The Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Planning, Aaron Farrugia, last week announced a positive initiative that will see Ħamrun, Sliema, Żebbuġ, Gudja and Qala benefitting from funds to embellish their urban areas.
The initiative is indeed much needed. Over the past decades, Malta has lost a lot of its greenery and experienced a great degradation in the quality of what remains of its open space. There are many factors that contributed to this, the most obvious being the rapid increase in development over these past five years. Irrespective of what the Planning Authority may claim, this ‘development’ was carried out with little regard for the impact it would have on the state of our built environment.
As two-storey houses were replaced with five to six storey apartment blocks (in the case of Sliema, even eight to ten storeys), the number of residents in all these localities increased exponentially. Since our transport system is completely dependent on private car-use, of course these residents brought with them more cars. Permits for apartment blocks (or any form of development) are often issued without the required minimum number of parking spaces being provided. All this led to the existing limited open spaces becoming overrun with parked vehicles, and evidently becoming grossly insufficient to serve the needs of the growing community. This alone is a major contributor to the degraded state of our surroundings.
Embellishing streets in Ħamrun, Sliema, Żebbuġ, Gudja and Qala is a good initiative that may help curb some of the negative impacts created by the Planning Authority’s inability and unwillingness to provide us with real urban planning that goes beyond the issuing of development permits. Of course, much more than embellishment will be needed to truly resolve the many issues we face today.
Through its highly elastic approach to regulations, the Health and Sanitary Legislation of 2016 led to a degradation of both our public shared spaces as well as our living conditions. This single document has paved the way for the construction of disproportionately tall buildings on narrow streets with no consideration given to the impact of overshadowing on surrounding properties. It has allowed for the reduction in the size of backyards, and in cases where the plot depth is below 15m, even allows for the development of residential units without a backyard at all. The concept of benefitting from more open shared spaces, gained from having back-to-back external yards, was dissolved. This legislation also enabled the approval of subterranean residential spaces with inadequate access to natural light.
The legislation’s weak unbinding approach to planning has facilitated the construction of inferior developments that are a far cry from the sustainable form of development we should be striving towards. It has lowered our standards of living and led to a clear degradation in the state of our shared urban environment.
Revising this policy to align its provisions with sustainable design that safeguards the individual’s right to decent living standards would truly help one attain a better built environment for both private and public spaces.
Another threat to the state of our built environment is the Hotels Height Adjustment Policy of 2014. Through this policy, hoteliers can apply for an additional 10, 20 or even 40 stories, over and above the official building height limitation of the site. Such uncontrolled growth in built development, often proposed in the heart of already heavily built-up localities such as Sliema, can have a devastating impact on the state of our surroundings. It is a policy that creates a phenomenal increase on infrastructural demand, which burden is unjustly carried by the existing residents. Private developers are being given the right to profit off dwarfing and suffocating these communities. Repealing this heinous policy would be a sure way of taking decisive action to safeguard, and allow for the eventual improvement, of our built urban areas.
Another critical measure that would enhance the state of our built environment would be to increase prioritization of pedestrians on streets, especially in the town centres. This will go a long way in converting our existing urban areas into liveable spaces that can truly be enjoyed by the public and ultimately benefit these communities. So long as we keep prioritizing cars, it will be impossible for our urban spaces to serve the community in the way that we need them to.
There is so much more that can and needs to be done to address the major deficiencies in the state of our built environment that years of neglect, on the Planning Authority’s part, has created. But we can start, and things can be a lot better. The state of our built and natural environment need not deteriorate further.
Tara Cassar is an architect focusing on planning policies and environmental issues related to land-use, active with a number of local eNGOs.
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