The question of town and regional planning in Albania

Albania has been going through a period of dramatic political, economic, social and cultural changes. Town and regional planning, once powerful instruments of the state, are now almost meaningless. For the gradual development of realistic and relevant urban and regional planning in Albaniaʹs current critical times, planning needs to change its formalistic land use approach to a more realistic, basic, and integrated type of planning, rooted in community autonomy. To achieve this, the basic institutional context of town and regional planning has to be changed, however optimistic and far away this objective may seem to be in the present troubled epoch of the countryʹs history.