In my previous article ‘Killing the goose’, (The Sunday Times of Malta, December 25, 2016-January 1, 2017), I had argued that the lack of a long-term plan based upon what the Maltese citizens want their country to look like 50 years from now should be enough cause to put an immediate stop to all building of towers in Malta. A moratorium was urgently called for.

Now, a couple of months after the publication of that article, I have had more time to think about the issue. There have also been a number of developments, news items, photomontages, as well as opinion pieces about the subject and these have given me more food for thought. For this reason I would like to add a third part to my original two-part article.

For me, the definition of a tower or a skyscraper in Malta is different from the definition of a skyscraper in places like New York, La Défense in Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

In Malta, anything above the already too high limit of eight floors, now raised to 10 floors, is unsuitable, however beautiful the design, however artistic and famous the architect or engineer who designs it is. In Malta, the quality of life and sustainable economy calls for ‘Malteseness’ and human size, since so much of what is Maltese comes from buildings in Maltese limestone, which do not rise easily to the 10+ or 30+ levels that are being designed today and that are in the news for many different reasons.

They are in the news because of economic development reasons; they are in the news because of Planning Authority permits that are being challenged; they are in the news because there have been insinuations and accusations of bribery and political interference; they are in the news because of protests from NGOs and local citizens worried and angry that their air will be blocked, that their towns will be uglified and that the value of their older property will be diminished.

For all these reasons we should continue to talk about this issue. For those of us who are against this form of economic development, it is incumbent on us to express ourselves, to protest, to take to the streets, to lie in front of bulldozers to stop the destruction of our built-up heritage and of our skyline and countryside.

Let us stop the uglification of Malta. The attraction for tourists will diminish in proportion to the rise of every tower.

I have myself visited Unesco offices in Paris recently to discuss what can be done by the ultimate protector of beautiful historic skylines, cities and monuments and I was astonished at what I learned.

Not only does Unesco have the moral authority to intervene whenever monuments and World Heritage Sites are at risk, it actually does intervene and does stop developments.

Last week a conference on cultural diplomacy organised by the European Commission under the auspices of the Maltese presidency of the European Council was held in Malta.

Cultural diplomacy is Eurospeak for using the soft power of the EU to protect monuments that are being ravaged by civil wars or being destroyed by iconoclastic or religious fanatic groups. Cultural diplomacy is Eurospeak for intervention by the EU and other organisations like the UN or other large nations in national cases of damage to cultural heritage, even in the internal actions of Member States of the EU. Savage destruction does not only occur in Myanmar, Cambodia, Syria or Libya but also in St Petersburg, Cologne, Vienna, Budapest and Valletta. In all these places the EU and Unesco is entitled to intervene, has intervened or will intervene.

I cannot predict what will come out of this conference since I am writing this article before the conference takes place. I can only hope that the subject closest to our Maltese hearts – the protection of our built environment, of our skyline and of our last remaining pieces of unspoilt and virgin agricultural or garrigue land – comes up.

Why do I mention cities like St Petersburg, Cologne and Vienna? I could also add Dresden and many others to this list. The reason is that, in these places, high-rise developments that were overshadowing or threatened to overshadow historic and World Heritage Sites have been stopped or moved outside a buffer protective zone around the monuments or skylines in question.

Moreover, these planned towers or large developments were brought to the attention of Unesco, and in all these cases Unesco had acted. It had put pressure on governments in those cities, and national, regional or munici­pal leaders were called upon to put a stop to these developments, or else…

Or else Unesco would take away the World Heritage Site denomination these sites enjoyed. Can you image Cologne Cathedral, the magnificent monument that one sees from miles away as one flies into Cologne airport or drives down the high hills surrounding the Rhine basin? It is the major tourist attraction of this beautiful city on the river Rhine.

By planning a skyscraper within two kilometres from the cathedral this unique view and attractiveness for the local tourist industry was going to be lost. Pressure from NGOs and Unesco had the effect of moving the planned high-rise tower more than five kilometres away.

The development was not stopped but the damage was averted and the threat to take away the World Heritage Site status from this masterpiece was withdrawn.

In St Petersburg the case was even worse. First of all we are in Russia, with its authoritarian government. Secondly the building of skyscraper proportions was being planned by Gazprom, one of the world’s most difficult companies to deal with. It is known to have cut supply to entire countries like Ukraine for political reasons and even threatens to cut supply to the EU if its pipelines were to be ordered to take routes not in the company’s plans.

In this case the threat to withdraw St Petersburg’s World Heritage Site status did have the positive effect upon the behemoth of the oil industry in the country that normally does not tolerate outside intervention. The planned building was moved several tens of kilometres away to save the historic and culturally unique skyline of the city of Peter the Great and which belongs to all of us in its beauty.

Dresden is another success story where buildings that would damage skylines were moved or cancelled after intervention of cultural diplomats.

But there are failures too. St Paul’s Cathedral in London tried to stop the growth of the skyscrapers in the Golden Square mile and to protect the dome from becoming insignificant, but failed. What will happen when the banks and financial houses that pushed up these large-scale and high-rise office blocks move to Paris, Frankfurt or Dublin after Brexit is the million dollar question. They will remain empty and cannot even be converted into social housing, since after Brexit there will be immigration controls and reduction of immigrants or refugees in the UK.

