“Public spaces – our streets and squares, parks and pavements – are the stages for public life; the public realm is at the heart of our life as social animals”. Richard Rogers wrote this in 2017 in an article titled When public space is eroded, our democracy suffers. That was one year before Valletta took its fated name as Capital of Culture. The title held a premise and promise for urban uplift. Instead, it became a watercourse to hyper-gloss and ugly trade.
Street adverts, decking, homogenous plant pots, obelisk-esque heaters, flapping tents, signposts, delivery bikes and other consumer trappings now obscure what used to be pavements and pedestrianised streets. There is no looking down or forward, no possibility of walking in a straight line, much less at ease. In under six years, Valletta has sowed an invigorated culture of capitalism, with public space as its sacrifice.
It’s not a unique problem. The lament over public realm given to private hands in Europe stretches back to late-1960s France, where uprisings condemned the growing social condition of capitalism and consumerism. The protests’ specific cry: ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’ (beneath the pavement, the beach!) – serving a belief that the city should belong to the people and not the establishment. Le Droit à la Ville (The Right to the City) was written in 1968 by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, opining the role of urban space as a citizen domain, not as a canvas for market forces.
The years around Valletta’s ascension to Capital of Culture similarly characterised an escalatory moment in the encroachment of public space. In Belgrade in 2015, protestors decried the €3.5bn redevelopment of the Sava River waterfront. In Beirut in 2018, residents vocalised fears over the city’s last public beach, Ramlet al-Baida, being swallowed by commercial endeavour. Both examples of swapping citizen wellbeing for billable leisure.
Back in Valletta, in the new year of 2024, streets are lined with accessories for consumption. They welcome visitors who will come, go, and leave cash as they do. The city increasingly defies that initial definition around the staging of a public life. It has, for some years now, been systematically erasing the power of that ‘stage’ to comfort and give balance to the lone citizen.
By nature, a public square – with its symmetry and commitment to space and light – can bring a person in tune with their senses, along with their haptic prerogative to experience joy within a human-made built environment. The way a crowd disperses within a well-planned piazza – tempered and balanced, leaving neither too much distance nor proximity between its users – reminds one of their participatory vocation, of being part of something bigger than individuality.
But space can also have the opposite effect. If serving priorities of fashion or outright profit, space becomes neglectful in nurturing public life. It transforms into a site of anxiety, cultivating spatial alienation incrementally – corroding the city’s duty to uphold, and nurse, public life.
By this definition, Valletta’s public spaces are disappearing. An aerial survey (architect Chris Briffa’s idea and contribution) of major public zones within the city demonstrates the degree to which the city’s commercial footprint has interrupted public space.
Merchant Street is unwalkable. St John’s Square is not a square. The ratio of habitable, open, occupiable space to tented, barriered, signposted swathes of hospitality is [insert ratio]. This is not an estimation. This is what public space amounts to in our capital.
There is another side to this argument – that people are in favour of Valletta’s current condition.
Ten years ago, the city was a fallow land, its revival desired and warranted. Maybe this is the course it had to take to achieve that revival – maybe this is what progress looks like and what everyone wants. If we were to survey the health of our capital’s public life by its consumption, taking the view that people are “voting with their feet”, then the results of what we define as ‘public’ might look different.
This Christmas in Valletta, however, streets looked palpably limp. Earlier in December, I had vowed to friends that I would be boycotting the capital during the holiday season, scarred by the audio-visual excess of the city’s recent festive years. But Valletta is inevitable. And so it should be.
Walking through what felt like a skinnier crowd than ever on Republic Street days before Christmas, I imagined a hybrid Valletta of sleepy past and gluttonous present. I remember living in the city briefly in 2010, waking up to blended sights of domesticity and civic grandeur. Back then, a sprinkling of polish held the potential for elegance, for becoming a modern-day totem of Valletta’s rightful splendour – a reminder of its role as a virtuous mercantile hub and a haven for the peripatetic.
That potential has succumbed to something else – a place where everything you see and touch asks for money. There is a dissonance now between the stage of public life and its actors. But now it’s a new year; a time to call in new direction, to realign the squares and streets with the people that seek to roam them. So give us back space – give us back the city.
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