Lack of open spaces resulting from mismanagement in town planning together with overdevelopment have rendered our children hostages to the indoor environment.

Playing outside is not safe anymore due to the increase in traffic while neighbouring fields that used to serve as play areas have disappeared too. The end result includes child obesity that has hot up following a more sedimentary lifestyle where physical exercise has been replaced by long hours at the computer.

While a number of open spaces and parks have been created over the past number of years, a holistic approach is still lacking.

Open spaces should address recreational needs of adults and children alike, air quality, sustainability and even parking/traffic concerns.

Let’s take Qawra and Buġibba as a case study. The unsustainable overdevelopment occurring over the past 30 years or so rendered the place a concrete jungle with huge parking problems and a deficit in open spaces. The latter issue seems as if it is being addressed following the creation of Salina Park and, lately, the Children’s Water Park while parking and sustainability are still unaddressed.

A focus towards improving public transport plus incentives towards the use of greener forms of private transport (bicycles and motorcycles) will help in partially relieving the parking problem. Small engine motorcycles such as mopeds should be exempt from the road licence.

Secondly, open parking spaces should be redeveloped into multi-storey underground parking incorporating a water reservoir at basement level plus an open air recreational area at street level.

Such projects should incorporate sustainability including efficient resource utilisation, something which, to date, has barely been considered.

Let’s take the much-needed water park (which is providing children with such fun) as an example. Fresh water is utilised when the shoreline is only 20 metres away while no photovoltaic panels were installed on the reception/toilet area roof top.

Irrespective of all the rhetoric we hear about sustainability, the Government is giving the wrong example.