In television reports of last Wednesday's business breakfast at the Nationalist Party headquarters, you were conspicuous listening in brooding silence to the imitation by UHM general secretary Gejtu Vella and Social Policy Minister John Dalli of the competitive exchange of insults by two ghannejja. What were you thinking?
I was thinking about the Prime Minister's taking up the theme that I had found most exciting during the last election campaign. It forms the last section of the GonziPN electoral programme. He began by referring to an international assessment of the Maltese economy that lowered our status because of the smallness of our internal market.
He then hitched on almost verbatim to the electoral programme: "For this reason, the PN has always embraced a foreign policy that seeks at the same time to exploit the advantages while overcoming the disadvantages of our smallness."
After recalling the programme's allusion to the then still looming world economic crisis, he again quoted it almost word by word: "Through the new means of communication that link us with the world we are progressively overcoming our smallness and our geographic isolation".
Lawrence Gonzi was clearly projecting once more the picture of Malta in the proximate future achieving a historic step forward similar to the Independence achieved by George Borg Olivier and EU membership achieved by Eddie Fenech Adami. This third step would consist of our establishing ourselves in an identifiable niche in cyberspace. The three steps clearly constitute three degrees of spatial transcendence.
No doubt because of time constraints, Dr Gonzi did not go on to quote paragraph 351 of the programme, as I would have been over-joyed to hear him do: "a centre will be set up to promote Open Access in the field of informatics and the renewal of internet governance. The systems of Open Access are, in the world of internet, what cooperatives are in the rural world and what workers' councils are in the industrial world."
That concisely formulated electoral commitment defines precisely what the 'identifiable niche' of Malta in cyberspace could be.
Was the Prime Minister from the election up to now apparently hiding this electronic card up his sleeve? Was it because of the context of the world economic crisis? Was he highlighting instead, as the great emblem of his tenure, the renaissance of Valletta as focus for a re-conception of spatial planning in our islands as a whole?
I see both projects not as alternatives but, on the contrary, as closely interwoven together. The perception of a revived capital city as an element of the island's insertion with an individual role in cyberspace supposes that an updated philosophy of urban planning has been adopted. I expected that to happen as part of the Malta Environment and Planning Authority reform the Prime Minister had presented in the electoral programme in tandem with the idea of Malta as a sort of capital city of Open Access systems in cyberspace.
A good idea of what I mean by an updated philosophy of urban planning can be obtained by reading a book such as Public Space and Democracy, edited by Marcel Henoff, of the University of California, San Diego, with Tracy Strong.
First, a town anywhere in the world is distinguished from, say, a large rural conglomeration of farmhouses, through its having ramparts, temples, palaces and other collective monuments testifying to the existence of a social hierarchy.
Secondly, western towns differ from those of other civilisations essentially by having freely accessible public spaces at their core dedicated to the pursuit of the common good, in other words, by being structured around a centre.
A big change, however, has been occurring with the transition from a machine-based industrial civilisation to an electronic, services-based economy. The centrally-focused urban model is becoming as obsolescent as the classical Ford automobile factory with its centralised, hierarchical work organisation.
That old pattern has yielded place to diffuse, relatively flat, network organisations, symbolised by Toyota. Likewise, the new urban model typical of the electronic age is a centre-less conurbation made up of widely distributed but connected archipelagos of buildings.
This new system reflects the increased complexity of local-global relationships in the electronic age. The new urbanism has not brought about uniformity in the segments of such a constantly self-updating megapolis as Los Angeles but, on the contrary, the triumph of vernacular architecture in each segment and the multiplication of locally identifiable small communities.
Surely, Mepa should be a little less harassed about out-of-place but easily camouflaged buildings in an ODZ, and a bit more about urban philosophy. Many have compared Malta to a Greek or Renaissance city-state, but today it is surely more suitably thought of as just a single, relatively smallish, spatial unit conceived on the new urban model.
A living role for Valletta would no longer today be that appropriate to our disappearing centralised, hierarchical society, but that of a node in a world whose most resonant buzzword is 'glocalisation'.
What do you see as priority conditions for sane development of Network Malta?
Communication, and especially transport. The key to Malta's future (including the result of the next election) has been thrust into the tight, strong-man fist of Austin Gatt.
The opening and closing clarion calls of the 2003 PN electoral programme already contained the vision of Greater Valletta (in both senses of the adjective) as the primary node of Network Malta. There were to be differentiations of area character within a systematic, holistic approach.
There were to be shuttle services between airport and port, and between port and upper hub. Taxi (or bus) drivers deserve treatment as fair as that meted out to hearse-owners, but that does not mean allowing them de facto to organise the economic and cultural funeral of the island's rising (IT) generation.
Fr. Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Alessandra Fiott.