After every protest, after every article, after every legal action to try and save the little that is left of our natural and urban heritage, someone always spits out that hoary old question: “Where were you when they knocked down the old houses in Sliema/they built Smart City/they built up Tigné Point/they built the A3 towers in Marsa/they built xxx?”
The underlying implication is that anyone who is protesting at this moment in time is doing so selectively and only to make the current Labour government look bad.
According to this partisan mode of thinking – through which every matter is viewed and assessed exclusively on whether it can help or hinder either major political party – one cannot object to anything going on at present unless one has done so each and every time any planning application was filed. Picking and choosing which developments to object to will inevitably expose you to charges of hypocrisy.
I cannot speak for anybody else, but here’s where I was whenever. The Preluna Hotel was the first tall building on the Sliema Promenade. Nowadays, hardly anyone bats an eye lid at its 17 or 18 storeys, but when it opened its doors in the swinging 1960s a building that high exuded futuristic glamour. There weren’t any objectors to this addition to the Maltese hotel scene. Why? Probably because the whole place wasn’t yet an overdeveloped concrete jungle with gloomy, canyon-like streets being the norm. Me? I wasn’t born yet.
When the Sack of Sliema really took off in the 1980s and the banks were giving unsecured loans to Lorry Sant cronies to buy townhouses along the seafront and replace them with the horrendous breeze blocks, which are still standing today, I hadn’t blown out the 10th candle on my birthday cake. Could I have protested? Maybe so. Even to the eyes of a child, the monoliths that replaced the townhouses signified a loss – the extent of which I could not comprehend till much later.
Rather than bemoaning the mistakes made in the past, playing the blame game and ruing the total loss of different towns, stop the rot
Some years later in my teens, and under a new administration, there was a proposal to privatise part of the beach at Fond Għadir. I was shocked at the prospect of the limestone beach of my childhood haunts being forever out of bounds to me and other children. When Alternattiva Demokrattika started a fund to ‘buy back’ the beach, I donated my savings. Thankfully – that proposal was shelved.
Then the Portomaso proposal came along. The entire area (not just for the Portomaso tower) was leased by the State to the developers for a measly Lm191,000 (€439,300) until 2114, and eventually sold to the developers for Lm800,000 (€1.8m) in 2006. Compare that to the price of apartments at the Portomaso complex and you will see how cavalierly (and cheaply) public land was given away to private interests. Even the Ombusman of the time, Joe Sammut, concluded that it was a case of “bad administration without due consideration to the national interest”. I supported the protests and the hunger strike by environmental activist Julian Manduca.
It was then that we first started hearing the words “iconic” to describe high-rise buildings. I don’t know about iconic. What I do know is that before the Portomaso people took over, we could swim at Shingles beach and the sea in the bay teemed with multi-coloured fish. Now access to the pathetic strip of rocky foreshore is restricted. The concrete marina wall remains ugly, grey and unadorned and the sea is dead. That stubby orange tower is not iconic and even if it was, it does not make up for the loss of beach. Did they have to take that too?
Smart City? The much-touted hub in the south ended up an awful eyesore that the government is flailing around to utilise. Why did it have to be built on ODZ land, I had asked.
I was at the Fort Cambridge Planning Authority hearing and I remember my hype-detector ringing loudly in my head, as the suave architect described a building “in the round” and “landscaped areas”. Today, anybody approaching the building can reach his own conclusions about the aesthetic value of that cutting-edge design and the “landscaped areas”. I know that I have walked through slums in Palermo which looked better.
I attended the protest against the Sadeen project at Żonqor. The south does not deserve the same fate as the Sliema slums – the destruction of all that is natural and beautiful and the over-commercialisation of all conceivable public areas. When the Nationalist government extended the development boundaries in 2006, I was there and I remember many Labour leading lights marching alongside saying it had to stop at some point.
So that’s where I was. But the important question is not, “Where were you then?” but “Where are you now?” Regardless of your past position, regardless of which political party you support, regardless of which protests you have missed out on, where do you stand now? Rather than bemoaning the mistakes made in the past, playing the blame game and ruing the total loss of different towns, stop the rot.
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Where are you now? Hopefully, lighting that candle.
drcbonello@gmail.com