A Piece of Land to Start from Scratch

Abstract

During five decades of totalitarian state-socialism in Albania, the movement of the population was extremely limited and centrally controlled. Anarchic times followed the fall of the regime in 1991, and the state weakened to the point of losing control over the territory. This triggered a migratory wave, not only out of the country but also within, towards the capital city of Tirana and its vicinity. Kamza, from an agrarian area close to the capital, turned into an arrival settlement for many families moving from the northeastern part of Albania where they had massively lost their jobs and social services previously provided by the state. First shelters resembled the primordial hut made out of local materials, like wood, plastic, or metal sheets. In the absence of the state, during the first years of settling in Kamza, the inhabitants had to rely fully on communal resources, in solidarity, kinship, and traditional oral regulations inherited from the place of origin. This gave Kamza the character of an autonomous, anarchic city, whose inhabitants were constantly stigmatized and othered as the newcomers, the squatters of land, and as those abiding by tribal customary self-organizational rules beyond the state and the market.