Public Spaces: A Sea of Change

Public space strategy

In 2015, BOOM Landscape together with Cityförster realised a project for an artificial cape, square and park in Durrës, Albania’s second biggest city by the Adriatic Sea. This project, called ‘Cape Square’, was a huge success and the start of many other public space projects initiated by Prime Minister Edi Rama as part of his national campaign to improve tourism by investing in the Albanian coast. Albania has a beautiful and rich variety of river, mountain and coastal landscapes that can easily compete with popular nearby tourist destinations such as Croatia and Greece. After the fall of Communism, a sprawl of (illegal) building projects turned the public coast into private land and threatened to invade and destroy Albania’s coastal landscape. Albania put a stop on construction near the Albanian coast, enforced regulations to remove existing illegal buildings and invested in hundreds of public space projects. The reason behind this strategy is the idea that transformation, building and reconstructing public space along the coast is necessary to improve liveability and to give a strong economic impulse by lengthening the tourist season as well as improving the opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors. It’s a radical strategy to make a resilient, sustainable coastal landscape that every citizen in Albania will benefit from.

International trend

With the world becoming smaller and smaller, the competition between coastal cities fighting for tourists, international companies and higher-educated employees is growing. The tendency to invest in waterfronts, harbours, promenades and parks by the sea has become a global trend for various reasons: tourism, liveability, redevelopment of ports, climate change, new possibilities because of technical advances and better sewage systems. One of the first cities in Europe starting this trend, making a radical change in 1992, was Barcelona. From a city with its back to the sea, separated from the coast by a highway and industrial land, it changed into a city opening up to the sea with residential housing, public facilities and a beach stretching along a promenade. It was a gigantic urban-transformation process with the Olympic Games as an excuse and an accelerator.

Barcelona is still an example of how investments in new waterfronts are profitable. According to a report on the economic impact of the Olympics by Ferran Brunet of the ‘Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona’, Olympic infrastructure created for the games is thought to have provided over 20,000 permanent jobs for the people of Barcelona. 

The city was also ranked higher than before in different ranking lists; according to the IOC, Barcelona became the 12th most popular city destination for tourists in the world and the 5th in Europe within 20 years. 

More recently, New York and the State of New Jersey are currently investing to make their waterfronts more resilient after the impact of Hurricane Sandy. With a Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy (WAVES) they want to reconnect the city to the waterfront and capitalize on the city’s waterways – the ‘sixth borough’ – to promote waterborne transportation, recreation and natural habitats.

Vancouver is currently dismantling viaducts to transform a coastal site into a new vibrant waterfront destination with amenities including social housing, plazas, a cultural centre and 32 acres of public park. In Mumbai there are plans to open up parts of the 730-hectare docklands for affordable housing, transport links and public space to revitalise the congested city. Investing in waterfronts and public space along the coast seems worth the money since cities all over the world are spending fortunes to redevelop terminals, sleepy villages, infrastructure and industrial sides into promenades and districts with an aim to luxe living, recreation and entertainment, though with mixed results. We believe that inhabitants, tourists and travellers, besides chasing the sun, are looking for an authentic experience and local flavours. The paradox of new waterfronts and tourist places is that they tend to look more and more like one another. The same palm trees, globally run franchises, turquoise pools, gated resorts and concrete boulevards can be found from West Coast USA to the Turkish Riviera.

Geological phenomena as a base for public space design

So how does one create authentic, resilient but new public space on a neglected stretch of coast between a beach and a promenade? This was the challenge when we were commissioned by the mayor of Durrës to design a new public space on the site of a waterfront building-debris, fly-tip. The solution to this question was found in a million-year-old geological phenomenon that every visitor will recognise and know how to use. 

The coast of Albania can be characterised as a sequence of capes and bays one after another. Each bay has its own character, programme, beach and visitors defined by the landscape and land use directly behind the bay. 

The capes, geological formations of mountains and hill ranges ending in the Adriatic Sea, are the joints between the bays; landmarks announcing a change in character. Reaching out into the sea, the capes can be seen from afar as beacons and destinations for locals and tourists taking a stroll along the beach or the promenades along the sea.

The same was true for the project site of Cape Square that was located between two bays. Unfortunately, the cape had been eroded over time and the small piece of land that was left was used as a dump for building materials. The design extended and enlarged the site into the sea with an artificial urban cape, as a destination, hotspot and landmark for the city. The cape has been embraced by locals and nicknamed ‘the Sfinx’. 

Even before the official opening, the Sfinx had been featured in a videoclip of an Albanian rapper and was used as a popular hangout for barbecue parties, fishermen, families or wedding pictures. A new square with planters full of local plants and pine trees connects the cape to the city centre and the landscape.

