Tirana has long been in a major conflict between the constructions that are disfiguring it every day, the noise, the mess and the dirt that are created by the constructions as a result of granting permits without a prior plan of the area, and the narrowing of space, light and breathing for its residents, who now seem to be locked up as in vertical prisons. Added to this is the little care for the technical safety conditions for both construction workers and residents. All this mess and all this risk is met in the face every happy day in this city, without stopping.
The same scene appeared this Saturday morning in one of the alleys that connect Kavaja Street with Myslym Shyri Street, very close to the center of Tirana. The alley, once a green and peaceful area with private homes, has been transformed into a construction site for a quarter of a century. Each building erected on it disfigures the alley more and more every day with unplanned and unaesthetic construction. But of course we cannot stop “construction development”, the main industry in the country that has generated a lot of income for the state and municipal budgets and that has fueled state corruption.
The alley stands out from the others because it houses a village market that takes you back to the pleasant peace between a seller who, with the sweet accent of a "Tirona street vendor", advertises his products as the best in the world. And you buy them with pleasure even when you know that it may not be so, because you like the care and kindness that the seller shows to his customer. This peace is broken when a concrete mixer violently intervenes, with a volume as large as the width of the alley itself and with a weight enough to crush everything on its side. The sight of the concrete mixer in this shopping alley, on a day off, Saturday morning, and the concern and alarm that was created in all the citizens present, as well as the blockade that was imposed on every activity for a long time, are typical indicators of the violence that the corrupt symbiosis of power-builders exerts on the well-being of citizens. We are all under the imprisoning power of concrete and its machinery!
