Sustainable Prefabrication for the social housing shortage in Albania

After the end of WWII, housing shortage in the East European countries was solved with the implementation of the (precast concrete) large-panel building technology that revealed very efficient in terms of costs and time of construction compared with traditional building solutions. Despite being implemented in a restricted scale, in Albania this experience has been largely considered unsuccessful because of the poor building quality and lack of indoor achieved. Nowadays prefabrication technology has evolved in a variety of building systems such as cross-laminated timber panels (CLT), also well-known for their high energetical performance. The growing demand for social housing, cannot be reduced as a matter of budget and public land available, as long as there is not any alternative building system that can be time and cost saving, too. The Social Housing Strategy 2016-2025 and the National law for the energetic efficiency Nr. 116/2016, highlight the willingness to develop good housing but further actions are needed to facilitate the supply.