Cities, to paraphrase Le Corbusier, are machines for living. We tend to spend our time in them swooning over the many necessities and delights they offer up or complaining about some shortage or other of the same. But I would suggest there’s some stimulation to be had by contemplating urbanity itself.

Cities like Valletta and Rome thrive on stories and myths of foundation- Mark Anthony Falzon

I can think of no better place to do that than Vijayanagar in South India. The city sits in a landscape of islands of colossal granite boulders in a sea of coconut and banana plantations. It has no living inhabitants to speak of, only visitors. Much of it, including what used to be the royal enclosure, bazaars and walls, is in ruins. Some of the rest is in much better shape.

Vijayanagar was once the capital of a vast Hindu empire that stretched across most of southern India. Travellers such as the Portuguese Domingo Paes marvelled at its splendour and wealth and compared it to Rome. Its fortifications, hewn from massive blocks of granite and garrisoned by tens of thousands of troops, appeared poker-faced and impregnable.

Then disaster struck. In 1565 the regent Rama Raya disowned his strategic advantage and did battle with a confederacy of Muslim attackers well beyond the city walls. Partly due to a Hastings-writ-large mischance that cost Rama Raya his head, partly a matter of split loyalties within their ranks, the Hindus were routed. Vijayanagar was plundered and has lain abandoned ever since.

It was the inevitable comparison with another city that was also attacked by Muslims in 1565 that set me thinking about some of the contrasts between living and abandoned cities. Vijayanagar died the same year, and in fairly similar circumstances, Valletta was born, which raises a number of themes.

First, stories. Cities like Valletta and Rome thrive on stories and myths of foundation. In the former case the narrative is alive and well enough for us to have installed, just a few days ago, a heroic monument to the founder – never mind the kitsch and zilch artistic value of the insufferable thing.

In Vijayanagar on the other hand, it is the manner of the leaving it that has become the stuff of legend. The story of the last raja (king) who, hearing of defeat left the city with a train of 1,000 elephants bearing riches and jewels, describes a traumatic moment, that at which urbanity turned its back on the city.

Second, spaces and time. Vijayanagar presents a hierarchy. The houses and streets where people lived – and this was one of the world’s most populated cities in its time – are all but lost. The royal enclosures and palaces probably bore the brunt of the plunder but were so well-built that some have survived.

The best-preserved are the temples. That’s also because in some cases people eventually went back to re-use them, to the extent that Vijayanagar is considered a holy city by Hindus. Alcohol and meat are strictly no-nos and one very well-educated man I met told me he believed the city was the work of gods. Somehow it seems that the time of the sacred is not that of the secular.

Third, nature. In a living city (and this is particularly true of the larger and more industrialised type), nature tends to be experienced and represented as a sort of antidote. It works with respect to colour (‘greenery’ as a break from ‘all the grey’), sound (birds singing as opposed to the noise made by cars and machinery), as well as air (the various talk of ‘green lungs’ and so on).

All of which are considered restorative of a way and pace of life that is slow and edifying. And therefore highly desirable, as the latest private donation ($200 million if my memory serves me well) towards the upkeep of New York’s Central Park suggests.

An abandoned city is a different animal. Nature in this case rather takes on the role of an invader, ever encroaching on what culture left behind and threatening to swallow it up. (A film that comes to mind is Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys.)

It’s as if the ghosts of the original inhabitants come back to reclaim their city. In Vijayanagar, one is tempted to hear voices reincarnated in the wind. The elements present, as Peter Serracino Inglott might have put it, a ‘peopled silence’.

Fourth, sensations. Take colour. Like say the very poor, or hospital wards, abandoned cities are relatively monochrome. That’s partly because they’ve lost their lives and therefore their ability to produce colour, partly because the materials that do survive the centuries, usually stone, are few.

Paes wrote of bazaars brimming with flowers and jewels and rich textiles, of bright façades and well-tended gardens. Now, Vijayanagar is mostly a dull grey-brown.

The reason why I find these dichotomies valuable is that they bring me to that species we are so familiar with in Malta, the living heritage city. Valletta is of course the doyenne but the three cities of Cottonera are no less promising.

If my generalisations (sweeping some will say, but no matter) about living and abandoned cities have any truth in them, a living heritage city is on paper an oxymoron. How is it possible for people to live the present in a place which is also experienced – and crucially, sold as – a repository of the past?

Academic anorak territory some might say, but I don’t think so. In fact I’d say that the dichotomies I listed earlier help us understand some of the real-life dynamics and collisions of living in a city like Valletta.

Take the sacred. The curators of a site like St John’s have somehow to balance the equation between the enduring sacred (the cathedral is still very much a functioning church) and the needs of those – tourists, mostly – who would rather see it as an elegy to a departed grandeur.

On to nature, what do we make of the trees on Great Siege Square, or the caper bushes growing on the fortifications? Are they an antidote, a welcome relief, a lung even? Or are they a threat to tangible cultural heritage?

Should we strip down façades and walls of their (centuries-old, in some cases) layers of paint and render them the uniform colour of ‘heritage’? And what of materials? Should we just nod to an imagined past and stick to stone? Or are we prepared to accept a variety of materials, including contemporary ones?

Thanks to the impeccable standards and hard work of the bid team, Valletta 2018 is now a reality. Question is, what do we want our capital to look like when the big year comes? A city that was born or one that died, in 1565?

mafalzon@hotmail.com