By some kind of kangaroo decision, the works on Castille Place (‘fuq Kastilja’ in Maltese) will start tomorrow morning, barely a week after the new design was unveiled.

We were told at the press conference (not an architect in sight) that the revamped space will do two things: complement the surrounding buildings, and in particular the Auberge de Castille, and ‘give the square back to the people’. Only it does neither.

On the supposed complementarity, what strikes me about the design is that it speaks a language which none of the surrounding buildings understand. I rather think it looks like an encroachment, as if a suburban shopping centre had crept up on an unsuspecting city. There are three main reasons why this is so.

First, the diagonal white lines that criss-cross the place are horrible and serve no purpose whatsoever. They set up a cacophony of focal points and make for a confusing composition and ultimately an erratic visual experience. I’ve seen crop circles that had more sense of direction about them.

The baroque façade of Castille has enough music scored into it as is. It calls for a type of complementary open space which is defined by simplicity, restraint, and parsimony of line and composition. The white lines are a million miles away from that.

Second, the lampposts and benches look like the result of a Saturday-morning shopping trip by a Buġibba restauranteur looking to upgrade his sun terrace. The benches are garden-centre material, and their form only adds to the general hubbub of lines and triangles. Straight out of a bargain basement, the lampposts are tasteless, huge, and overpowering.

Both benches and lampposts jar with the surrounding buildings. I have no issue in principle with the modernity of their design, whatever that means. I do have a problem with its mediocrity, pointlessness and lack of sensitivity to context.

Third, the design includes a fountain of sorts as well as a reshuffle of the men in bronze. I can’t say much about the fountain. The artist’s impression is so vague and stylised that I suspect the moment of inspiration is yet to come. If we must, let’s just thank heavens it’s not another water-jet design by C. Liché & Associates.

The reshuffle appears to be an attempt to set up an axis of glory of the prime ministerial type. Again, however, there are problems. The Dom Mintoff monument is as yet unseen and I suggest we give it the benefit of the doubt. The only one of those monuments to be worth its bronze is Paul Boffa’s. The Borg Olivier one is God-awful and the Dimech yet another example of Anton Agius’s triumphalist horrors. In any case, Dimech, much as I like him, was never a prime minister.

In sum, a fine complement indeed to the surrounding buildings. We will soon be able to follow the white line, sit on triangular benches, and marvel at the lampposts from design hell. That, and look at the Auberge de Castille and wonder what on earth went wrong.

I rather think it looks like an encroachment, as if a suburban shopping centre had crept up on an unsuspecting city

Which leaves us with the second claim, namely that the new design will give the square back to the people. I’m tempted to say there are many places (Armier, for example) that cry out to be thus transferred, but never mind.

In the case of Castille Place, I was not aware that at any point it had been taken away from the people. Only last week I enjoyed what seemed like a right of passage there. I was in no way stopped at a checkpoint and questioned. I was even allowed to drive my car on that hallowed ground. Assuming ‘the people’ includes me, I’d say Castille Place is already very much with the people.

The clue is in the bollards, high on my list of pet hates for a good many years now. As expected, the new Castille Place will be a forest of bollards. They will come in countless sizes and at least two kinds – the normal metal post and the round stone one.

The reason why I so loathe the damn things happens to be especially telling in this case. Bollards are dishonest and deceitful. They sneak in all nicely dressed up and in neat single file as bringers of openness and free access – of what we might call public space, that is. Only they then proceed to hold their line and defend the exact opposite.

Bollards are essentially obstructionist devices. They exist to hinder movement and to exclude, even as they masquerade as associates of benign and hearty notions of urban regeneration, social cohesion, and such. They also remind us that there is no such thing as unqualified public space.

That’s also because there is no such thing as an unqualified public. Any urban space must juggle different publics and include and exclude according to which of these publics it deems more worthy.

Pedestrians and the human occupants of cars are both ‘public’, for example, only the former tend to be glorified and the latter vilified. Bollards, as well as things like CCTV and armies of wardens, function to keep the caste lines as neat as possible.

That’s why the bollards were the first thing that caught my eye when I saw the designs for Castille Place. Their presence in profusion told me that the rhetoric was just that. Far from a new public space occupied by shiny happy people, the revamped square will be fraught with unease and tensions between publics. The bollards will simply provide the punctuation to that script.

Little wonder then that Chris Briffa, Conrad Thake, Alex Torpiano and other respected names in architecture and urban design are peeved. The new Castille Place will be an ugly and dysfunctional example of design-by-committee. Boffa for one has already got up and put on his overcoat.

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