When a foreign friend comes to visit, I find nothing more fulfilling than to show off my country: I am somewhat of a patriot (whatever that means). I take them to Mdina, Waterfront, the Temples, Comina, Gozo, Valletta, Birgu: the works. Yet when I asked my latest international friend what she thought of my beloved country, she answered "To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed. I thought it would be more colourful. Malta feels unfinished. It looks like a permanent construction site".

"Unfinished". I was stumped; she was right. It is practically impossible to take a 5 minute drive in any direction without noticing a tower crane. Our towns do have that unfinished aspect. You can't really move into a house which is always being renovated and call it a home.

Well of course development is essential and unavoidable. Otherwise we'd still be living in caves and people in my future profession will become instantly redundant, and new places will promote new experiences. So it's not really the tower cranes which are promoting the negative effect, but the unfinished buildings scattered around which give the overall unfinished feeling.

There are several concrete structures staining our skyline, with no real prospect of completion. Most of you surely drive by such a building that you know has been "a work in progress" for ages. Why should such an eye sore be allowed to remain that way? We have too many half finished structures littering our roads, making our roads less homely, our towns look dirty and our country feel "unfinished".

During any half informed rant, I always tend to try to find a radical solution to an obvious problem, and this one I believe is simple enough: Issue fines for ugly incomplete buildings. The logic behind it is simple: if an old man runs out in public for 30 seconds in the nude, he is arrested and fined for "indecent exposure".

So why shouldn't a much larger body which is being "indecently exposed" for months (or even years) on end, get anything less then what the streaker got? Simple! It would be a very effective (albeit unpopular) strategy. Any building development which is not completed in a decent time frame should fall liable to such action.

In certain cities, away from our precious shores, developers cover the scaffolding or the site itself with an image giving an idea of what the final structure will look like. While we're ages away from having a development Utopia, we cannot tolerate half hearted attempts at buildings to lower the overall aesthetic quality of any region or our country.

I feel that something has to be done.

Christopher Mintoff is a 5th Year Architecture and Civil Engineering student at the University of Malta and is a member of Insite – The Student Media Organisation.