Recently we read about the setting up of a committee aimed at seeking to propose several sites in Malta for potential inclusion in the Unesco World Heritage Sites. Malta has already managed to inscribe Valletta, with its unique 16th century structural plan, its baroque buildings and churches and its exceptionally magnificent skyline.

I wish the members of this committee luck and success in their endeavours. Yet I am surprised that a parallel committee of equally strong dedicated persons led by the Environment Minister is not set up to protect Malta’s and Valletta’s unique skylines.

In fact, only last year, at the Unesco 2017 July meeting in Krakow, the historic centre of Vienna was placed on the Unesco World Heritage Sites in danger. There are 54 such sites around the world in danger from natural causes, wars and devastation and intrusion by modern structures and buildings.

Whenever this happens, there is immediate pressure upon the developers planning to damage a historic site to review, cancel or relocate their investment. Or else the original site in danger loses its World Heritage Site denomination. Similar stories can be told about St Petersburg and Cologne. In both these cases developers changed their plans by relocating or reducing the footprint, height or designs of their monsters. Common sense won in those cases. Will common sense win in Malta? Probably not since we have a steamroller government in the hands of developers with no respect for the views of common citizens. Money speaks, voters are bought off.

If the committee set up to propose new sites in Malta to add to Unesco’s positive list is not careful they may find themselves obliged to defend our only existing World Heritage Site  from being put on the danger list.

The last 20 years have seen a shift in protection of the local environment, starting with a successive loosening of environmental protection in Malta, starting with the broadening of the boundaries of ODZ areas under the previous Nationalist administration and continuing under the present Labour administration with the castration of the Planning Authority which seems to let all applications through as long as our sacred building industry continues to flourish.

Adding to this, the new regulations relative to floor space proportion to open spaces to allow buildings to rise above the original maximum of eight floors, then extended to 10 and 12 and now open with these rules to any height that technology allows show what happens when oligarchic speculators grease enough palms.

With these changes we must also add one severe omission of our property owners and our college of architects, namely , the neglect of existing vacant properties in most of our inner towns, village centres and  our 19th and 20th century ‘new towns’ like Paola, Sliema, Pembroke or Swieqi.

If we are not careful we will soon find ourselves with 100,000 vacant and decaying two floor town houses, villas and other industrial or office structures in slowly ageing and dying towns where grocery stores, butchers, bars and chemists vanish to the suburban sprawling ‘malls’ and higher and higher buildings built in speculative frenzy on the outskirts and sometimes in the centre of these towns and village cores which will create a great wall. A wall that will soon blot out all characteristic skylines of our parish churches’ steeples and domes, surrounded by concentric circles of two-storied houses and farms with their traditional wooden balconies and their front room or rooms with coloured persiani and their colourful front doors.

We have a steamroller government in the hands of developers with no respect for the views of common citizens. Money speaks, voters are bought off

Many historic walls have been built during human history. We have protective walls such as the bastions of Carcassone, Mdina, Luxembourg and the Kremlin; we have walls built to keep out invading forces like Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China.

Some in Malta, led by so-called developers, in the name of progress and to save the building industry that employs mostly foreign masons, plasterers and handymen and a few Maltese foremen or subcontractors, are planning to build a number of walls with a height of 75-100 metres or more along the coast in Sliema, St Julian’s, in the centre of Malta in Mrieħel, Gżira, Paola and Smart City.

This wall is not meant to protect the local population or to stop invaders.

This wall is ostensibly meant to bring about massive investments into Malta and to transform Malta from the quaint and relatively slowly growing economy with a limited population and Mediterranean laidbackedness and village life that has made it known across the world and adorned it with a happy population, to a fast-moving country growing very fast, changing its customs and way of life and doubling its population to live in Dubai-like series of towers.

The wall that is being planned is, however, not going to achieve these desired results.

What it will become will be a wall of imprisonment. It will be a set of offices and apartments for foreign investors and speculators, priced far above the reach of the normal Maltese employee or small dying race of shopkeepers, craftsmen and women. It will house strangers in our midst forcing the locals, dwindling in numbers and in incomes to forget access to the sea, forget what traditional skylines they loved so much looked like and forced to suffer constant shade and dampness, strong winds in winter in the shadow of the ‘Great Wall’.

It will return us Maltese to become, once more, servants to a new feudal or colonial-like invader. We can only cope with limited increases of population and have always done so successfully. We already see the first effects of the wall in Gżira, in Pender Gardens, in the second tower of Portomaso, in the Gasan tower in the old Union Club tennis courts and open grounds, in the spoilt Tigné promontory and soon in Mrieħel with the quadruple towers.

Mdina will not see Valletta as before, Valletta will be invisible from Kappara. As a result of development in St George’s Bay – the Mercury towers and the catering school project – many residents of Pembroke, Swieqi, St Julian’s, The Gardens and St Andrews will lose their hitherto distant view of the sea. Unable to afford flats in the ‘out of bounds for Maltese’ locations including White Rocks and Smart City, we may imagine a sort of apartheid-type segregation in our very own Malta.

Today we segregate foreign workers and immigrants from the local population by collecting these in Qawra or Marsa, tomorrow the additional residents in Malta will occupy the highrises and waterfronts with the normal Maltese living behind the ‘Great Wall’ in rapidly deteriorating older town houses, alley houses and social housing, while the third section of our future society, namely immigrants and low paid foreign workers, will continue to collect behind the wall in Qawra and Marsa.

Is this what we wish our Malta to become?

John Vassallo is a former Senior Counsel and Director for EU Affairs at General Electric, a former Vice President EU Affairs and Associate General Counsel Microsoft and a former Ambassador of Malta to the EU.

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