Let it not be said that building fads don’t catch on here. At one point it was the craze for converted farmhouses that reigned supreme and everybody was setting up house in Żebbuġ or thereabouts.
Then it was the maisonette’s turn for its place in the real estate sun. That proved to have staying power, but it has been superseded to some extent by the minimalist flat – all clean lines and brushed concrete and not an item of clutter in sight (where do these people stow away their books and lilos in winter?).
And real estate speculators have had a rising star for some time now. It seems like every day you flick open the papers you find a photomontage of some new bombastic high-rise building rearing like a malignant cucumber over the scenery.
This is seen as the new frontier for development by some people. According to them it is better to build high and narrow rather than to have ugly urban sprawl. They rave about lean, glittering towers rising above green open areas and landscaped plazas – the building blocks of futuristic metropolis.
I feel sorry for the people who have to live with the bleak reality of high rises in Malta. As someone who has seen the transmogrification of the Tigné peninsula into one of the ugliest, darkest and most congested areas on the islands, I can state that it’s a far cry from the Manhattan in the Med that the publicity bumph promised.
What we are facing is high-rise urban and vertical sprawl with the attendant risk of total traffic deadlock
The conglomeration of tower blocks have placed great pressure on the infrastructure and created insane traffic congestion problems for thousands of people in the area. The wide ‘green’ landscaped areas they talked about amount to a few drachenia trees and succulents and a mound of white pebbles.
The government has decided that the way to mitigate the effects of these blocks is to have more (on the lines of ‘If two wrongs don’t make a right, try a dozen’).
What the tower block fans don’t realise is that there is no option between low-rise urban sprawl and contained high-rise development. What we are facing is high-rise urban and vertical sprawl with the attendant risk of total traffic deadlock in the region and even more pressure on our infrastructure.
We are talking about a country which comes to a standstill when it rains. I don’t really see us coping very well with the intensification of use on the infrastructure built over 50 years ago.
Rather than walking on water, it’s going to be swimming in sewage for us in the land of vertical coffins.
• For a nation of bargain and discount-lovers, it’s odd to see that the Planning Authority’s amazing half-price offer has escaped wide notice and comment. But it’s there – on black and white – the superbly generous Authority Application Fee Refund Scheme. Of course, it isn’t described as a discount scheme for developers – but see for yourself whether it can work out as such.
All this came to a light during a press conference during which the Planning Authority announced measures for improved efficiency and greater transparency.
A spokesperson said that it was all systems go for cutting through that red tape. From now on, if the Planning Authority doesn’t come up with an answer about the proposed development application within 42 days (or within 100 days for major projects), it will refund the applicant a whopping €500 a day, up to 50 per cent of the fee he had paid.
At first glance, it seems like a severe case of self-flagellation – the Planning Authority punishing itself for its inefficiency. A closer look at the measure will show that it is just another way of further entrenching the pro-development bias in the system.
There is no way the public can ensure that delays are not intentional so that chosen applicants get to recoup half their application fee. It is the easiest thing in the world for staff to ‘sit’ on certain applications for a couple of weeks so that lucky applicants benefit from the refund scheme.
When you consider that the refund (I refuse to call it a fine) amounts to €500 daily, it adds up very quickly. A relatively minor delay of 10 days will result in the applicant pocketing €2,500 of the fee he would have paid.
Development just got cheaper (as if it needed to be). We see what you did there Planning Guys.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt