Building – the motor of Malta – that which keeps us wealthy, or apparently so, and that causes so many worrying headlines and so much media coverage. Contractors are reviled; those who quietly have a lot of housing wealth are envied and admired. We have a love-hate relationship with our buildings. We keep them beautiful inside and abandon them outside, as we indeed have abandoned the whole of outside Malta. Love /hate – not the healthiest of relationships. So what can be done about it?

A starting point could be less division into camps.

Less all virtue on one side, and all sinning on the other. We are a perfect nation of Nimbys (Not In My Back Yard cum bitha types), happy to live in flats where a developer once tore down a house, while slating anyone else who does so. Having said that, there is plenty of ammunition for those who protest under the banner of greenery or civil rights, or Sliema as it was or should remain. They are right about a lot but, like the official Greens, seem to prefer just attacking, rather than coming around the table and looking at a strategy that could work for us all in the long term – a strategy in which we all have to lose a little, but collectively would lose a lot of the hypocrisy as well.

Sliema is the case study, the place to start. A former Socialist PM started the rot. The Sliema Front, one all of us over 40 clearly remember, was effectively pulled down to make way, in large part, for higher buildings, mediocre architecture and a lack of maintenance that is endemic all over the island, hence our fading façades look, our true core value for branding experts.

Malta looks shabby and so does Sliema. And this mess and shabbiness is not mainly about empty fast-food cartons flying about, courtesy of our gusty climate. Malta, and increasingly Gozo, look shabby because Malta’s buildings look shabby. The 100-year-old ones look shabby. The 75-year-old ones look shabby. The 50 and 25-year-old ones are often grotesquely shabby too. What are we doing about this? Grotesquely nothing. We rebrand ourselves with punchy words but we leave the island looking shabby beyond belief. Of course, shabbiness has a charm too. In Valletta, and in Cottonera, there is a certain charm to some level of Shabbiness (I think it deserves the status of a proper noun here!), but overall, you have to guide our tourists to Malta’s beauty spots after manoeuvring through street upon street of gunge and mess.

Just look around you on your normal drive to work, have another, closer, look at your home town. Perhaps you only see the charm, and Malta has loads of charm everywhere, but you have to look for it between all the mess, and a big part of the mess is in our buildings. Homes are not looked after on the outside. Many homes are abandoned. Building sites look messy for a long time as well, for too long, in fact. Malta is one big building, interspersed with building sites.

The building sites are causing a furore, particularly in Sliema. Somebody made a planning decision that may have been a very bad one. That decision, in a nutshell, was this: Sliema has already been destroyed, with its mediocre tall buildings of the socialist seventies, so it makes sense to concentrate development there.

So we have the concrete monstrosity from the sea that is Tigne. We have the Hilton, an overdeveloped site but one that has worked well as a residential and entertainment/leisure area. We have Pender Place coming and now Fort Cambridge, which will be beautiful for people to live in but when you see the artists impression of the mass being proposed that will be seen from Valletta, your heart misses a beat. And there is also the Union Club site, and the one adjoining, which was pulled down without a whimper – perhaps because it was built by the British?

Value-wise, we appear to have the same imbalanced, almost racist, relationship towards heritage that we have towards our own two languages. Maltese, as the language of the Arabs who colonised us, is venerated while English, as the language of those who colonised us more recently, has been relegated to the rubbish heap.

Buildings built during the English period – we happily tear them down. The Sliema Front, the Union Club et al. And yet a home for the pigs downstairs is lovingly restored, as well it should be. But again, this was something the many English people came here and did – they led the way in our loving our homes that we didn’t appreciate enough before.

So in our historic towns and villages we have jewels of homes, but between the jewels is way too much dross. Bad planning is as endemic as ever. With a 400-person strong planning department, the look of Malta is still deteriorating faster than ever. And the new buildings are uglier than ever.

The old buildings are left to rot. And towns like Sliema are being told that you cannot stop time. The whole of this town will eventually be pulled down. Sliema will become a giant Fort Cambridge, a giant Pender Place, a giant HiIton, with some apology for a tower (sorry, but that tower does not grab me).

So our planners need to think again about the destruction of Sliema. They need to rethink, and fast, their policy to continue its destruction. It is becoming unbearable in parts and needs some relief. Our planners are giving permits for a staggering four times more residences than we require. I believe in a free market, but this is not planning!

Sliema residents, as are many residents in many areas, are being killed – polluted by dust. The building waste we are creating with our garage culture is phenomenal.

Do they seriously expect us to worry about some black fumes from a car when all this dust is legitimate and killing us anyway? We need a moratorium on building in some areas. We need to reduce the number of permits. We need to allow people to keep buildings empty but ensure they maintain the façade. We don’t have enough demand to fill our empty buildings: 40,000 are empty and fewer than 4,000 want alternative accommodation, so ruses to incentivise people to rent out their properties will be ruses – that is all – with whole families spreading their ID cards everywhere.

We need fewer pompous reports. We need fewer kumitati. We need less politics. We need to grab the building bull by the horns and stop it rampaging through our lives. Sliema residents have had enough. But we should be on their side. It may not be our back yard now, but it will soon be all our back “bithas” when the cranes, the dust and the deaths move in.

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