I wish I could say I was surprised when I heard that Michael Briguglio had been threatened over Alternattiva Demokratika’s stand on the Armier boathouses. I was rather more moved, however, when Armier Squatting Ltd expressed its solidarity with Mr Briguglio. To me that sounded a bit like a spider expressing its solidarity with flies. Surely the threat was more in character and they should have left it at that.

Armier Developments Ltd is involved in what we might call ‘construction laundering’- Mark Anthony Falzon

Armier Developments Ltd also “called for cooperation with the authorities”, which I thought was a tad rich coming from people who have been giving the authorities the finger for the best part of 35 years. Maybe it’s just me, but “cooperation with the authorities” is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the Armier boathouses.

This is not to say I’m terribly categorical about the boathouses business. A good part of me (do I hear ‘stock bourgeois’?) tells me that the lot should be bulldozed at dawn with no final requests. If what I hear and The Times online comments are anything to go by, that opinion is shared by many.

Someone told me last week that she thought decisive action now would win the Nationalists boxfuls of green and other votes and quite possibly the big prize. I think she had a point.

Still, canons and orthodoxies are there to blow raspberries at. In this case there may be something to be said for thinking of the boathouses as a kind of fascinating case study into how legally-dubious groups manage, over time and using a combination of clever devices, to coax the state into accepting them as one of its own.

Take last week’s occasion. First, Armier Developments Ltd “expressed solidarity”, and was reported as having done so by the media, as a legitimate organisation. The implication is that the boathouse fraternity is now less like say a Reckless Drivers Ltd or an Association of United Litterers, and more like the SPCA or some such.

Second, in “condemning without reservation threats and violence” and pledging to “continue working with the authorities”, the organisation effectively aligned itself with and appropriated the dominant morality of law-abiding civil society.

In other words Armier Developments Ltd is involved in what we might call ‘construction laundering’. (‘Sanctioning’ is the official take on this.) This is the process by which a building which has no right whatsoever to exist is slowly but surely laundered into a legitimate structure.

The chosen nomenclature itself is relevant. The word ‘development’ (żvilupp) brings to mind planned projects and economic and social dividend, as opposed to finger-waving squatting.

A couple of years ago I worked with an enterprising student of mine precisely on this process. We tried to keep an open mind and looked at some of the devices used by the boathouse people to launder their spontaneous settlements, so to say, into proper properties. We found ourselves teasing apart a tissue of subversion, imaginative posturing, and vote-trawling politics.

First, a caveat. It would be myopic to discuss Armier as some kind of one-off. We counted 22 boathouse clusters in Malta and Gozo, some of which (e.g. Ġnejna and San Tumas) were very extensive indeed. Besides, boathouses should be seen as part of a broader context of what one might call informal vernacular constructions. I have in mind rural ‘toolrooms’ that double as weekend boltholes, giren (corbelled stone huts) and duri (hunters’ hides), and the kaxxi (tiny rooms used to store fishing tackle in) one finds in the harbour area. Back to Armier, there are at least two means by which the boathouse people launder their shacks. The first is what an anthropologist would call a set of discourses. Academic jargon perhaps, but one that is useful enough in practice.

Take the term iż-żgħir which loosely translates as ‘the little fish’. One of the standard retorts of Armier people is that they are in effect iż-żgħir, that the real threats to the environment are the big-fish mega-contractors who get away with murder and a handful of beach hotels.

In so doing they play on deeply-felt collective notions of state heavy-handedness with the relatively powerless. It’s not just the boathouse people who believe that Mepa is ‘strong with the weak and weak with the strong’.

The master class goes on to connect with two pillars of contemporary political cliché, namely community and family. There’s hardly a piece of social welfare these days that isn’t said to build ‘komunitajiet b’saħħithom’ (strong communities), hardly a green space that isn’t there ‘għall-familja’ (‘family park’).

The Armier people can play that game rather well. They will invariably tell you that the boathouses are places where families can spend time together. They will also come up with practical examples of strong community bonds – things like neighbours helping each other out, food sharing, and so on. Just the things our families and communities elsewhere are said to be in dire need of, incidentally.

Which sort of raises the question: If Armier is so good at producing some of our most cherished values and social units, how can it be bad?

Discourse is of course just a part of it. The second way in which the boathouse people stand canon on its head is by actually building model villages. The streets at Armier have names, for example, and there’s even a little square where Mass is said every Sunday. As for secular religion, there are recycling stations and strict rules on littering.

The upshots are twofold. First, by virtue of these devices (and I’m not being cynical about this) the Armier boathouses come in line with what I earlier called law-abiding civil society and its orthodoxies. Second, and perhaps more pertinently, bulldozing would mean the destruction of a village and a model one to boot. Which politician in their right mind would want to be responsible for that?

I have thus far rather sidelined politics. Certainly, there has been a fair bit of pandering going on, and I also think it’s a political game to keep the Armier people perennially in debt by cooping them up in the grey area between the acceptable and the downright outrageous.

There’s another thing too. The devices I described earlier are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, street names and Sunday Masses are an important oxygen supply that keeps the boathouses where they are. But they also lend themselves to accusations of cheek and brass neck and rather tend to take the powerlessness out of iż-żgħir.

Which probably explains the general feeling and online comments, something politicians might equally want to buy into. Now, am I surprised Armier is still standing?

mafalzon@hotmail.com