Dingli road residents want stopped: owner’s plan to build ‘room’ has ERA concerned

The proposed demolition and relocation of two rural structures, expropriated by Infrastructure Malta to make way for a controversial new road cutting across old carob trees in Dingli, could increase pressure on new buildings along the new road, the Environment and Resources Authority has warned.

The old rural structures are in the immediate vicinity of a medieval chapel recently granted protection.

But the owner of the two structures – 8.6sqm and 9.5sq.m in dimensions – wants to replace them with one 20sq.m room on the opposite side of a new road it will be build to link the alleys Daħla tas-Sienja and Sqaq il-MUSEUM.

The owner of two small rooms wants to demolish them to build a new, relocated room on the other end of the controversial linkage

ERA is now arguing that the relocation of the room along the outer side of the new road will introduce “likely pressures” and set a “precedent” for future development of plots on the ODZ side of the road.

Even the proposed replacement of the existing rooms is not “even a like-with-like replacement”, the ERA said, but one resulting in a new ODZ (outside development zones) building which is actually larger than the minor structures displaced by the road.

ERA even said one of the existing ‘rooms’ is being proposed for demolition unnecessarily, “displacing its footprint onto ODZ land, only to be replaced by a redundant land parcel within the development zone, at the street corner.”

In 2018, the same owner of the two rooms expropriated by Infrastructure Malta was granted a permit for a terraced house, outside development zones, located 40m away from the chapel. A similar application had been previously rejected in 2011.

The Environment and Planning Review Tribunal approved the permit on the basis of a policy, which allows development at the edge of the development zone.

The rural rooms set to be displaced complement the nearby medieval church of Santa Duminka, which was proposed for scheduling just months before the 2013 election, in November 2012. But no action was taken for the past eight years to protect the chapel, with the scheduling placed on the backburner, and facilitating plans for a schemed road to link the two alleyways.

It was only after Graffitti activists took direct action to stop works on the new road that the PA and the Superintendence for Cultural Heritage moved to schedule the chapel after an eight-year delay. The chapel was protected at Grade 1 level, following a submission by the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage to the PA’s executive council.

The IM roadworks themselves, announced in the government gazette on 7 September, do not require a permit. But it remains unclear how the newly scheduled chapel and its context – with 300-year-old carob trees now earmarked for destruction – will be protected. When buildings are granted Grade 1 protection, the authorities are also bound to respect their context.

Moviment Graffitti is currently appealing a nature permit issued by ERA for clearing the carob trees to make way for the new road.