There has been at least one curious (negative) reaction to your views on Malta Environment and Planning Authority reform. Your main suggestion was deemed to involve the near abolition of the case-officers' role. Two reasons were advanced to question your position.

First you seemed to be implying (wrongly) that the role carries with it an inherent temptation to discriminatory treatment of clients.

Secondly, the general impression is that the academic background of a large proportion of the fairly large number of case officers is geography. You personally shoulder responsibility for the University's production of graduates in geography. So your position seems to be contradictory.

Undoubtedly, the establishment of geography as a field of study at the University is one of my few lasting achievements. My immediate motivation was that I felt geography, like anthropology, was essential as a basic component for the Mediterranean studies course that I felt was vital for the University to establish a distinctive cultural identity. That course was wantonly destroyed sometime after I ended my spell as Rector, but geography has happily survived for several other reasons other than its necessity for a holistic regional approach to the Mediterranean world.

The first was that it ensured the provision of teachers without whom the inevitable, miserable outcome would have been death of this unique subject at the secondary level. Another reason was precisely the fact that the subject was so structured that it equipped students for many new jobs other than teaching for which demand was rising. Their curriculum of studies involved training in fieldwork, geographical information systems, familiarisation with ecological thinking and the cluster of problems related to globalisation, sustainability, climate change, natural hazards and others relevant to policy making, as well as heritage, landscape and urbanism.

But I confess that I was no doubt influenced by the growing, widespread awareness of the close links between geography and philosophy. I was among the early supporters of the Routledge periodical Ethics, Place and Environment; A Journal of Philosophy and Geography.

Philosophers, after Heidegger, have been centrally concerned with the core concepts of geography, namely space, place, environment and maps. Space, for us, is essentially a synthesis of land and people, and so we are averse to any over-rigid division between physical and human geography. Incidentally, one of the most challenging doctoral theses being developed within the Mediterranean Institute is an attempt at 'cultural cartography' of the Mediterranean at present.

Obviously, I do not underestimate the value of the contribution that geography graduates can provide in various sectors of the economy and I actually suggested that many more of them could be employed in the still very understaffed heritage and landscape sectors.

The polemic about who in the Office of the Prime Minister or Mepa should be responsible for policy has evolved almost in exactly the way you had somewhat ironically predicted. What do you make of this?

My fervent hope now is that the framework that had actually been adopted will take into account the very clear contribution made by Vincent Cassar, the president of the Chamber of Architects. He pointed out that the problem of responsibility had arisen because of the failure to distinguish between two planning levels, namely the overall and the land use.

Actually, perhaps the overall planning function should be attributed to the National Commission on Sustainable Development. Clearly this commission was not intended merely to provide a report. It needs to be structured so that it really becomes the closest think-tank to the Prime Minister.

Equally clearly, overall planning and land-use planning, especially on the scale of Malta which is smaller in size than a not very large city, can no more be rigidly separated than physical and human geography. On one hand, because land is such a determining factor in our social and economic life, land-use needs to be a key element in overall planning. On the other, overall planning has to be the envelope for land-use planning. But the two levels of planning need to be distinguished.

You have said something about the relations between philosophy and geography. How relevant is philosophy specifically to planning and architecture?

The answer can perhaps be best perceived by looking at the impact that the moral philosopher Jane Jacobs has had on urban planning in the United States. For years the modernist philosophy of planning of which the classic expression may be taken to have been Le Corbusier's Radiant City. One of its cardinal tenets was fairly rigid zoning into residential areas, industrial estates, commercial sectors, etc.

In Malta, the ugliest result of this system is the almost absolute concentration of youth entertainment in Paceville, even though this disaster was not the result of deliberate government planning, but occurred spontaneously in conformity with prevalent fashion among town planners.

From the sixties onwards, Jacobs challenged the fashionable zoning concept notably with her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

In it and in her subsequent works, of which Systems of Survival is the most generally philosophical, Jacobs showed through the analysis of empirical results that the vitality of cities depended on not separating places of work from housing districts and on there being high densities, in order to justify the dissemination of commercial and entertainment functions.

The most dominant theme in recent philosophical writings about urban living and architecture is the relation of differentiated places and the character (habitual traits of behaviour) of individuals.

Those in the Aristotelian tradition put at the heart of their architectural theory the ways in which character (virtues and vices) is shaped by patterns of human co-operation that are in turn shaped by different forms of conviviality in town and village. Other vast topics feature in discussions of urbanist ethics.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.