So after destroying the skyline around St Paul’s in times of uncontrolled economic growth, they will rust and rot and remain half empty, and the damage they caused will be irreversible. Prince Charles, who may be the ruling monarch in the future, will not be able to have them removed. Too late!

There are two localities that are in the throes of battling with developments that are damaging the historic centres.

These are Vienna, where organisations like Unesco strongly opposes the redevelopment plans for the Heumarkt in the Unesco-listed historic centre. The present proposals for the high-rise redevelopment of the Heumarkt concerning the ice-skating club, the concert hall and the Vienna Hotel Intercontinental threatens the World Heritage status of the historic centre of Vienna, of which the Heumarkt is an integral part.

The second is in Albania, where what was planned to save a World Heritage Site will end up damaging it because of failure to follow the proper procedures. This is a project that is currently under way to destroy, in part, the historic city of Gjirokastra, which is in the Unesco World Heritage List. On November 10, 2015, the Albanian government launched an international competition, ‘Design of a Bypass Road in the Unesco Protected City of Gjirokastra’. The main purpose of this project is to keep vehicle traffic away from the Bazaar, which sits at the heart of the historic city, and to turn this section of the World Heritage Site into a pedestrian-only zone.

When one sees these few examples of a much longer list of monuments at risk in the world and in our European part of the world one is grateful for the cultural diplomacy being exercised by large international organisations.

What is going to happen to our own dear case of protecting our Maltese heritage and our Maltese skyline?

We do not seem to be able to stop our present politicians who laid the ground conditions for this ravaging of our country

Are our small local NGOs able to stop these damaging developments and to withstand the pressure being exercised by developers, who for reasons of overblown egos or for a clear choice that they make, go for economic profit ahead of cultural protection?

These developers have a misplaced sense of nationalism and patriotism. They seem to equate economic growth and increase in GDP with a sense of nationalism. If there is more money entering the Maltese market, if the coffers of the State increases, if there is full employment, then all is allowed.

If this is what quality of life means then it’s time to get off the bus. Quality of life includes a good economy but it is much more than that. Clean air, low noise pollution, good roads, a good cultural and social mix and less crowded country are all part of what quality of life entails.

Malta is rapidly moving from a heaven on earth to a much worse place, and over-development and the too rapid growth of population are clearly some of the reasons for this deterioration.

We have added a substantial number of Maltese citizens in the past five years, growing the local population from 350,000 to 420,000. At the same time, the foreign residents who are here for work, for retirement or illegally as refugees or failed asylum seekers has gone up from 5,000 five years ago to over 10,0000 today.

If the trend continues there will really be a need for skyscrapers since, even with the 70,000 empty old houses and flats we would still not find living quarters for more residents.

But do we want to grow into a crowded anthill?

We have always been overcrowded but now the rate of crowding is a very fast one, bringing with it more problems than benefits.

One begins to despair about where Malta is heading when one reads about law-bending to allow a high-rise in Mrieħel or land grants without public calls like in Żonqor; when one reads about land valuation by what is supposed to be a serious worldwide accountancy firm and a payment scheme of that paltry sum valued by this firm that smells, looks and feels like a Ponzi scheme or an Al Capone style deal; when one reads how the so-called Paceville master plan was created to suit a few businessmen close to a few ministers; when  one reads about a skyscraper planned for Villa Drago and the former Union Club grounds in Sliema that all residents are against, a development that will dwarf Valletta’s skyline and that does not satisfy the logic of the high-rise land use policy.

If one sees the amount of mushrooming ugly Sicilian cafes and restaurants providing off-the-shelf services, like the pizzeria shops that mushroomed in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s for money laundering purposes, one wonders why our local councils allow these to continue to encroach our pavements.

When one sees the number of rule-breaking, over-speeding, illegally parked cars with foreign number plates just exploding in number, so much so that the Minister for Transport recently announced immediate clamping and on-the-spot fining as a stopgap.

When one sees the overpricing of flats for the large number and ever growing number of foreign workers from Eastern Europe or poorer parts of western Mediterranean countries coming here to work in hospitality, hairdressing, manicuring, massage and other cashier and supermarket store jobs at €4 to €6 an hour and taking what could be better paid positions from our local youngsters, then one begins to wonder how we are going to survive, or better still, how we are going to survive and remain Maltese.

We could become another sort of people and even squeeze 800,000 or one million people living like ants and earning incomes from their flats for foreign workers and running away to Sicily to their estates for a weekend of peace; I wonder what the traffic, the criminality, the life in the shadows of the towers will look like. Paceville at night, car bombs in public streets, private secret accounts in faraway tax havens indicate that a lot is wrong in our country. It is sick, and high-rise mushrooming is just such a symptom.

It will not be nice; it will not be great, in fact, it will be so ugly that I, for one, will emigrate once more. It will be unlivable.

