Personhood in protest

Just over a month ago, the Mosta’s mayor announced a reversal of plans to uproot twelve Ficus trees from the town’s main square. Their survival was secured by a group of a protestors who physically and digitally arrested the nation’s attention through their express refusal to surrender the trees. Viewers watched while demonstrators were carried away, pried from their seated obstinance as they guarded the venerable trunks, defending them as though apostles of the nation’s diminishing public realm.

There was more before this.

In September 2019, a protest was organised by Moviment Graffitti with 60 non-political activist groups fighting the onslaught of hyper-construction. Earlier that year, activists gathered to oppose the Central Link project and potential uprooting of up to 550 protected trees from the Mrieħel bypass to Saqqajja Hill.

In December 2020, residents of St Julian’s, Sliema and Gżira protested the towns’ rapid development and forsaken built heritage, whilst in March 2021, activists, farmers, and residents of Dingli stood for days in objection to the construction of a road cutting through agricultural land, endangering a group of 300-year-old Carob trees. One month later, people gathered in Victoria, Gozo to rally against over-development on the island.

In January 2023, a ‘Justice Protest’ for JeanPaul Sofia – a 20-year-old man who was killed by building collapse during construction works ­– was called, galvanising activism against an industry deemed to have graduated from excessively harmful to repetitively fatal. Five months later, eight organisations announced a national protest titled, ‘Xebbajtuna! Bidla fl-Ambjent u l-Ippjanar ISSA!’, congregating the mounting contempt against the scale of development on the islands.

Mosta’s fight for trees, therefore, links to an ancestry of organised agitation (the local concern for trees stretches back to 2012, when objections to uprooting of trees as part of the City Gate Valletta project was made following similar exercises in Marsa, Cospicua, Luqa and Mellieha). A civilian battle against the besieging of Malta’s urban fabric is resolutely ongoing. To this point, someone recently asked me if I thought protests worked, or if they were actually counterproductive to securing real change.

They don’t always. In London in 2023, built environment professionals took to the streets as part of the Extinction Rebellion’s four-day climate action demonstration known as ‘The Big One’. Architects demanded urgent government action on carbon emissions. According to post-protest reports, were “met with near-silence”. But even if demonstration doesn’t always result in direct resolution, it does hold power to catalyse individualistically.

When I watched the Mosta demonstration footage on Instagram, I spotted a familiar face amongst the vigilantes. Sumaya Ben Saad, a soon-to-be architecture graduate who I’d worked closely with in the past, was present that day – becoming part of the reason this famed file of Ficuses had been rescued. I wrote to her to ask if she’d be willing to talk about her decision to join the demonstration. We met online a few days later.

I felt protective of Sumaya, not wanting to invite reputational risk to her name at such an early stage in her career. I acknowledged, however, that she had already taken that leap, in showing up that day. My questions were around that decision.

“Even though I think my contributions were minimal, I believed in the power of the collective. The way I reasoned with the risk of going is that I think the architecture profession is quite versatile. So, in the worst case, were I to be blacklisted, I could try and find something new to do. So I tried not to be fearful.”

“Before this, I wasn't someone who would go to protests, even if they were totally aligned to how I viewed things. I think I played a big part in what I'd call our ‘scaredy-cat-syndrome’. The reality is that people feel that if you speak out, there's a big chance you’ll fall into trouble and damage your livelihood. And this damage is always attached to finance – you won't get your warrant, or you won’t have a lucrative career path. It's never just about how you feel about the situation. It’s never about if you morally feel right about what’s going on.”

“In the end, I figured that what I needed to be fearful of was doing nothing. Because if you just don't show up, then no message is sent. In our society, the messages we receive are overwhelmingly from politicians. But from our side, the people’s side, our only platform is online commenting. That's how we communicate. So the other powerful thing I realised was that, protesting – or at least showing that you are not satisfied with what’s happening around you – is our message”.

“In the past, say three to two decades ago, protests were being held about what I consider to be small issues compared to what we are seeing now, with bigger crowds. Back then, people were sensitive to what was happening. Whereas now, we’ve been made malleable, becoming a generation of compliance, of being okay with anything. But protests like this can help enlighten people around what is actually a big problem. And it's made me hopeful. Because I genuinely believe that, ultimately, everyone cares about their environment”.

In Sumaya’s case, protest did lead to direct action – Mosta’s Ficus trees will be spared from Malta’s pervasive ‘embellishment’ offensive. But beyond that, her participation proves how protest can act as a personal audit on civic responsibility.

