People have been given until August 3 to put forward their objections to two proposed high-rise buildings in Sliema. If the projects go ahead, a 38-storey tower would rub shoulders with a 40-storey non-identical twin.
There are many reasons why there can be no question about demand. Owning property in Sliema is the Holy Grail of a savagely-aspirational society. It has class-conquest connotations of having made it in the world, irrespective of one’s background and of a palpable sense of resentment felt by the ‘real’ Slimiżi.
Perhaps more tangibly, a place in Sliema is a foothold on an idea of a lifestyle which derives its attraction from cosmopolitan models of consumption and leisure. Little wonder, then, that high street shopping has largely migrated away from Valletta.
The fact that these models are cosmopolitan also means that they attract foreigners. Certain parts of Sliema could be anywhere in the world. I sometimes go there just to breathe a different air, rather like the Maltese people who used to spend their Sunday afternoons at the airport with their Thermos flasks and sandwiches.
They may be a short ferry trip apart, but the urban experiences served up by Sliema and Valletta are very different. To go to Valletta (‘tidħol il-Belt’, historically), and especially to walk down Republic Street, is to rehearse one’s local social connections. In Sliema, on the other hand, one samples a different and less rooted kind of urbanity. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just saying.
The upshot of these currents, each of which sets off its own positive feedback, is that property – and especially an apartment, or 10 – in Sliema is universally seen as the ultimate investment.
I remember talking to a tradesman of Żejtun who told me that he had just bought two apartments at Tigné. It was his way of telling me he was doing very well indeed, Lakshmi bless him.
The point, pardon the tinny pun, is that the ‘vacant dwelling’ and ‘evil developers’ twin arguments don’t really hold in this case. Developers could build a hundred high-rises in Sliema, and they would still manage to sell or rent them out down to the last bedsit. Demographically unlikely though it may appear, there seem to be enough tradesmen of Żejtun willing to part with their money for a slice of El Dorado.
Sliema needs high-rise like a marathon runner needs a broken toe
The fact that the demand exists doesn’t entirely clear the field. One might still ask questions about the sustainability of more high-rise in Sliema. To not ask those questions would be to abandon all notions of planning altogether, and to hope for the best. We have a rich case history of that attitude and the results aren’t exactly the Royal Crescent.
That said, I’m not sure that arguments from visual aesthetics would get us very far in this case. High-rise can be beautiful, or it can be profoundly ugly. Actually Sliema is already high-rise, and largely in the latter category. There is little reason to suppose that higher-rise will do what high-rise hasn’t done, but no matter.
The Swiss wizard-architect Peter Zumthor gives us a useful cue: “What generally comes across when I see a high-rise is its external form and the language it talks to the town, which can be good or bad or whatever.”
Now I know there are a thousand arguments as to why high-rise makes sense. Just in case, the architects to the Sliema developers have wheeled out the lot. They include maximising on available footprint area, making way for open public space (sorry, I just inexplicably choked), centralised and more efficient rubbish collection, and such.
That much is generic and straight out of a treatise on skyscrapers written by Donald Trump. I am more concerned, however, about the language that high-rise would likely speak to the town – to Sliema specifically, that is.
Thankfully, or perhaps not, it doesn’t take much guessing. The thing that high-rise would tell their neighbours is, ‘Look, I’m taller and better than you are, but do not despair’. Simply put, the two proposed towers would lead to a forest of high-rise.
That’s partly because of a slippery-slope politics of planning, but also because high-rise in Malta has tended to systematically devalue its surroundings. I know people who were perfectly happy in their terraced house in Żebbug, until their neighbours sold out to someone who built a block of flats. Their little garden was overshadowed, their privacy was gone and their terraced house no longer made sense. So they sold it to a man who pulled it down.
This familiar little round of dominoes would likely repeat itself in Sliema, especially given the cramped conditions of the place. We’re looking at a protracted, dusty, noisy and barely bearable zero-sum game.
Take shadow. The developers’ architects have argued that the towers would only each cast a ‘pencil’ shadow over their surroundings at any given time of day. They seem to have forgotten that pencils can stack up.
But let’s be kind to them. What exactly would be the matter with a forest of high-rises and pencil shadows? It’s a question which a five-minute trip to Sliema would immediately produce an answer to.
As is, the place is already an infrastructural nightmare. Sliema is like an Indian bride over who more and more gold is draped, until she can barely move. I’ve seen it happen in Mumbai, and I’m not talking about brides.
There are neighbourhoods in that city, usually posher ones in fact, where people have quite simply given up on the urban infrastructure. They have withdrawn to their gated ‘lifestyle developments’ and only talk about the rest to complain about it.
It’s a real paradox, one in which urban space gets less and less bearable even as it becomes more and more desirable. Sliema needs high-rise like a marathon runner needs a broken toe.
What it really could do with is an infrastructural upgrade that is not limited to the roundabout cosmetics of turf and pansies. When that’s done, and only then, we could maybe talk about high-rise.
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