Four towers have been approved for construction at Mriehel and one in Sliema, and all without any attempt at planning. And by planning I don’t mean only town-planning in the strictest sense of the word (and there is none of that), but also planning to ensure that these towers fit in with economic policies and demographic change.
In normal circumstances – that would be in a properly civilised country outside Italy where the Mafia has long controlled building contracts and permission – the policies on economics, social change, the labour market and demographics come first and the towers come later. But what we have here is towers plonked down after those who are rabidly keen to build them have worked out how much they can get by selling them or, in the case of the Mriehel towers, renting them out to the government as offices under yet another Taghna Lkoll cosy arrangement.
Towers don’t have an impact only on the infrastructure and the physical shape of the surrounding neighbourhood. They also bring about demographic shifts and very often, fundamental change. The flats at Fort Cambridge and Tigné Point are not as concentrated as towers – though they are getting there – but because so many of them have been bought to let rather than bought by those who want to live in them, they have permanently changed the social demographics of the area. This is immediately apparent in the fact that those who can best afford to pay the rents that are being asked there are refugees from Libya, who also like the area and atmosphere and prefer to live close together. The net result so far is that the Fort Cambridge and Tigné Point area is Little Tripoli. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that except for the fact that it happened completely without planning in the space of a couple of years.
When the new tower, approved yesterday, is built there, what will happen in terms of a demographic/social shift? Many questions have been raised about the aesthetics of the building, the drains, the traffic, parking and infrastructure, but I haven’t read anywhere that questions have been asked about to whom the flats in that tower will be sold, and who will live there. It is as though selling them is enough, and that’s the ultimate goal. It might be the ultimate goal for the developers, the very same people who are building the new power station with the Bank of Valletta’s money, who appear to be putting their money into these towers instead, but it is not the ultimate goal for whoever it is who is supposed to be taking care of town-planning but is not.
Do we still have town planners? Did we ever have them? Because I hadn’t noticed. The only Maltese people who are going to want to live in that tower are middle-aged childless couples and retired old people who cannot or will not bother any longer with the large homes they have lived in for decades, and who sell those homes – or rent them out – and buy a Sliema flat instead. In fact, this customer profile accounts for many of the flats the developers in question have sold already in their first-up TownSquare project. More will be sold to non-Maltese people in their 50 and 60s who want to be resident in Malta for tax reasons (and not because they think it’s great, because they don’t; they think it’s boring and ugly) but who will only spend the barest minimum of time actually on the island, leaving the flat empty for most of the year. And then the vast majority of them will be bought by Maltese people as ‘investments’ – capital investments which will appreciate over time and which will, in the interim, yield profits in the form of considerable rental income unless that rental income is used to pay back the loan to the bank. In the meantime, the people who rent them out will not be Maltese (Maltese people don’t pay rent unless they have to). This doesn’t matter at all – places with nobody but Maltese people are uniquely dull – but it does matter that they are a shifting flow of people who come and go, staying for just a couple of years until their work contract is up, and it also matters that are predominantly non-Maltese because what this means is that an unofficial expatriate ‘colony’ is formed, again with no planning whatsoever.
I haven’t gone into the matter of how ugly they are and what they’re going to do to the drains, the parking and the crowding, or how life is going to be rendered hellish while they’re being built. My purpose here is to get people thinking and talking about towers make for a concentrated change in a neighbourhood population, what this change means, and how it should always be planned for.
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