In the run-up to the third annual international conference on cultural relations in Europe and the Mediterranean organised by the Valletta 2018 Foundation, Marija Schranz talks to Canadian-Maltese editor, author and flâneur Shawn Micallef on how we live our cities and how these cities are changing and adapting to contemporary culture.

Shawn Micallef will be addressing participants of the Cities as Community Spaces conference in November. Photo: Beth Darbyshire

The city is not just an economic gathering of people, buildings and businesses. It’s the place where lives are lived and culture is made. The public spaces in a city – its sidewalks, squares, bars and places of worship – are the public living room of a city, where we meet and bump into other people and understand each other. It’s why public spaces are so important.

Bettina Hutschek, artist and curator of the Fragmenta platform in Malta, recently said that for her, art can bring people to see different points of view without it being forced on them. Fragmenta takes art outdoors into open spaces and also seeks to be political, indirectly.

“Such events are quite important because they get people to think about things in different ways, or in the case of Fragmenta, even go visit a place and observe it when they otherwise might not,” Canadian-Maltese editor, author and flâneur Shawn Micallef, who is in Malta for the Cities as Community Spaces conference, said.

“Art sometimes creates a situation for people to come to their own conclusions by taking something they’re familiar with and turning it at an oblique angle.”

With Malta’s race towards urbanisation and with the overbuilding and overpopulation that this is causing, are we losing vital spaces to communicate in?

“A well-functioning city is a good balance between letting things happen, a kind of organic development in the city of people and commerce, and sound planning that ensures public spaces are well designed and there are enough of them,” Micallef said.

“Buildings add to the intensity of the city and culture in it but there has to be some regulation to ensure good design gives something back to the people.”

Within this context, rural spaces play an important role.

Buildings add to the intensity of the city and culture in it but there has to be some regulation to ensure good design gives something back to the people

“Rural public spaces are different than urban ones because they offer an escape from city intensity. As appealing as a busy city can be, it’s good to be alone or in a place that’s quiet.

“In Toronto, where I live, urban sprawl would have continued to gobble up farmland were it not for an important piece of legislation called the Greenbelt, which prevents development around the city, essentially turning it into an island and forcing it to create density rather than sprawl. As long as it holds, there’s rural landscape, for both escape and agriculture, near the city.

“In a place like Malta, the need to preserve rural land is perhaps more important because it’s so finite and there is room in the cities to add buildings, as well as the issue of all the vacant buildings that could and should be filled with people.”

Cities have also become a terrorist target – Brussels, Paris, Munich and Istanbul have all recently suffered terrorist attacks. How does terrorism affect cities as community spaces?

“Living in Toronto we have, for now, been fortunate to not have had to deal with this issue much. But watching how other cities have dealt with terrible events suggests people become even more attached to their public spaces after a terrorist attack, in many cases, defiantly so. The mass gatherings after attacks in cities around the world prove people want and need to come together in public, rather than mourning individually in private.”

Micallef posing with a bust of his uncle Johnny Catania, one of Charles Clews’s closest collaborators, on a recent holiday to Malta. Photo: Sarianna Mileski

In a globalised world, cities no longer function just within their national context  but also on an international stage.

“Geography is important in a globalised world,” Micallef said. “Being there, being present, walking through spaces and bumping into the people there. When products, clothes and mass culture are often the same wherever you go, the geography can matter even more. However, community spaces now exist in virtual space, transcending geography. People can connect where they wouldn’t have been able to before.

“In this globalised world, Malta carries significance. It has, throughout history, been such an incredible crossroads of cultures that the potential for new things developing here is great. The Maltese themselves have a great perspective on the region as well because of this interaction with everybody else. Malta can interpret other cultures and be a place where they all meet.”

For the Cities as Community Spaces conference, Micallef will be discussing some of the work he has done, both studying and exploring city cultures, including a city-focused magazine, Spacing, and a mobile phone documentary project he co-created called [murmur].

“I’m also interested in thinking about Valetta as a place that has meaning beyond Malta. Growing up as a second-generation boy in the Maltese diaspora, I had a sense of Valletta and Malta long before I visited. Malta exports the idea of itself to the diaspora, something I’ll talk about in the context of community spaces. It was a virtual space long before virtual reality and the internet was invented.

“In fact, Valletta 2018 and this conference has got me thinking about what role contemporary Malta and Valletta play and could play in the wider diaspora. It’s something I’ll continue to think about and hopefully write about. I’m hoping the people attending the conference itself will also feed this curiosity.”

The Cities as Community Spaces conference is taking place from Wednesday, November 23 to Friday, November 25. Participation is open to the public, though registration is necessary. The deadline to apply is Monday, October 31. For more information or to register, visit http://conference.valletta2018.org .