Making Malta liveable

Being born and brought up in Mellieha in the 50’s, I am painfully aware how this fair land has been raped, especially since Independence. I still remember seeing the beautiful Ghajn Zejtuna valley being ripped apart to give way to Santa Marija Estate.

If you are younger and you want to understand the changes that the local landscape has gone through, you only need to see the videos of the British Pathe online. Through them, we have a rare glimpse into the way of life of the past. The impression one gets, from footage going back to the 1930s, is that of a simple life in rural towns, with God and family enshrined in a bucolic landscape.

Times have changed, and from the 1970s onwards we have seen whole new towns appear before our eyes and grow into communities. Many people remember a time when places like Santa Lucija and Attard were nothing but miles upon miles of fields. You will struggle to believe that those clips from Pathe are the same country today.

The word ‘development’ is often referred to for construction, but some of the developments we have seen over the past 50 years can hardly hold true to the original meaning of the word. We’ve seen construction, and its intensity, increase every decade. In the 1980s we used to teach children at school that the population of Malta is 330,000. Today we’re at 430,000. That’s an increase of a third within a generation, and it’s huge.

The infrastructural demands placed over the past few decades were strenuous. We have built and continued building to keep supplying the ever-growing demand. I don’t think there is a debate when I say that we’ve failed miserably in doing so in a sustainable manner. What we’ve lost has been lost and some of it is impossible to bring it back. What happened was a constant drive to build and build – I think that much of the annihilation was made due to poor institutions, improper influence and a despicable culture of anything goes. Blocks of buildings were allowed to come up without any social spaces around them, without any trees and without any plants and without any space for children to play.

Today our country is still growing. Our population is increasing expediently and foreigners living and working in Malta have put further pressure on the supply side of things. We have two opposite sides in the divide. On one side you have the argument that the economy is growing, space is needed and we must increase the supply by building more units, flats and hotels. If this doesn’t happen (preferably yesterday) things will collapse. On the other side of the argument you have those who are saying that everything has to stop, that we’ve ruined the environment, there’s too much pollution, nowhere for children and families to enjoy and the construction rage must stop immediately.

As everything in life, extremes are wrong and I believe that even in the case of construction in Malta, the way forward is a balanced approach. How are we going to achieve that? Way too often over the past years we have seen urban planning given a secondary thought – it was always a ‘build first, think later’ approach which put finite resources under pressure in change of dubiously viable projects.

Singapore is one of those places which gets urban planning right, acknowledging its limited resources and finite space, Singapore has done a great job in blending the different needs of the economy with sustainability and crucially, viability. The density of the population meant they have to be smart... and they have – regularly topping the Siemens Green City Index for Asia. The decision-making process for planning is a no nonsense approach – they call it the ‘liveability framework’ there.

They do not wait for the next big construction magnate to submit projects on their own terms (with limited holistic or long-term goals) – they actually plan ahead and use sets of incentives and disincentives to drive their policies forward. This has worked wonderfully – Singapore is the only place defined as ‘High Density’ which has also achieved the ‘Highly Liveable’ status, according to the Mercer Quality of Living Survey. The only other places which come close are Hong Kong and London. An article entitled “9 Green Spaces that prove Singapore is literally an urban jungle” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/02/singapore-parks_n_6746136.html) provides information about what is called “City in a Garden”.

The Singaporean approach to urbanisation is very simple and can be broken down into five key processes: think long-term, “fight productively”, build in flexibility, execute effectively and innovate systematically.

I particularly like the term ‘‘fight productively”. Point blank it acknowledges the fact that there will be different forces and ideas but the ultimate reaching point is to have productive goals. In Malta, where it seems everything has either to be black or white we can use this more often.

I believe that Malta, in the area of urbanisation, has a lot to learn from Singapore, as we share similar features. We both came from labour-intensive economies not so long ago and had to find our own way in the past decades. Their progress and development made over the past years should inspire us. Sustainability is possible, it goes hand in hand with economic development and it works for everyone. It makes living places “liveable”. You look at our towns from a plane and all you see is concrete upon concrete. It’s incessant and even looking at it is suffocating.

We’ve made silent revolutions in the past years – we’ve modernised our economy, our jobs, our way of life and, to many people’s shock and awe, our core social beliefs. The next step is to give proper importance to urbanisation and long-term planning. Not having noise or air pollution should no longer be a ‘nice to have’ – it should be for everyone. We owe it to the next generation because while it is our duty to forward to them a prosperous country, it also has to be a liveable one.

Evarist Bartolo is Minister of Education and Employment