Tirana

The municipality runs a handful of companies and agencies. Tirana Parking runs 12 paid car parks, three of them closed for some months in early 2025, and since April 2026 takes permit applications through an app. The Agency of Parks and Recreation looks after green space, UKT supplies water, and Tirana DC handles post-earthquake reconstruction. The municipal police issued 477,247 traffic fines through e-gjoba, the online fines system, in 2024.

The bigger digital builders are national. AKSHI runs e-Albania, ADISA (the Agency for the Delivery of Integrated Services) runs the service desks, and AKEP regulates telecoms. Under a 2022 start-up law, the state has funded 172 start-ups and 23 support organisations, with €10.2m. Albania counts about 450 active start-ups, 37% of them founded by women.

The Pyramid of Tirana, built as a memorial museum to the communist leader Enver Hoxha, now houses a technology school. The municipality and the Albanian-American Development Foundation (AADF) set up the non-profit that runs it. TUMO Tirana, its free coding and design school for teenagers, had 1,680 students in June 2024 by the mayor’s own figure. More than 20 outlets had misreported his statement as 20,000 students. An innovation hub run with the accelerator Plug and Play shares the building.

Research and planning sit in a few institutions. The Polytechnic University of Tirana trains the engineers, while POLIS University and Epoka University teach architecture, planning and computing. Co-PLAN works on the electric bus line as a sub-consultant for gender, communication and waste. Open Labs, a hackerspace, brings together open-source volunteers.

Outcome checks come mostly from reporters and watchdogs. Citizens Channel, an online newsroom, has checked the tree pledge, the railway’s deadlines and other outlets’ figures for the Pyramid’s courses against official answers. LevizAlbania, a civic programme set up with Swiss funding, monitored the Tirana Ime app; it has run without that support since October 2023. BIRN Albania follows public procurement and the courts.

The money for the large projects comes from abroad. KfW, the German development bank, lends the largest share of the electric bus line’s cost, and the EU adds a grant. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) lends most of the money for the railway to Durrës. A loan from the Abu Dhabi Fund for the Northern Boulevard is the largest the municipality is still repaying. Vodafone Albania built the Tirana Ime app and, in 2019, a set of air sensors shown in it.

From our library

Raporti vjetor i konsoliduar i zbatimit të buxhetit të Bashkisë Tiranë për vitin 2025

The municipality’s own 2025 budget report: two-thirds of the budget spent, the electric bus line at design stage.

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From our library

Tirana-Durrës again without a train, 'with luck' next year (Citizens.al, 13 Feb 2026)

Five missed openings, €113 million cost surge, EU/EBRD‑funded rail link still stalled.

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Erion Veliaj of the Socialist Party (PS), Albania’s governing party, has been mayor since 2015 and was re-elected in May 2023. On 10 February 2025 he was arrested on charges brought by SPAK, the special prosecution office for corruption and organised crime. He is charged with corruption, money laundering and concealing assets, which he denies, and his trial has been repeatedly delayed. In October hearings were postponed again because defence lawyers were following a boycott called by the national Bar Chamber, and the court suspended the time limits on his detention. The council dismissed him for his absence in September 2025; on 3 November the Constitutional Court annulled that decision and the by-election was cancelled.

As of mid-October 2026 he remains the legal mayor and in pre-trial detention. The Supreme Court refused his release on 15 September, after the Constitutional Court had sent his appeal back to it. On 28 August he withdrew the powers he had delegated to Anuela Ristani, acting mayor since February 2025, and named no one in her place. Ristani and two senior officials resigned. He has since signed the payroll from prison in Durrës, and the Prime Minister’s office says he is the mayor.

The council of 61 members has a Socialist majority of 34. It approved a 2026 budget of 39.2bn lek, about €400m, in December 2025. The municipality’s own report shows that in 2025 it spent 66% of its budget and only 48% of its capital budget. In July 2025, at the Prime Minister’s request, the four deputy mayors resigned and were replaced. A new structure designed with the Tony Blair Institute gave Ristani digitalisation; who has held that brief since her resignation has not been made public.

No current smart-city or digital strategy for Tirana has been found. Its main plans date from before 2021: the energy plan of 2014, the Green City Action Plan written with the EBRD in 2018, and the mobility plan of 2020. A climate action plan was still being drafted in 2024, and a draft air-quality plan to 2040 went to the council in May 2026. Tirana applied in 2022 to the EU mission for 100 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030. It was not chosen; Elbasan was the Albanian city selected.

