Radically re-conceiving Mepa

If at the stroke of midnight on December 31, you found yourself changed into the personification of Malta, some sort of embodiment of reincarnation of the collective soul of the Maltese people, what would your New Year's resolution be?

Unhesitatingly, it would be the reform of our system of governance, with spatial planning at its core, and generally adapting to life in cyberspace as its goal.

You might judge that, among my polychrome and entirely virtual headgear, a bowler if not a top hat is my membership of the Today Public Policy Institute. We presented the Prime Minister with a report on the reform of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, which contains a host of suggestions that merit and are undoubtedly receiving his attention.

A key proposal is the re-composition of the authority board's membership so that it represents not just the political spectrum but also the relevant range of civil society bodies. However, I am also prone to nocturnal imaginings. In my dark dreams Mepa changes always assume overhauling, rather than tinkering, proposals.

My mind harks back to the context when the embryo of what is now Mepa was being hatched in the laboratory. I was then well-placed to observe the process. It was dominated by two horror factors. The first was that of the overall central planning excesses of the Mintoff era. The second was the Lorry Sant way of handling the issue of building permits.

Because of the first, there was a general rejection of planning in all spheres, notably the economic, but because of the second, land use was the only exception. The architects (for so they were) who were entrusted with the task of setting up the new system of land use planning were rightly convinced that you could not have rational land use planning on its own, that is outside the context of national development (social, economic, cultural) as a whole. So they called themselves not the Land-use Planning Authority, but purely and simply the Planning Authority.

I myself remarked publicly at the time that perhaps it was not ludicrous for experts in spatial planning to assume the overall national planning function. In an island as tiny as Malta, space was the most precious resource and it was not absurd to take spatial planning as the most determining factor in global planning.

It is interesting to note that when the EU set about establishing an integrated marine policy, it placed spatial planning as a primary requirement. However, when the Planning Authority was first set up in Malta, it was still organised as if its real function was land use and not overall development.

On a previous occasion, you had pointed out that this anomaly had proved to be one of the worst handicaps that you faced as rector of the University, because the then Planning Authority had refused to authorise buildings on the University grounds that the University had decided upon, because the authority disagreed with the priorities the educational experts had established. Is this still the case?

Unfortunately, my successors have continued until now to have problems about land use. I think that the radical solution for this kind of problem is in fact to re-structure Mepa so that it is really competent to deal with sustainable development, including the integrated management of resources as a whole.

Since it was set up, the authority's responsibility has been widened to include the functions of the former department of the environment. Also, other co-ordinating bodies have been set up, such as the Commission for Sustainable Development, the Resources Authority, and the Commission for Social and Economic Development.

This is resulting in a somewhat haphazard, or at any rate, unclear distribution of overall planning responsibilities.

Rationalisation for the sake of both efficiency and genuine participatory democracy is manifestly called for. Such a radical restructuring would have an extremely valuable advantage from another point of view. It would mean that the Prime Minister could undertake the reform of Mepa, to put it crudely, by completely abolishing it as it stands now, and rebuilding it from scratch within the new overall planning perspective.

This may be the only possible way in which to eliminate the present rampant suspicion that malpractice has established a tentacular, crab- or Mafia-like grip more at middle than at top levels of the system. It would avoid such prospects as that of some fresh graduate seizing the opportunity of lording it over, in the likes of Renzo Piano, if given the chance of displaying an inordinate share of cleverness. This sort of hanky-panky must be prevented.

You referred to adapting to living in cyberspace as another goal that should be aimed at in the reorganisation of built environment planning. What did you mean by this?

The electronic revolution is making obsolete the kind of urban living that industrialisation had necessitated. A great deal of attention is being given by city planners to the new requirements of the new information age and the different systems of communication that technology is making possible.

Clearly, I do not have either the space or the competence to discuss this topic fully, but when setting up a new spatial planning system in Malta of which the marine segment is at least as important as the terrestrial, the fact that we are now dealing with a digitalised humanity living in cyberspace has to be taken decsisevely into account.

Fr Peter was talking to Alessandra Fiott.