The pavement of the square has an abstract stone pattern in local grey and white stones that can be read as the name of the city of Durrës. It looks like a comfortable carpet that makes you want to linger, drink a beer with a friend or put up a small stall to sell ice cream. Only when you look from above, from the top of the cape, can you read the name of the city. The plantings in the square also have an Albanian identity through a selection of Mediterranean umbrella pines, shrubs and perennials providing shade and a cool hangout during the hot summers.

Embrace local culture

The most beautiful coasts of Albania can be found in the South in a region called ‘the Albanian Rivièra’. To get here you have to cross the Mali Kanalit Mountains via the Llogara Pass. The area is characterised by steep mountain slopes descending towards the coast, white sand or pebble beaches and seaside resorts that have become popular holiday destinations. For two months a year, the beaches of Dhërmi and Jalë are overcrowded destinations for tourists and young Albanians, offering a variety of facilities ranging from eco-camping sites, hotels, bars and clubs in different price categories. After the holiday season, the villages become ghost towns with just the remains of what once was happy beach life. Inhabitants and entrepreneurs move to Greece or elsewhere to supplement their insufficient incomes, leaving the villages nearly empty. Many of the beach facilities are low key, temporary and poorly constructed. Besides, most of the original housing, bridges, chapels, garden walls and stairs, all beautifully constructed with local stones, were destroyed or replaced in the leap of progress during or after communism by cheap-looking chalets and Florida-style urban villas. To lengthen the tourist season, strengthen the local architecture and landscape features and give an economic impulse to the Rivièra, Edi Rama added the villages to his programme promising new promenades, better infrastructure and beach facilities. Two designs were made for the promenades of both Dhermi and Jalë, taking local characteristic landscape features as key principles of the design.

Jalë

Jalë is the perfect bay, located between two capes with a former military site and a resort. Jalë beach is unique; fed by fresh water from two creeks running from the mountains, spontaneous but fragile beach gardens pop up in the low season around the temporary bars. The course of the two creeks has been disturbed over time. Locals built on top of it and used the riverbeds as a dump for waste and construction debris, which cause floods during heavy rainfall.  To make the landscape resilient and productive again, the design will reconstruct the riverbeds, connect the mountains to the sea and beach gardens again. The pop up vegetation and poorly constructed pavilions are turned into lush gardens with local plants and trees and elegant simple wooden pavilions. Small garden walls made of local stacked stones protect the gardens from the sea and make smooth transitions from the promenade to the beach. A new back road connects the bars and restaurants along the promenade turning it into a car-free pedestrian zone. With a roof of scattered pine trees, the new promenade is the central spine between the capes, the gardens and restaurants, crossing the creeks with elegant bridges. Even the pavement pattern is local, referring to Jale’s beautiful capes and bays. The beige and brown stones reflect the local colour of the mountains, blending the promenade into the landscape.

Dhërmi

Dhërmi Village is built on a slope of the Ceraunian Mountains. It is connected to the beach by an overgrown river valley with citrus and olive trees. In the past, all visitors needed to drive or walk through the river before reaching the beach. Here, the riverbed was used as a garbage dump, ending poorly between the old concrete fundaments of a former hotel constructed when the country was under Communism. The riverbed was cleaned up and the design for the promenade is currently under construction with a new bridge and a square on top of the old fundaments turning them into a spectacular new water feature: the Water Square. The square collects the river water 4m above the beach, into an artificially-shaped riverbed. The perfect playground, hangout and drop off for tourists at the Ionian Sea. At the end of the square the water runs over the retaining wall and drops onto the beach. Six stone letters of Dhërmi catch the water and make the wall into the perfect waterfall and photo booth.

The former gravel path full of parked cars is to be turned into a spectacular car-free, 1.7 km. promenade planted with colourful pine trees, olives and local perennials and shrubs, with jetties protruding into the sea. A new road with informal parking spots under hundreds of new canopies of trees makes it possible to develop new facilities, cycle to the beach (instead of taking the car) and turns the promenade into a relaxed pedestrian zone. Garden walls and stairs made of stacked local stones provide access to the beach, bars, clubs and restaurants. By embracing local culture, using local materials, planting and craftsmanship techniques, we believe we built better, more sustainable and resilient structures as unique waterfronts.

New localism

Besides making unique, meaningful public spaces appreciated for their aesthetic value, urban landscapes need to offer more. It needs to create conditions that make life possible, supporting not only humans but birds and insects as well. Every design intervention should, without a doubt, contribute to productive (urban) landscapes that provide infiltration, storage and discharge of rainwater, improve biodiversity, connect and enlarge existing networks and provide healthy air and climate conditions. With ‘new localism’ as a motto, our belief is to make strategic and poetic designs using local craftsmanship, local knowledge, local materials and embracing local landscape phenomena, believing it is inevitable to build strong identity landscapes as productive, resilient public spaces that locals and visitors understand and know how to use. New localism is a strong asset in the global battle between waterfronts all over the world, offering unique experiences both as physically and economically healthy living environments.