A book on Albania’s luxury building boom has become a surprising talisman for those who oppose the government’s urban and tourism development model.
History sometimes takes unexpected turns. Edi Rama, the Albanian prime minister, contributed the foreword to a book thinking it would be a celebration of his government’s role in the country’s urban modernization. Quite the opposite, however: The Albanian Files has become one of the symbols of the mass demonstrations against the Albanian government. Some of the protesters who carry placards bearing the book’s cover during the nightly marches in Tirana, have sent a copy to the public prosecutor’s office, claiming it contains evidence of possible corruption at hundreds of construction projects.
“A book cannot choose how it will be read once it is published,” says Anneke Abhelakh, the book’s editor, and curator of the Albanian pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. “Its content has not changed, but the historical moment in which it is interpreted has. The very material that was presented as evidence of transformation now features in the public debate on the lack of transparency and the management of that transformation.”
‘A Remarkable Period in Albania’
The nearly 800 pages of The Albanian Files document, in the words of its editor, “20 years of architectural transformation in Albania.” More than 60 architects from around the world were invited to reflect on their experiences of working in Albania, through interviews, essays, photographs, and maps.
“All these elements paint a portrait of a period in which architecture became closely connected with Albania’s changing identity. It is often described as a book about architecture, but for me it is more accurately a book about the relationships through which architecture is produced,” Abhelakh says.
In one example of this in the book, architect Sam Chermayeff describes how he was hired to design the 44-story “Sun Moon Star” tower in Tirana outside of the usual bidding and administrative processes. Everything was agreed upon through informal dinners and phone calls with Rama and other government members who, presumably, subsequently facilitated access to public land. Anger at this kind of opaque, parallel governance is what sends thousands into the streets of Tirana every evening in protest at the multi-billion dollar developments planned for sensitive coastal areas.
The book was never conceived as a protest, nor as a defense of any particular political project, Abhelakh says. “It was conceived as an attempt to understand a remarkable period in Albania through architecture. Rather than asking whether that period was successful or unsuccessful, I wanted to understand how it was produced, who participated in it, and how architecture became one of the places where political, economic, and cultural ambitions converged. The fact that the book has since become part of the protests tells us something important – not only about the book, but about Albania today.”
The DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art is an artistic collective that combines criticism of neoliberalism’s effects in Albania with artistic practices. Its members have been actively involved in the social unrest that has been rocking the Balkan country since the end of May. In a collective reply, group members Armando Lulaj, Jonida Gashi, and Pleurad Xhafa wrote, “the book inadvertently exposes the very mechanisms it seeks to glorify. There is almost nothing in these pages that resembles a shared public project – a project for the community. Instead, they are filled with skyscrapers, luxury hotels, and other private developments, many projected to be built on public land, other people’s land, or protected natural areas.”
The protests began in opposition to the construction of a luxury resort on Sazan Island, a project in which Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is involved. “But that’s just the last straw,” DebatikCenter says, “because public frustration over the way urban planning is being organized in Albania, as well as over the management of the country’s tourism boom, has been building for years.”
For these artistic activists, “ultra-predatory capitalism” enabled by the state is the real target of the protests: “The Trumps embody this model particularly well, though they are not its only proponents.”
Abundance for Whom?
Allegations about the nefarious dealings of some of Prime Minister Rama’s close associates and the involvement of crime bosses in Albania’s booming property market are not new. Shortly after the protests began, the Progressive International activist network pushed those accusations further when it published leaked Albanian court and police documents it said revealed a network of corruption, drug trafficking, and money laundering with Rama at its center.
The documents reveal how the National Territorial Council (KKT), chaired by Rama himself, systematically granted construction permits on the Adriatic coast and in Tirana to companies linked to money laundering. Among them stands out a luxurious tourist complex in the protected wetland of Zvernec, also linked to Jared Kushner and built on land obtained through falsified Ottoman-era titles, according to the report.
The mechanism of the scheme uses the legal figure of the “strategic investor,” created by the government to speed approval of projects it considers of special importance. The law allows the state to expropriate private land for such projects at its discretion, with no legal recourse for the landowners.
The Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SPAK) – accused by Rama of targeting his political allies – has already ordered 20 arrests and frozen more than 100 million euros in assets, steps media reports have linked to drug trafficking bosses and political officials connected to the land concessions.
“This is a government of oligarchs and organized crime against the people of Albania,” graphically states Fatos Lubonja, a writer, prominent public intellectual and critic of the ruling party. Since Rama became prime minister, “power, oligarchs, their media, and organized crime” step by step took “almost every institution under control,” he says. And the boom in big construction projects reflects this: The Albanian Files demonstrates that Rama personally chooses his star architects. “The resistance of activists who were against this kind of development became weaker. Since then, skyscrapers and touristic resorts are taking away many more public spaces, protected areas.”
It is not surprising then that urban planning issues are at the center of the political conflict in the country: “To me, architecture in Albania is a visual expression of what disasters can produce globalization as a force of homogenization, combined with neoliberalism,” declares the dissident, who spent many years as a political prisoner during the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha.
When Abhelakh first started working on The Albanian Files, she says “I was struck by how present architecture was in everyday public life. It is not a topic just for experts, but rather part of the political debate and conversations about the future of the country.”
In her conversations with architects, “architecture was never discussed only as architecture. It became a way of talking about identity, development, public space, tourism, heritage, investment and democracy,” she says. “The recent protests make that even more visible. The debate is no longer only about individual projects, but about who shapes public space, who benefits from development and whose voices are heard when a country imagines its future.”
In the words of DebatikCenter, it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of architecture and urban planning in Albanian public discourse over the past decade.
“The Albanian government has tried to sell the slogan of a ‘landscape of abundance,’ but abundance for whom?” the collective asks. “Who, exactly, is expected to harvest the fruits of what is so often described as Europe’s last Eden?”
Bernardo Álvarez-Villar, a freelance reporter living in Madrid, writes for various Spanish and European media outlets.
This article was supported by the Fund for Central & East European Book Projects, Amsterdam.
