It seems to me that in the on-going fuss about construction and development, what most people are objecting to is ugliness. Few people would have any quarrel with buildings that are harmonious with their surroundings and pleasant to look at. The trouble is that what we want to look at, and what we want to build, are two different things. We build ugly houses and then have the cheek to complain because the island is full of ugly houses.

Believe it or not, there actually is a rule-book. A stylish architect tells me that it is now so thick, and delves into such detail as to what may or may not be done on a plot of such and such dimensions, that only those most gifted in that rare combination of pragmatism and imagination can produce a design both functional and lovely to look at. In other words, the rule-book serves to have the opposite effect of that intended. It is one of the major reasons for our ugly buildings. Our urban sprawl is so unattractive because when there was a clean break with vernacular architecture, a free-for-all followed.

There is another reason, too. The northern European concept of individual sacrifice for the common good is alien to us. As a fiercely survivalist people, we put the individual before the group – not in the terms envisaged by those who drew up the list of human rights, but in terms of brute survival. Indeed, the concept of the group does not exist, except as an audience which judges or admires the individual according to his status, wealth, or power – or, where women are concerned, their “cleanliness” and their modesty.

This streak in our nature, this inability to cooperate for the common good, combined with the poorness of land supply, is a recipe for aesthetic disaster. No land can be wasted, but instead of building upwards, we have solved the problem by squashing buildings right next to each other in one ghastly terrace after another. Worse, plots of land small enough for a house are now forced to accommodate long thin buildings of flats: pencil buildings. Because the rules are so tight as to the actual construction of the terraced building, the owners try to enforce their individualism in the decoration: the aluminium balconies and gates and the overwrought carved stonework. This is why, when I drive around, I try to tune out my surroundings so that I am not offended yet again by the chaos of a mish-mash of terraced buildings, jostling against each other in a festival of hideousness.

Some people have said to me that you can’t legislate for good taste. Oh yes, you can. There must be people with dreadful taste in the picture-perfect towns and villages of so many parts of Europe, but their design efforts and attempts at individualism are kept in check by the local authorities and even by the neighbours. If you think planning is strict here (in theory at least), then perhaps you should try building something decorated in bronze aluminium and pink cement tiles in the middle of a little town in Bavaria, or an English village. The difference is that these are places where the integral and harmonious nature of the whole is protected against the excesses of the individual. Anyone who steps out of line is stepped on.

The houses along the canals in Amsterdam have not been built in that same way for hundreds of years because the Dutch have homogenous taste which has remained unchanged since the 16th century. They are built that way because of strict rules governing every last detail. The underlying principle, in this and other attractive European cities, towns and villages, is that non-conformist buildings are permitted only when architecturally they add something positive to the street.

In Malta, we still think in terms of our buildings as being no more than functional shelter. That is why the rule that terraced houses would have to be set back from the pavement and have a patch of garden in front was thwarted. Almost everyone paved over their “front garden” and turned it into what’s now called a “drive-in”, another Maltese word that doesn’t exist in the English language, except to describe one of those burger places where you can drive in and buy your food through the car-window. In one fell swoop, the softening effect that might have been created by some plants was wiped out, along with one parking space in front of the ‘drive-in’.

Then we have all those new areas where the homes are best described as garages with houses, rather than houses with garages. There is a premium on garages in Malta because people prize their cars more than they prize their own comfort. This is surely a reflection of the high taxes that make it unaffordable to change our cars every five years. So the cars get cossetted in luxurious space, while the household children huddle up at night in cubby-holes. I was fascinated when walking to a clinic appointment in one of these new areas and passed through street after street of massive metal doors high and wide enough to take a bus, by the side of which sat a prissy little front-door that opened straight onto a stairway leading to the living-quarters, perched on top of that blessed garage. The car had the biggest bedroom in the house.

The sad truth is that it’s too late now. There has been much too long a precedent for the principle of ugliness. Even if new rules were to be drawn up that would force us to build with some sense of aesthetics, these attractive buildings would be cheek-by-jowl with the many thousands of existing horrors. Think about it: how many homes, built in the last 25 years, do you know of that are attractive from the outside? Sitting here writing this, I can think of absolutely no such terraced houses, and only two or three villas. Like our approach to dirt and cleanliness, we concentrate on the inside and give little or no importance to what’s outside.

I am one of those people who understand that a beautiful building is much more desirable, and is more uplifting to the spirit, than an ugly piece of undeveloped land. There are those who believe that nature is always and inevitably superior to anything that the human mind and hand can create, but in this they are misguided. Nature is often unattractive. Human creation is frequently wonderful. Equally misguided is the assumption that we have a right to open spaces. We do not. We live on a couple of tiny islands where land is at a premium and the population continues to creep towards half a million. Curiously, I notice that those most against development and in favour of the protection of open spaces are the very same ones who are against the concentration of high-rise buildings in certain areas. They are living a dream in which today’s population can fit into the same space occupied 100 years ago, when there were far fewer people and most of them lived in slum conditions, 10 to a room.

We have to take up more land and we also have to build higher. These are not the true sins against aesthetics. That true sin is poor design, to which, unforgivably, we appear to be predisposed. Every time I drive past Xemxija hill I am horrified afresh. Individual blocks of apartments have been built on tiny plots, each one different to the other, crawling up and over the natural hill at different angles depending on the orientation of the owner’s plot. If ever there was an area that should have been developed as a harmonious whole, with the good taste police standing watch with a whip, this was it. It’s beyond ghastly, and it’s a metaphor for the rest of hotch-potch Malta. What Fr Christmas should bring us this year is some more exposure to beauty: man-made beauty and not natural beauty. We are starved of it. It’s not the buildings that are the problem. It’s the fact that they’re so damned ugly.