Building a Nation, Building a Modern Capital City: a Comparative Study of Ankara’s and Tirana’s First Master Plans

Abstract

Two capital cities, Tirana and Ankara, once united under the Ottoman banner, shared a similar urban development process ideologically and physically as they were designated the new capital cities under disparate national banners in 1920 and 1923 respectively. After the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, both cities witnessed a non-negligible transformation. Their urban development occurred in a congruent fashion including urban components and settlement patterns with a strong foreign influence, i.e., paid foreign technocrats for the case of Ankara, and the foreign fascist rulers for the case of Tirana. This article provided a comparative analysis of these two cities and their ideological and physical transformations via evaluation of their first urban development plans, i.e., Ankara’s by Carl Christoph Lörcher and Tirana’s by Gherardo Bosio, and ideological charges behind their implementations. The rise of new nationalist regimes employed urban planning as a tool to implement ideological modernization and nation-building agendas. The focus of the text was to correlate how the two modernist plans oscillated between a tabula-rasa approach and conservation and/or neglect of the existing Ottoman built environment.