This Europe: The greening of an ugly concrete jungle

In Tirana's central park the grass is growing. In any other European city this would be no reason to celebrate, but Albania's capital has little in common with other cities.

When Tirana's maverick mayor, Edi Rama, took office as an independent 18 months ago the park was just another derelict public space, its trees lost amid illegal kiosks in a jumble of mud and concrete.

In a normal city, Mr Rama admits, he would never have become mayor but in this "strange and special place" the former artist believes a normal mayor could not help.

During the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999, Tirana reached its nadir. A decade of anarchic capitalism had followed 50 years of Stalinism and the population had swollen from 200,000 to 800,000, with no sewerage system or rubbish collection.

Mr Rama had found the municipality employed 800 people to tend public spaces. But none worked, and they split their wages with a corrupt official. Five hundred were fired and the remainder are hard at work.

The concrete kiosks have been bulldozed, and gone are the rotting piles of rubbish and most of the lethal potholes. The before and after shot is striking, best seen from a pedestrian bridge over the canal. On the one side saplings are growing, while the water emerges on the other side into a thicket of cement slums.

"A pop star among mayors and a mayor among pop stars," in his own words, Mr Rama likes to compare his municipal team to film makers on a set. And he has used the bare exterior of the city's grey buildings as a canvas to paint a multicoloured sign of what's to come.

He has many critics, but next year the voters will decide whether their mayor and his film crew get to make a sequel.