In a survey of Europe’s Land Use Cover Area, conducted by Eurostat last year, Malta took the dubious prize as the most built-up country in the European Union.
Thirty-three per cent of the islands’ territory is covered by buildings. Other relatively small countries in the EU – the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium – also scored highly (at about 13 per cent) on the built-up scale. But Malta’s figures should be compared with the five per cent average of built-up land in all EU member states.
Poor planning has left the northern and eastern half of the island, especially the ribbon development along the coast, consisting of virtually unbroken conurbation. While the EU has 40 per cent of its land covered by forests, the areas in Malta where trees can be found only account for five per cent of the territory. In a national survey recently, citizens expressed major concerns about the stultifying urbanisation of the country.
The explanation is partly the density of Malta’s population. At 1,340 people per square kilometre, the island is far more congested than the next most populated countries in Europe. The chairman of the Malta Developers Association is quick to ride on this bandwagon when he points to Malta’s population density and influx of tourists as the reason for the country’s high rate of built-up territory.
But that is a misleading and simplistic answer because it does not account for the thousands of housing units that lie empty in Malta, estimated at about a quarter of the country’s housing stock, or the increasingly ramshackle planning system that gives rise to them.
The distinguishing feature that marks out Malta for its exceptionally high built-up state from the rest of Europe is its poor planning record.
To compound the situation, the island’s abysmal planning process is about to receive a boost from plans for high-rise buildings (“like Dubai or Singapore”) to be encouraged and, specifically, if a permit is granted to an application which has been filed by developer Anton Camilleri, a council member of the Malta Developers’ Association, for a massive construction development in the picturesque St George’s Bay.
St George’s Bay Hotel will be the largest of the four areas in St George’s Bay earmarked for development with the construction of an underground car park for over 1,000 cars, together with luxury apartments, a boutique hotel, 15 villas, offices and commercial outlets.
The buildings would stretch over an area from St George’s Bay Hotel down to the bay, including the gardens of Villa Rosa and Cresta Quay, where a new hotel would be constructed.
In addition to the ruination of St George’s Bay, major traffic problems would arise that would spread the impact well beyond the bay itself. Inhabitants in the area as well as the local councils of Swieqi, Pembroke and St Julian’s have all rightly expressed dismay about the project.
It appears that the island’s appetite for construction development has still not been sated. It has reached the point, however, where, as the Eurostat survey has highlighted, Malta, to its detriment, is now the most built-up and poorly planned country in the EU.
What is now more worrying is that the government appears to be in thrall to the development lobby and seems hell-bent on making a situation which is already ugly even worse in the name of ‘economic growth’.
It has yet to learn that growth of this kind, which neither protects the environment nor the people’s quality of life, does not amount to progress.