The role of protest has never felt more charged than it does today. In the past month, protests around the world have taken on the dual function of activating resistance and providing sanctuary for grief where nothing else really can. And while demonstration is often conflated with virtue signalling, the latter only happens when activism fails to infiltrate or bend everyday ritual. Protest ‘works’, if nothing else, because it sends a message – if only to oneself.

Our future is already built

A couple of months ago, I attended the Architects’ Journal Retrofit Conference – a daylong event focused on re-use practices in architecture, specifically geared towards their role in decarbonising UK construction. From my pages of otherwise esoteric notes, one line reverberates: “Net zero is a societal issue, not a tech issue”.

This is not an article about Malta’s conversion to net zero construction. I cannot see that this exists – if anyone knows different, please write in. This is about the connectedness of building methods with wider belief systems. It’s about how difficult it will be for local development to ever become less environmentally and spatially offensive unless fabric or performance-led efforts are matched with awareness and will. To echo: Malta’s construction grievances are a societal issue, not just a technical one. 

Right now, the two things exist separately – what we believe in, and what we build. But one methodological candidate has the potential to act as bridge: our steady allegiance to conservation.

I next spoke to Nicholas Bewick, an architect and art director for Milan-based studio, AMDL Circle – a practice that describes its work as “humanistic architecture and design”. We virtually meet fresh off his trip to Malta as one of the judges for the Din L-Art Ħelwa Prize for Architectural Heritage, where he visited some of its contenders. The award focuses on restoration projects, rehabilitation, and reuse of old buildings.

Of his visit, Bewick describes the presence of “a real sense of wanting to explore the whole history of everything that has happened over the years, centuries, in these spaces and buildings. There was also this ambition or clarity of vision [from the entrants] to say – okay, we need this, this is important. And they found the tech, the builders, and the people to do it”.

His description aligns with Malta’s deep-seated preoccupation with conservation. Indeed, heritage forms one half of every postcard and personal elevator pitch that has classically defined what Malta offers. The other half being heat.  

My questions to Bewick fixate less on rigour – which he readily affirmed – and more on innovation. In a context where development is so rapid and new-build focused, and where we desperately need an emphasis on re-use, how can heritage practices become more about novelty and less about rigid preservation?

“I think you have to be sensitive and respectful. But you also have to not be afraid of trying to do something that is bold and imaginative. Our role as architects and designers is to help people understand where we're heading. In the past, people made bold statements – to impress, but also to demonstrate the potential of innovation, the ingenuity of people, the understanding of climate or history, or the understanding of people's nature. It’s not just thinking about one single idea of building construction, but also bringing together all the arts to contribute to something”.

“It’s also about the communication of projects as not just a heritage or museum piece, but what the potential is of these regeneration projects to bring something to the community and society around them”.

Incidentally, Bewick’s practice recently completed the conversion of the former Banco di Napoli into the Gallerie D’Italia in Naples, designed originally in 1940 by Marcello Piacentini. The adaptation is pitch perfect – the original Rationalist architecture made canvas to resplendent new materiality of brass-coated metal and walnut wood, graciously refusing to bow in aesthetic servitude to the austerity of its host. The project exhibits the very sentiment of the technical meeting the aspirational in heritage – showcasing how commerce can become a site of culture; announcing architecture’s role as a beacon of shifting interests.

Back in Malta, it will take three things for heritage architecture to overtake the veneration of the new. First, become more desirable than whatever can be virgin-built. Second, be less expensive. And third, become as usable as possible.

Together with the aptitude we already have around preserving buildings we choose to, we must now become more inventive with their future functions. Aside from the visual scourge of new-build intensity, we are also facing a crisis of affordability. If we are numb to our responsibility to the natural world, at minimum we must counter the collateral damage of building at such speed and scale. We should care about both.

The need for flexibility should originate in education. To piggy-back onto Bewick’s thoughts around combining architecture with all arts, let’s add economics, demography, and overall social science into how the discipline is taught and eventually practiced.

Architects and urbanists should be trained to understand land use demand, coached to insist on programmatic need ahead of delivery. This should be enshrined into planning law, preventing permanent infrastructure where industries are only temporarily dominant (see: Smart City).

Bewick led our conversation describing the devotion, passion, and meticulousness of the heritage awards entrants – which, I’d agree, exists abundantly. But for re-use to take hold of mainstream development locally, there must be willingness for heritage practices to go off-script.

It’s time to accelerate both a societal and technical effort around the resurrection of spaces, reimagining their functions more wildly, and ensuring their convertibility for yet another life. Our future is waiting to come alive in what already exists. We have the practical know-how to make it happen, we now just need to want to.

Green space – Malta’s growing urban quagmire

Three weeks ago, a story appeared on our feeds without ordeal but with roguish potential for repping Malta’s newest viral urban sin. It shed light on an expansion proposal for a site adjacent to the PAMA supermarket in Mosta – arguably the most super of supermarkets across the archipelago – where a mature public garden, it said, would be introduced on brownfield land with three storeys of retail and parking space below.

This is not the first announcement to this sprawling retail effect. The story reaches back to 2019, when a planning application was first submitted for the project. News then emerged that its extension would live below what is currently a 13,700sqm-agricultural field (approximately the size of two football pitches), on land outside our much-beleaguered development zone. This original scheme has changed somewhat, but not majorly.

Essentially, it is not the merits of the proposal itself that need calling into question here (although actual questions have been sent through to the project applicants, with no reply received at time of publication). What is of more acute concern is how proposals like this increasingly present themselves in our urban conversation, and connectedly, the misdirected critique they often carry.

The comments section beneath the PAMA expansion stories hold a familiar assortment of complaints – several are legitimate, most address its siting on ODZ land. But this story is not scary because of its chosen plot. It’s scary because of the swelling trend it mascots – a trend of park-washing, vertical-green-wall-washing, public-space-washing, public-art-washing, street-planters-washing, water-fountain-feature-washing; and in this case, the proliferation of underground development toupéed with green space, advertised as endeavours that will improve public realm.

Here’s what’s scarier than the fact it’s being proposed on ODZ land.

Firstly, underground development has high potential for detrimental environmental impact. Its carbon footprint stands to be far greater than anything built aboveground. To that tune, these are some of the danger signs we should look for with large swathes of subterranean development.

Waste. Clarification on re-distribution plans for excavation excess is needed, and there do exist genuine opportunities for excavation waste to be managed properly. For example, if it’s used to level out land that joins the site with its wider urban context, ensuring the development creates an integrated urban experience beyond its red line. If there is no sign of this, we should worry.  

The composition of subterranean structural materials must also be expressly named. Underground development typically requires significant structural reinforcement, which often means steel and concrete – materials that carry high embodied carbon (i.e. carbon emitted during the construction of a building). We need to be dogged about demanding measures are taken to avoid this carbon impact, whether it’s through concrete aggregates, cement substitutes, or otherwise. If not, we must seriously challenge development policies for accepting any justification around such huge environmental impact.

The kind of vegetation proposed to sit on top of any development is also consequential. How much water will it take to sustain that greenery? (Same question applies to invariable roadside green-wall proposals). Lawns specifically, known to require substantial watering, should be considered red flags if recommended without clear maintenance strategies. And if a park, mature garden, meadow, would-be forest, etc. is proposed as having a relatively shallow roof system, how will it handle rain accumulation and avoid run-off mismanagement and flood proclivity?

It all goes far beyond ODZ, and accordingly our provocations must extend past that particular crime. The acronymised language of ODZ, UCA and so on is what we wield as automatic weapons of criticism, because these are terms universally understood within this fight. I empathise. But resorting to the ODZ card amounts to using one square of kitchen roll to absorb an island-size milk spill. It’s too far gone.

Sad as it may seem, we must be on guard for anything presented as ‘green space’ today. That’s not to say we should discard singular proposals out of hand, but our scrutiny must intensify. Green schemes hold a surface appeal convincing enough to ingratiate themselves with a public that is sick to death (and by respiratory problems) of a shortage of fresh air, greenery, and open space. Without igniting island-wide paranoia – they are a weapon for concealing urban vice.

Beyond the material questions imperative to these proposals, we most crucially should be questioning large-scale development on an ideological level. Should we really be siloing land uses in this way – building another shopping temple in an area where retail needs appear to be more than amply met? Are we at peace with allowing shopping ghettoes to atrophy urban ligaments like the PAMA site into oversized motorway service strips?

But there’s a park on top! Sure. But imagine we moved away from sweeping unsavoury environmental practices under the park, and instead marshalled focus towards deriving value out of existing built matter? Perhaps we could install the grocery Mecca we apparently want inside a building that is not being used for anything else.

And if our standing buildings are not good enough to be retrofitted as such, then we could try reusing their materials to rebuild (without excessive subterranean structures) a place for stacking the miles of consumer goods we think we need. Then maybe, after that, we could build a park somewhere – with nothing underneath.