NGO says that Valletta will benefit from becoming intercultural

Valletta can benefit from becoming more intercultural, SOS Malta, a human-rights NGO, said during a meeting with Council of Europe experts for their ‘Valletta Living Together’ project. This 16-month project is co-financed by the EU Fund for the Integration of Third Country Nationals and aims to improve integration and intercultural exchange in Valletta.

“We will soon come up with a three-year written strategy to make Valletta more intercultural by 2018, the year Valletta will become the European Capital of Culture,” SOS Malta project manager Susan Vassallo said. “This strategy will include proposals for policy changes which we will send to the Valletta Local Council.”

In a statement, SOS Malta said that successful integration must come with migrants’ access to political rights.

“Academic literature points at the need to adapt representative democracy to the multiplicity and complexity of identities in diverse societies,” SOS Malta said.

After researching into cities that embraced diversity, SOS Malta found “convincing evidence that diversity and intercultural interaction can improve productivity and wages and increase entrepreneurship and trade.”  

Valletta currently ranks within the bottom quarter of the Intercultural Cities Index, which has so far evaluated how intercultural 55 cities in the world are.   

“Multi-culturalism is flawed as it simply creates divisions between cultures living next to each other,” Phil Wood from city development experts Comedia said. “What we are looking at is a dynamic and intercultural approach with all cultures in constant negotiation with each other. We must expect some conflict between different culture, prepare for it and manage it, rather than sweep it under the carpet.”

“Integration is a two-way street,” Wood said. “We must stop looking at integration as immigrants having to adapt to the dominant culture. We must also stop looking at immigrants as people in need of our help, but rather as people with assets we can utilise.”

A group of people with different ways of looking at the world all working together on one project tend to be more innovative, he said.

However, the experts admitted that gaining public support for integration could be a hindrance.

“It is important to challenge false rumours about immigrants that can spread and destroy entire intercultural programmes,” Wood said.

“There is no quick fix for public dissent against immigration,” Irena Guidikova from the Council of Europe admitted. “However, people who protest against immigration are often dissatisfied with their economic situation or their government or their general life and take it out on immigrants.”