Much of what a smart city needs is decided outside City Hall. e-Albania is national. A $145m World Bank programme is to turn 10 priority services into e-services in all 61 municipalities. The European Commission finds local government has a “low level of digitalisation”. In September 2026 the government moved new reconstruction work in two Tirana zones from the municipality to the Albanian Development Fund. Waste collection is also to be run nationally. And since September 2026 the interior minister, who answers for the police and the cameras, is also to answer for the municipalities.

The sharpest argument is over cameras, and it is a national one. In December 2025 the Interior Ministry signed a contract with Presight, an Emirati AI firm, for a “Smart City” programme in 20 cities. It relies on an Albanian law that exempts companies from the United Arab Emirates from standard tenders, and the contract is unpublished. Phase one put 380 AI cameras in 20 Tirana schools.

From our library

Albania's AI Turn: A Surveillance State Without Oversight? (Transitions, 13 Apr 2026)

The national camera contract, its legal basis and the missing impact assessments.

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Prime Minister Edi Rama says the cameras alert school staff and police “in real time”. The data-protection commissioner confirmed that no impact assessment was done beforehand. Silva Arapi, a data-protection and AI-governance expert in Tirana, notes that such assessments “are a preventive tool”.

The cycling counters are Tirana’s most regular measurement. Three counters installed in 2021 recorded an average of 5,948 passes a day in 2024. The busiest, on Rruga e Kavajës, logged 1,188,108 of them; another was out of order for two months. They show how many people ride on those streets, not whether cycling has replaced car trips.

Tirana Ime, the municipality’s reporting app built with Vodafone Albania in 2016, is still running. It logged 41,665 reports up to 2022, and 19 municipal structures promise to handle a report within 72 hours. The municipality publishes no resolution rate. A monitoring team backed by LevizAlbania filed more than 270 reports in 2016–17; of those marked solved, it found 20 of 37 still unsolved. Friendly Wi-Fi, filtered public internet in squares, served 103,700 users on Skanderbeg Square in the first half of 2022; no later figure exists.

Open Data Tirana has stalled. The portal went online in March 2019 as a website of data stories rather than a data catalogue, with no catalogue interface for developers. It offers 29 downloadable files, and its newest post, on paid car parks, dates from 14 February 2025.

Green Transport Tirana is the largest project, and it is still on paper. It was launched in March 2024 at €110.26m: a €50m KfW loan, a €31.09m EU grant and €29.17m from the city. The plan was three electric bus rapid-transit lines, 52 km counted in both directions, to start “within this year”. By the end of 2025 no works had been tendered; in January 2026 the city signed a €7.43m consultancy contract to design the lines and supervise the works. That month the consultant presented the three lines as 24 km long. Co-PLAN, which works on the project, gives its implementation period as 2026 to 2031. The 2021 “Go Green” ring line, presented as the first electric fleet, used hybrid buses.

The Orbital Forest, a belt of woodland promised in the TR030 general plan, is far behind. In March 2023 the mayor planted what was presented as the millionth tree. A month later the municipality’s own answer to Citizens Channel counted 60,987 trees and shrubs since the plan began, and the parks agency only 2,987 in the previous 19 months. At the pace of the previous six years, about 10,000 a year, the newsroom calculated, the 2 million trees would take 200 years. No later count has been published.

From our library

Pylli Orbital i Tiranës është 200 vite larg (Citizens Channel, 27 Apr 2023)

Citizens Channel’s check of the two-million-tree pledge against the municipality’s own count.

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The Tirana–Durrës–Rinas railway, a national project of Albanian Railways with EBRD and EU money, has slipped three times. Promised for 2023, then 2024, then early 2025, it is now due for regular service by the end of 2027. About €108.9m of roughly €113m had been spent by February 2026, and electrification needs a third contract of about €25m.

The Sharra incinerator is the costliest failure. Under a national public–private partnership agreed in the late 2010s, taxpayers paid about €86m in six years for a waste-to-energy plant that was never built. In April 2025 seven former officials, including the former environment minister Lefter Koka, were convicted of abuse of power. The owners were convicted in their absence.

From our library

Money to Burn: Albania's Nexus of Organised Crime and Rubbish Collection (BIRN, 20 Aug 2025)

Failed €86 million incinerator PPP, never built, officials convicted, exposing Albania’s waste‑crime nexus.

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The answers in Tirana come mostly from outside City Hall. The municipality counts bicycles, car parks and fines, and publishes them. The checks on the forest, the courses, the train and the incinerator came from a newsroom, an investigative network and a court. The municipality’s own budget report shows the bus line still at design stage, and only a reporter’s question established that no one assessed the school cameras’ risks in advance. Most of those checks came after the money had been committed.