After the first post-communist government in Albania lifted the ban on private car ownership in 1991, the number of private automobiles rocketed from zero in 1990 to 300.000 in 2007. Currently, in a country with three million inhabitants, there are more than half a million registered cars. It is evident that the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities.

If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic case studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, manoeuvrability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatised mobility, reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.

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