The Sliema high-rise matter is neither about Sliema nor about high-rise. Certainly Sliema in particular could do without the tremendous increase in volume and density, as well as the construction mayhem that 38 storeys will bring. Besides, at this rate the place will soon become a Manhattan minus the good architecture and the park.
But it is also true that Sliema is attractive precisely because of the bustle. I met a youngish woman the other day who told me that she loved living in a cosmopolitan place where so much variety was within such easy reach. Real estate values show that she is no threatened species. If Sliema didn’t work, no one would want to live there.
That, and high-rise is ugly to some, splendid to others. Told that Sliema is becoming a Dubai, many people would say that it should do so as fast as possible.
The case of Townsquare, then, is not remotely clear-cut either way. Still, there is a sense in which both Sliema and high-rise matter. They do so as symbols.
The mad thing about Sliema is that, even as it attracts more and more people, it has become a symbol of a certain malady. As the endless media attention shows, the place is an elegy in brick and mortar. That’s due partly to the ferocious rate of development, partly to an abnormally high social visibility that is itself a product of the typical background of people who have family roots there.
With respect to high-rise, we’re all too familiar with the Trumpian story of towers as a symbol of power and business virility. Thing is, however, that like all conspicuous displays, this one cuts both ways. High-rise may be an ode to power, but the counterpoint is about the threat of power.
We have reached a point where no party can hope to win an election unless it has the full weight of development and construction cash behind it
I’m saying that Sliema and high-rise are of great symbolic value. They have come to represent reckless and relentless development, as well as a rotten polity that sustains them.
I once told a builder how unpleasant it must be for people of his trade to have to spend the day covered in stone dust. One got used to it, he told me, and besides, ‘it-trab flus’ (dust is money). What he meant was that the more caked the builder, the more money he was likely making – a clean builder was a jobless one. The quip would make a wonderful leit motif for a modernised version of the national anthem, in at least two ways.
First, dust is money directly to the thousands of builders, plumbers, tile layers, plasterers, suppliers, and so on, who work in or service construction. Indirectly, more construction means more people buying, selling, renovating, and otherwise dealing in property. It is hard to overestimate the volume of work, trade, and business that is generated by construction.
It is hard to fault it, too, because people in the industry deserve to live as well as the rest of us, and in any case their taxes lend the exchequer considerable solvency. Except there’s a problem. The capacity that development and construction have to generate money and keep people happy also means that they are an easy route by which a government can cobble together a buoyant economy, at least for a while.
Governments can do that by means of State-funded capital projects. Or they can go about it the easier way, by giving free rein to development and letting people do the rest.
That’s exactly what the president of the Malta Developers Association (MDA) Sandro Chetcuti had in mind when he urged his members to “make hay while the sun shines”. As it happens, the sun shines bright high in the sky. That’s because the government has homed in on development and construction as a sure and easy way to keep the economy buoyant. It has given its blessing to a happy marriage between two idioms: ‘it-trab flus’, and ‘indawru lira’ (make a buck).
Exactly how long that marriage will last is another matter. Bubbles will soon burst and geese will shortly be killed in cliché-land, but the truth is that no one knows what will happen. What we do know is that the policy of a midnight-sun-in-the-Mediterranean that lets people make hay through the night is, in fact, no policy at all. Rather, it is a pig-headed strategy for short-term monetary gain.
It-trab is flus in a second, more elephant-in-room way. It is no hyperbole to say that dusty money has become an endemic part of our polity. We have reached a point where no party can hope to win an election unless it has the full weight of development and construction cash behind it.
There are many reasons for this. Certainly the combined facts that campaigns are so centralised and zealously party-run, and that the glossy brochures and billboards cost so much money, have something to do with it. Besides, the big parties have discovered that it’s also much easier and more convenient to shop in bulk.
Forget the rubbish about ‘il-ftit mingħand il-ħafna’ (‘the little from the many’), the telethons, and the weekend-break raffles. They’re all a pathetic mise en scène, put up to dupe us into thinking that the grass has roots and will grow. Except the real mulch comes covered in dust, and is made on the fourth floor of the party headquarters.
Nor is there anything to choose between the two parties on this one. If the Nationalist Party is skint, the reason is simply that the developer and construction source has all but dried up. Then again, there is a fourth floor at Pietà, and it will busy up sooner or later. Which explains why the party is largely silent and frankly clueless on matters of reckless development, and why Ryan Callus was marooned by his own party at the Townsquare hearing two weeks ago.
I was taught in secondary school that stone is Malta’s only natural resource. On this one, most of the country’s politicians are stuck in Form IIC, with a tower and Magnus et Potens for a school emblem and motto. Their refusal to grow up has some of us wading in money, and all of us in dust.
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