Nothing is more entertaining than the thought of Renzo Piano doing a Jesus-in-the-temple at the Monti (street market) in Valletta. Not that he needs to. His cause has been taken up by a troop of knights who will stop the migration to Ordnance Street if it means the last drop of blue blood.

I think there’s something wrong with a city that doesn’t know what to do with its markets

I quite honestly don’t have a strong opinion about exactly which corner of Valletta the hapless Monti people will be moved to next. Certainly I think there’s something wrong with a city that doesn’t know what to do with its markets. But never mind, it’s the list of associations I find intriguing and worth a thought.

One of the things people visiting Mumbai usually find charming is the ubiquity of street vendors. Walking and shopping are one and the same in that city. The streets are lined with stalls, vendors, and hawkers, sometimes many rows deep and selling anything from sugar cane juice to mini-fans to mildewed National Geographic magazines.

All very quaint one might suppose, except for the ongoing war between the pavement entrepreneurs and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. Egged on by citizens’ committees and a thousand letters to the Times of India, the men in uniform plague street vendors at every turn.

There are now ‘hawker-free zones’ in upmarket areas and ‘anti-hawker drives’ whenever the Corporation offices get too stuffy. That vendors often have to bribe officials to protect them from themselves is an open secret.

Forget all the circuitous talk of ‘obstructing pavements’. The main reason behind all the harassment is that street vending is seen as somehow not quite worthy of a modern, orderly, and forward-looking city. It lacks the hygiene and science of a shopping mall, for example.

There are echoes of British colonial attitudes to ‘filthy’ native towns. Perhaps more worryingly, there’s also a big contradiction: The very people who wheel out the caustic adjectives for their letters to the editor are likely to stop over for a quick bhelpuri pavement snack on the way home.

The conflicts and contradictions are hardly endemic to Mumbai. I remember reading something on how street vendors are seen as a ‘hindrance to a competitive and modern city’ in Mexico City, for example. In 1994, New York’s 125th Street lost its thriving ‘African’ street market to an organised eviction drive aimed at peddlers who created ‘dirt and congestion’ on the street and ‘sponged off the community’. And so on.

Moving back to Valletta, the headache of street markets is hardly a recent one. The covered market (known to locals as is-suq) was probably one of the earliest attempts at finding a cure. Its mid-19th century origins make it a contemporary of the covered markets of Covent Garden in London and Les Halles in Paris.

This was the age of order and sanitisation, of Napoleonic campaigns to regulate street markets and the Markets and Fair Clauses Act of 1847. Is-suq was built of cast iron and glass, elements that made for light and airiness. It was designed in such a way as to ‘prevent the crowding of idle persons’. It was also apportioned according to the products sold.

All of which would strike a chord with the present-day Napoleons. Like I said, the list of associations is worth a visit.

First, the resistance to il-Monti has to do with the collective utopia that fixes Valletta as a noble baroque city inhabited by the ghosts of departed knights. It’s a boring, inaccurate and monochromatic fixation which, to their eternal credit, the V18 team under the outgoing David Felice worked hard to put a big dent into.

Only the bastions have withstood the broadside rather too well. I have in mind the widespread nostalgia for a grand Teatru Rjal, the newly-ennobled space up by the church of St Catherine (now the haunt, aptly enough, of a triumphalist and anachronistic bearded monstrosity in bronze), and the newly-rigged daily re-enactments featuring mounted knights in improbable Walter Scott-type armour. To name but a few examples.

I loved Din l-Art Ħelwa’s press release: “It is ironic that while the Government plans to relocate and tidy up the unsightly kiosks and stalls just outside the entrance to Valletta, on the other hand it may now be proposing to place market stalls just within the city walls, thus restoring dignity to one side and taking it away from the other.”

The statement subverts itself so effectively that one need hardly comment. I’ll just say that when the words ‘tidy’, ‘dignity’, and ‘city’ occur in the same sentence, I tend to make for the nearest breach.

Second, class is written all over this latest debate. Take the snooty swipes at pirated CDs, fishnet lingerie, and colourful towels. They tell me that it’s not just the physical market that people are objecting to, it’s a market (shoppers, that is) for certain types of products and one that jars with the image of a noble city.

I’m sure there would be less fuss if it were a matter of De La Quaint stalls selling artisanal jewellery, naturalment Malti honey, and antique bric-a-brac.

Third, and more so in the case of City Gate than il-Monti, orientalism and race are not too far away. I’ve often heard people refer disparagingly – even as they bite into a jam doughnut bought at an unsightly kiosk – to the place as ‘qisu s-suq ta’ Tuneż’ (‘looks like the bazaar in Tunis’). The idea presumably is that the East is disorganised, chaotic, and un-European. Unlike Valletta as it should be.

It doesn’t help that the spot has become popular with black Africans. Why should we be surprised that far-right extremist Norman Lowell chose to target precisely the black vendors at City Gate at his infamous Safi meeting of 2005? As he put it, Valletta had been demoted from a baroque to a Moroccan city (‘minflok belt barokka saret belt marokka [sic]’).

Finally, it’s hard not to detect an undercurrent of party-political notions in the online comments and such. One would expect this from Labour, the tune goes. Isn’t Labour the culture-less party of Ġensna and Jason Micallef-V18, of social housing blocks populated by Elvis lookalikes and Priscillas who wear too much gold? One is left wondering if there’s a place for Labour at all in a city built by gentlemen.

Will it be Quasimodo’s or Hausmann’s Paris? I’m not so sure which one I prefer. In any case I’m not sure we need to choose at all. Perhaps it is the tension between its ‘dignified’ and ‘noble’ spaces and its swieq ta’ Tuneż which make Valletta a living city. Bring on the leopard-print panties if we must, anything’s better than a sanitised showcase ruled over by a stern de/La Valette in dull green.

mafalzon@hotmail.com