The Union Haddiema Maghudin announced last week that you are involved in its attempt to formulate a six-part social supplement to the pre-dominantly economic Vision 2015, lead-authored by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi. Actually the vision contains a seventh area as a sort of appendix, namely the picture of Gozo as an 'eco-island'. Do you think this part of the vision needs no supplementation?

I try to follow news about Gozo with the special interest that our sister island undoubtedly deserves, all the more since Stanley Fiorini has persuaded many of us (although not including Godfrey Wettinger) that it may have been mainly thanks to Gozo that Christianity survived despite the Islamisation of Malta.

Yet I must confess that I have not yet managed to form a clear idea in my mind as to what Gozo will look like when it will have been truly transformed into an 'eco-island'.

Is it meant to resemble Dongtan? There, not too far away by Chinese standards from Shanghai, by 2020 the world's first self-styled 'eco-city' should have come into existence. Commissioned in 2005, it is being designed by a team of engineers based in London, known as Arap.

Founded on the very morrow of the end of the Second World War with the beginning of the post-bombing reconstruction boom, it has been named after its founder, Ove Arap.

Today it is one of the largest inter-disciplinary design and construction firms in the world, perhaps best known globally for having succeeded eventually in getting the Sydney Opera House to stay erect.

Incidentally, I hear from the grapevine that Arap is heavily involved in the preparatory work being undertaken in the City Gate project, presumably because of Renzo Piano's high esteem of them, although I suspect they are quite unfamiliar with the Maltese building context.

I have not, however, heard that Arap has been consulted also in connection with the 'eco-islanding' of Gozo, even if its specialised work in relation to Dongtan is at least as celebrated as its intervention on the most famous opera site in Australia.

Are you implying that Dongtan can provide inspiration for Gozo?

Arap described the principles it has adopted for the 80,000-soul future community of Dongtan as "integrated urbanism". It is planning for people to sleep, work and shop in one and the same neighbourhood, in order to reduce demands for transport (all of which will be electrically powered), in contrast with the idea of segregating residential from industrial zones.

Even more unconventionally, the intention is to set up "food factories, multi-storey buildings that will convert solar energy to power light-emitting diodes and grow several layers of crops at once, making use of nutrient-rich water recovered from the city sewage." Seventy-five dwellings are planned per hectare, roughly the same as central London.

Alejandro Guitterrez, leader of the Arap design team, has said that the citizens of Dongtan will admittedly have to adopt a new style of life, but so too will the rest of us. "Two-hundred years ago people used to throw excrement into the street, and we laugh. In 20 years time, we will say 'didn't people have carbon credits?' and laugh".

Roofs will be covered with vegetable gardens to reduce rain water run-off and improve energy efficiency. They will also have photovoltaic panels to supplement the large offshore windfarm. Waste will be zero; all packaging will be recycled on the spot.

The Arap team's sustainability experts are not worried about the technical problems, but they are concerned about the island-city's management. For the eco-city to function well, it obviously needs an appropriate 'political co-operative' type of governance. That democratic device is not yet in sight.

Arap is not involved in the Gozo eco-island transformation, but is any planning on the same lines taking place?

The imaginative effort being put into the concept of Dongtan seems to be on the scale if not of the great utopian cities dreamt up by Plato or Thomas More or Robert Owen or Charles Fourier, then that of projects of such architect-urbanists as Le Corbusier (La Ville Radieuse) or Frank Lloyd Wright (Usonia).

Incidentally, both these two opposed great masters of 20th century architecture had fallen under the spell of Malta, and there is in particular a story to be told about narrow misses by us when the occasion to secure masterpieces by them existed.

Dongtan requires much greater investment than the admittedly costly projects of Corbusier or Wright, and I see no sign of anything like that being spent on Gozo, although all financiers assure us that innovative boldness is the condition of all great economic success.

The big difference between the Corbusier/Wright visions and Dongtan is that Dongtan seems to have been conceived much more in line with the ideas expressed by Carolyn Steel in her bestseller Hungry City - namely, that the most basic principle to be observed in town-planning is ensuring the best methods of food supply, distribution and cooking. I commend this principle to Gozo's rulers.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.