Translating Systemic Intelligence into Urban Renewal

Vlore · Albania · 2024

Urban Regeneration, Strategic City Masterplan 2030, Spatial Strategy, UN SDG 2030

The project engages Vlorë’s coastline as a living threshold — a place where ecological memory, urban pressure, and cultural rhythms collide. In continuity with the ideas developed in your New Polis article, the work reads the city’s edge not as a line to be beautified, but as a spectral zone shaped by historic infrastructures, sedimented behaviours, and the long arc of coastal transformation.

Here, regeneration becomes an act of revealing what the city has forgotten: the buried waterways that once structured movement, the informal economies that produced social cohesion, the micro-ecologies that persisted despite aggressive development. Through mapping, sampling, and systems-based analysis, the project identifies the latent patterns governing the coastline for the flows of people, wind, salt, and land use and translates them into a spatial framework that restores coherence across scales.

Rather than imposing a masterplan, the intervention works as a Lifeline: a sequence of public spaces, resilient infrastructures, and blue-green corridors that restitch the fractured relationship between the city and the sea. By treating the coast as a dynamic organism rather than a fixed boundary, the project advances a new paradigm for Mediterranean urbanism — one rooted in continuity, stewardship, and the long-term evolution of place.

Mindscapes

Also featured in Mindscapes, where we document the processes, reflections, and trajectories shaping our ecosystem’s ongoing exploration of spatial clarity and cultural depth.