development will include a school and university centre. While the ground floors of the housing blocks will contain food vending machines, the roofs will be gardens that can be used by the residents.

"The direction to be taken is that of reducing urban congestion, expanding the common areas and bringing 'outside' what is today 'inside', providing every commercial reality of an outdoor area, with even wider sidewalks, cycle paths and increasingly narrow streets. Cities need to rediscover even more its open spaces creating an interconnected future capable of desynchronising the city's rhythm, avoiding big fluxes of workers and improving open-air green spaces," said Boeri and Bianchi.