The exhibition of the Renzo Piano project for the renovation of City Gate, the construction of a new Parliament building and the development of the Opera House ruins into an open-air theatre is set to dominate public discussion in Malta in the weeks to come.

Just as they say that Italy has 50 million national football team coaches, Malta too has 400,000 architects and planners for City Gate, a figure that may even be augmented further by the number of people living abroad who probably have an opinion on the matter.

It would be futile or worse to kick-start the comments that will be made and to come down in favour of or against the plans at this point.

It would be even worse still to decide to do something, or anything, for the simple reason that for 60-odd years the country has been looking at the sorry sight of this ruin and has done nothing about it – but now it is about time we did something, anything.

What will be done will colour the coming years, the coming generations. Just as our forefathers, or rather the PN administration in 1967, thought it was doing the best for Malta by choosing the City Gate that it did - only for the whole country to recoil in disgust when it saw the finished product.

In the same vein, we too would be prone to make a wrong decision if we were to deliver a verdict in haste or without adequate debate. At the same time, just as the Maltese pushed the PN administration in 1988 to turn down the Piano plan after seeing a few designs on a wall, we must not be pushed and panicked into a rejection that would leave us with the Kasbah atmosphere we have at City Gate for many, many years to come.

From what has been made public about the Piano plans until now, at the time of writing, it would seem that we are to undergo a sea change in the way we view the Opera House ruins. So far we have looked upon them as ruins of a glorious Opera House, mainly the result of nostalgia expressed by so many people who relished going to the opera in the pre-war years and who yearn for the glamour and the culture that surrounded the short opera season of those years gone by.

But there may also be a different view of the ruins to be adopted.

Instead of seeing them as a national shame and an inability to agree on what needs to be done, why not look on them as a symbol of the destructiveness of war – as a symbol of how war can destroy a nation's cultural awareness, along with buildings and human beings?

After all, the Greeks did not rebuild the Acropolis, nor did the Romans reconstruct the Coliseum, although the people of Dresden did rebuild the Frauenkirche stone by stone.

It is also true that as a country Malta needs to spend far more on culture, and why not on an opera house, than it does at present.

A parallel debate will no doubt rage over the choice of Freedom Square for the new Parliament building, although the brunt of the arguments in this regard has been somewhat blunted by, sensibly, shifting Parliament's new site from the Opera House ruins to Freedom Square.

It would also seem that the proposed building will be light, not the heavy block of building one could have envisaged. And it will also be eco-friendly – creating, in other words, another symbol of our own times.

As for City Gate, it seems Mr Piano has reworked his 1980s proposal to refashion the bridge as a bridge rather than a road, to enhance the notion that people are indeed entering a walled city.

Here in particular, the temptation will be to ensure that it is not just to sweep away the present Third World atmosphere inside and outside the present City Gate but rather to ensure also that any proposal stands the test of time.

In this regard, Mr Piano's very high standing in the architectural world is of utmost importance. Even so, the proposal of a City Gate and accompanying structures for a city built by gentlemen for gentlemen (and ladies) must, at the end of the day, be approved by the gentlemen (and ladies) themselves.

Let the debate begin.