Metropolitan cities from both sides: some questions about Tirana and Bari

In a contradictory panorama, in which the large cities of Italy and Europe are experiencing the structural phenomenon of stagnation or declining growth, although soil consumption is anyway increasing, on the other side of the Adriatic in the Balkan countries, large cities grow by population and extension and live, in an amplified way, the conflicts and contradictions between wealth and poverty, tradition and projection to the future. So geographically close but far from each other in terms of urban and political history, shape and character, the large cities on both sides are facing the same challenges: fragility towards natural phenomena, climate changes, soil consumption, transformation of the population and its needs. Both need a renovated design and new infrastructures, not grey, but green and blue, based on new projectual ingredients to rethink the metropolitan and urban system: water management, landscape and open spaces, history and heritage; and also new densities, new utilities, new ways of living. These are new ingredients compared to the urbanism of the 1900s, which are nowadays necessary for both stagnant and growing cities. Starting from the comparison between two case studies of the metropolitan cities of Tirana and Bari, characterized by spatial situations, urbanistic and institutional histories that are profoundly different, we want to analyze and compare the specificities of the territorial and institutional contexts, and also the differences and convergences of the approaches and methods of intervention - where they exist - concerning the problems that metropolitan cities today have to face. The paper therefore aims to analyze the ways in which planning tackles these challenges in the two metropolitan cities, trying to outline new approaches and possible projectual trajectories and to define the new ingredients of transformation projects at different scales.