Running away from a problem is not the answer. We need to organise ourselves and to stand up and fight for our heritage, our birthright and our wishes to live in a beautiful, peaceful, law abiding country.

The success stories that Unesco so proudly speaks of and writes brochures and videos about, give us hope, that maybe, maybe, our Valletta and Mdina skylines, our open countryside in Għar Lapsi or Miżieb, Mtaħleb or Żonqor Point, Wied tal-Lunzjata in Gozo will not suffer the fate of the Azure Window.

Today the window has fallen, a victim to erosion and the forces of nature, but also the abuse of the Dwejra area, with too many tourists, uncontrolled access, buses and stalls all over the place, pollution and lack of fencing or wardens, human intervention and use of explosives in the Inland Sea.

Unesco can take away Valletta’s and Mdina’s cultural heritage stamp and publicise their destruction or they can force these 10-kilometre buffer zones around both Mdina and Valletta

Our dear Creator who, according to Dun Karm, dressed this country, so loved by Him, with the sweetest of lights, seems to be giving us a clear and noisy message by taking back one of our most beloved sights, the Tieqa tad-Dwejra, which He had so kindly created for us.  What message is He/She sending us?

We could not save the Azure Window but we can save all the rest, we can save the ODZ, we can save open countryside, we can save the view to and from Valletta from the south, the north the east and the west, and the view of and from Mdina to Valletta to Gozo and Żebbuġ and Paola by having 10-kilometre buffer zones around Valletta and around Mdina.

We can save Gozo by disallowing any high-rise building there at all.

We do not seem to be able to stop our present politicians who laid the ground conditions for this ravaging of our country, nor can we stop the developers, who seem only to care for money or for monuments to their wealth and egos in the form of higher and higher phallic towers. They are constantly destroying town houses to build chicken coops with a partial sea view. Owners leave lovely town and village houses empty, especially along the main roads in our towns and villages. Over 70,000 of these are vacant and derelict.

Would a property tax linked to protection orders force their restoration and use? It works in other countries; why not introduce it here? Traffic too has to be reduced or forbidden in all town centres, or 20kph zones introduced, or oblige the electrification of all cars, buses and vans in Malta through an e-mobility programme funded by the EU. People would move into their town houses.

Or can we?

Just as Obama used to say “Yes we can”.

There is help in the form of Unesco, which like the proverbial cavalry in the western films “Arrivano i nostri” style can come to our rescue from ourselves.

They can take away Valletta’s and Mdina’s cultural heritage stamp and publicise their destruction or they can force these 10-kilometre buffer zones around both Mdina and Valletta.

We can also challenge the government on the interpretation of the high-rise land use rules, which allow the chewing gum or plasticine analogy so that what would fit into the land area if built low-rise would be compressed into half the same space on a high-rise structure instead.

What is challengeable in this rule is that if high-rise buildings need to leave 50 per cent empty space, then logically and proportionally any building below the given limit of 12 floors should leave 25 per cent free space if it is developed as six floors, 12.5 per cent empty space if developed as three floors and 6.25 per cent empty space if developed as one-and-a-half floors. This would be the natural interpretation of special use and open spaces that is healthy and useful to the population. Thus, any high-rise building will have to compress lesser space if this rule were applied mutatis mutandis to all buildings of any height.

Courageous politicians in the future can cut themselves away from the clutches of developers and reboot or reconfigure the Maltese economy to one based on fewer but higher-quality tourists, on higher, much higher paid jobs in all sectors, which would get Maltese youths back to work and reduce the influx of lowly paid foreign modern slave workers, and by reducing traffic drastically by slowing it down, raising the cost of combustion engine vehicles and promoting slow-speed, silent and clean electric cars.

Finally, a sustained cleanup of all illegal activity, ranging from the petty theft of VAT avoidance, the gross theft of income tax evasion, the latent theft and discrimination caused by tax imputation, the foreign corporations using Malta as a vehicle for tax evasion elsewhere, the foreign retirees and passport buyers who get residence here without spending the obligatory minimum of 183 days a year here, drug dealing and smuggling, illegal buildings like the beach huts, the extra floors and PA permitting of ODZ constructions and leisure boat registrations to nominal and nominee companies hiding real ownership. The list can go on and on, but a cleanup would help.

So there is hope and there are actions we could and should take to save Malta from itself.

First of all, Unesco could take away the World Heritage Status from Valletta and Mdina if these structures are planned or given permission within the buffer zone.

If this were to happen or to be threatened, like in Cologne or St Petersburg, what would operators in our tourist industry say? Would they take it lying down and see their goose no longer laying golden eggs?

Even today, the hotel industry is questioning how, despite the former Institute for Tourism Studies site being outside the areas that the present government had indicated as acceptable for skyscrapers or towers, the deal for the transfer of the site was given the go-ahead.

Let us not give up. If we join ranks and raise our voices there is still hope of success.

John Vassallo is a former ambassador of Malta to the EU, a former president of the Malta Business Bureau, a former EU affairs director and vice-president with GE and Microsoft and a former chairman of AMCHAM EU.  He is currently a strategic adviser to the Microsoft Corporation and a council member of Europa Nostra.