The proposed towers in the area stretching from Tignè Point to Townsquare are pale imitations of Dubai.

Ten years ago, Malta was victim to a reckless decision by the then Nationalist government to extend the construction development zones. It was a political act of calculated vandalism introduced to meet the demands of greedy developers and to win votes. The consequences of that decision haunt Malta to this day.

Ten days ago, the Planning Authority granted planning permission for five high-rise towers to be built in Mrieħel and Tignè. The developers behind these projects – the Tumas and Gasan Groups at Mrieħel and Gasan in Tignè – have, in the past, shown no hesitation in supping at the Nationalist Party table.

Today, they find themselves at home with a Labour Prime Minister who was elected promising “to leave behind a heritage to future generations so these will be better off than we are today”. He has instead embarked on a sustained and destructive onslaught on Malta’s environment in which these developers, with their snouts in the trough, are complicit.

Like Attila the Hun at the gates of Rome 1,500 years ago, the developers, their architects and the supine Planning Authority, led by the Prime Minister, are the Barbarians at the gate. Inside, the hapless victims watch events unfold, unable to resist the incoming tide of ugliness and ruination. More high-rise applications are promised.

Politics is not the issue. Both parties are equally guilty, as the Nationalist Party’s current deafening silence attests. Financial greed and profit are the overriding motives. I write here, with reluctance, of people I know, who appear to have lost all sense of moral, corporate responsibility in their efforts to become even richer than they are already. They are of the same class, affluence and background as those individuals who were so closely involved in controversies that brought down the last Nationalist government. Only the political allegiances have changed.

But the voracious drive for greater financial gain is identical and unrelenting. Together with this government, they represent the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’. Not because profit is bad but because they harm so many and so much in their unyielding pursuit of it.

The first 24-storey high-rise building in Malta – the Portomaso Tower, in Paceville – has added absolutely nothing to the quality of the environment or the aesthetics of St Julian’s. Nor have the high-rise carbuncles at Tignè Point, impinging as they do on the iconic skyline of Valletta less than 500 metres away.

Environmental NGOs and civil society must be prepared to wage their campaigns in a different direction

Yet, the Planning Authority, in an act of grotesque environmental destruction, has just agreed to the construction of five high-rise towers in a country where they are alien, unnecessary and unwanted. The planned construction of four interlinked, 19-storey tower blocks in a cluster at Mrieħel and the 38-storey Townsquare tower at Tignè, within 1,000 metres of the proposed 40-storey Fort Cambridge hotel and the high-rise Tignè Point rabbit-warren, are an abomination. They represent in the starkest manner all that is wrong with our built environment and the planning blight that the so-called Planning Authority is actively inflicting on this island.

The Townsquare tower wilfully violates the organic texture of Sliema – a once elegant town of classic endemic architecture, of which Tignè forms an intrinsic part – and creates a grammarless architecture in which buildings aren’t made for the town but are ranged in a ragged skyline against it.

What we are getting with these monolithic, intrusive, high-density footprint buildings – far too massive in scale for their surroundings and imposing extraordinary strains on the existing inadequate road, water and drainage infrastructure – is an example of architecture that destroys its surroundings, rather than adapting its art to them.

These piecemeal, monumental developments in Tignè and Mriehel inflict damage on the Maltese skyline as a whole – the Portomaso Tower excrescence is already visible virtually everywhere – and will cause irreversible damage to Malta’s heritage landscape hitherto unchanged for centuries, undermining every consideration of visual harmony. They are an affront to Malta’s traditional architecture.

How leading architects of the quality of Ray Demicoli at Mrieħel and Martin Xuereb at Townsquare – for both of whom I hitherto had much admiration – can lend their names and reputations to glass and concrete stump architecture of this kind is saddening.

The Mrieħel office development and the towers in the area stretching from Tignè Point to Townsquare do not use an architectural language that puts buildings into relation with their neighbours. They are pale imitations of Dubai, a city created only in the last few decades: an ugly, artificial, soulless, characterless metropolis, consisting of toxic glass and concrete canyons.

They should have no place in Malta whose architecture has evolved over the centuries into a distinct and integral grammar of its own. Despite the Prime Minister’s known admiration for Dubai, there is no historical, aesthetic, social or even commercial reason for imposing tower blocks on Malta. Worse, with thousands of empty accommodation on the island, there is no pressing need for them.

High-rise is an answer to a problem that simply does not exist. These are vanity projects unworthy of a Prime Minister who was elected to office promising “to protect environmental standards… because our children deserve this”.

What can be done? The way in which Malta’s absent guardian of the environment, Victor Axiak, chairman of the Environmental Resources Authority, failed to make his voice heard at the board meeting (abetted or sabotaged by Tim Gambin) leaves one’s worst fears about the ERA being the poodle of the planners starkly confirmed. Axiak is still prevaricating over whether to appeal against the decision.

The Sliema local council (and, hopefully, other councils affected) are now exploring the legal options open to them with a view to appealing the decisions. The fact that the Mrieħel towers were added to the high-rise area list on the instructions of the Prime Minister well after the public consultation period had been completed clearly renders the decision ultra vires and illegal.

But the environmental NGOs and civil society must be prepared to wage their campaigns in a different direction. To conduct concerted ‘guerrilla warfare’ by different means. For example, why should members of the public not be urged to boycott the business outlets of the Gasan and Tumas Groups? Why should Martin Xuereb and Ray Demicoli, both of whom have long participated in – and have won – the prestigious Din l-Art Ħelwa Award for Architecture not be banned from entering it?

This may be a pinprick as far as the two architects are concerned but it would be a public expression of disapproval that the participation of these two leading architectural firms in these wanton acts of environmental destruction are beyond the pale and will not be taken lying down by Malta’s leading cultural heritage organisation.

The history of Malta’s environmental and spatial planning over the last 60 years is a dismal story of greed, exploitation, abuse, misgovernance and political ineptitude. The latest development epitomises this.

Looking back in 20 or 30 years’ time, what substantive legacy will Joseph Muscat have left? Will it be marked by ‘Panamagate’, by concrete and glass stumps, by architectural and cultural vandalism, the loss of Malta’s last vestiges of heritage landscapes and further rapid degradation of the built and rural environment?