26 November 2009
Graduation Oration
Inhabiting a (small) Island-State – or Standing Room Only
Professor Alex Torpiano Dean
Faculty for the Built Environment
Amongst the fifty-odd imaginary cities described by Italo Calvino, in his book “Invisible Cities”,
there are two descriptions that must surely ring a bell in Malta. Thekla is a city that is
permanently under construction – and the reason that its inhabitants give, for the length of time
that the construction takes, is quite striking: “so that its destruction cannot begin”. Even more
interesting is the city of Leonia, which renews itself completely every day; its citizens throw out
everything that belongs to the previous day “in spotless plastic bags”, and acquire everything
anew, every day. In so doing, “fortifications of indestructible leftovers” grow in expanding rings
around the city. Calvino presents us with an image of a world whose many cities are all
surrounded by “craters of rubbish … in constant eruption”, expanding outwards until they
overlap and mingle. Surely we know what he means.
The environment within which we live is probably one of the most topical issues discussed
today, in the media and political circles. The terminology is all-pervasive: “climate change,
pollution, green development, sustainability, low carbon footprint.” Energy consumption is
becoming a more important measure of building or environmental quality than visual coherence,
or than that most immeasurable of parameters, “beauty”.
There is a popularly perceived link between good quality living “environment” and a low density
of development. Our models of planning are, more often than not, based on the situations that
exist in the larger countries in Europe. A detailed look at the statistics can help put things into
perspective. People living in the United Kingdom, or in Germany, inhabit ca. 4000 sq.m. each; in
France, but also in China, it is about double, that is 8500 sq.m. per inhabitant. The inhabitants of
Iceland have a whopping 340,000 sq.m. each, as do the inhabitants of Australia; that is nearly a
hundred times as much as the UK or Germany. In Malta, we have a completely different reality;
each of the ca. 400,000 people living here, (not including tourists), have to make do with about
790 sq.m. each – even in Gozo, which is often perceived to be much less densely inhabited, the
inhabitants have less than 2500 sq.m. each to live in!
And yet, lest we start to commiserate with ourselves about this sad state of affairs, even this is
generous when compared to, say, Singapore or Hong Kong, where each inhabitant has about
150sq.m. to live in. Average national densities, however, do not properly depict what happens at
the local scale, since people’s homes are not normally uniformly dispersed over the total land
area, but are necessarily concentrated in villages, towns and cities. At the scale of towns,
Singapore or Hong Kong is comparable to the space inhabited by the citizens of Birkirkara and
Valletta, which is about 125 sq.m. per inhabitant, and of Sliema, (just under 100sq.m. per
inhabitant). However, this is yet generous when compared to Valletta of, say, the 1900’s, when
its citizens could inhabit about 44 sq.m. each – at the same time as the population of Malta, and
therefore its density, was just under half of what it is today. It is acknowledged that, with this
level of density, 1901 Valletta did suffer from over-population. However, it must also be
acknowledged that it was this density, confined within the garland of its masonry fortifications,
which gave the city its particular vibrancy. Everything was available within the city, and
everything was within walking distance, making commuting obviously unnecessary. And there
was obviously much more pristine land, countryside, outside this compressed urban space, than
there is now. Did this high density necessarily make the environment of Valletta a poor one?
Was Valletta an ugly city? Not necessarily, although one would find, one is sure, the socioeconomic problems normally associated with this level of high density.
When the defensive constraints disappeared, and modes of personal transport flourished, the
capital city exploded. Its population deflated, also assisted by war, at the same time as the
population in the suburbs, and in the countryside around, grew – and at the same time as the
land surface occupied by buildings also grew; and, sometimes, grew very quickly indeed. It
seems indeed contradictory that as popular consensus directed that the spread into more
“virgin” countryside should be contained, the resistance to higher density residential
development also stiffened, resistance, that is, to densities higher than those resulting from the
ubiquitous two-storey terraced house or the semi-detached house.
It would be reasonable to presume that, in order to ensure that we do not occupy more of our
“virgin” land area as the population continues to grow, there would be a search for ways by
which one could achieve livable, and beautiful, urban spaces, capable of accommodating higher
residential densities than hitherto. Seen in this context, higher density should not be dirty word;
on the other hand, it should be a reality that we should address, by study and research, in order
to ensure a future balance, and a distinction, between the areas which we inhabit, and those
which we do not. In a small country such as ours, this distinction is difficult to preserve,
especially if our ideal remains the two storey-house with front and back garden.
What, therefore, is the ideal urban environment for us? What is our ideal city? The ideal city has
often, in literature, been proposed as the built expression of social reform. Filarete’s 15th
century Sforzinda is proposed as a geometrically organized city, in contrast to the organic, and
disordered, growth of the towns of the medieval period, as an image of a perfect Renaissance
society, comfortable with a strong centralized power. I find that one of the more intriguing
proposals, in this ideal city, is the House of Vice and Virtue, a ten-storey building, with a brothel
at the ground floor, and an academy of learning, (a University?) at the upper levels, and a scale
of activities, from immoral to virtuous, in between. This proposed tower represents a society,
therefore, which seeks to find a place for both the good and the less good aspects of life.
Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia, borrowing from Plato’s proposal for a perfect society, is not
so much a description of building plans and layouts, as a description of a perfect socio-politicallegal system, with a few laws and no lawyers, with no private ownership and hence no locks on
doors, with communal dining halls, amongst other surprisingly contemporary ideas.
In the 19th century, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City marks the beginning of a series of what
can be considered as ecological utopias – where bringing nature into the city, in the form of
large parks, and boulevards, and re-shaping nature outside the city, in the form of agricultural
“greenbelts”, can be made to tame the inhumanity of the industrial city and its slums. Ecotopia,
proposed by Callenback in 1975, reacts against the problems of energy consumption, pollution,
transport and waste, all topical subjects in contemporary Malta thirty five years later, and
proposes an alternative balance between the built environment and nature, free of polluted air,
“chemicalized food” and “lunatic advertising”. Ecotopia is a proposal that does not actually reject
technology, as do some other green utopias, but seeks to selectively harness technology to
provide environmentally-benign sources of energy, and transportation technologies – even
predicting, for example, the rise of video conferencing, as a way to avoid useless transport.
In the context of our finite land area, our population, and our economic resources, what,
therefore, should be our model for the built environment? What ideal society should our towns
and cities reflect? How do we continue to grow and develop, lest, as in Calvino’s Thekla,
destruction or decline commences? How do we preserve those special features that we call
“heritage”, without transforming them from a “culturalizing” influence on our daily life, into dead
museums, or without resorting to pastiche? What planning tools should we develop in order to
achieve such ideal model? And, most importantly, for a Faculty in a University, what are the
dreams that we should be encouraging in the young minds entrusted to us, and on which
depends the attainment of these future ideal states? What issues should we be exploring with
them? Should we be discussing the elevations of houses, and whether one should have round
arches or flat ones, or whether one style is better than another? I think not. As British architect
Rod Hackney famously puts it, architecture is not about Post-Modernism, Conservatism or
Eclecticism; but it is about solving people’s problems in the environment.
Planning should be about making a proposal on an ideal environment, and about finding ways
how to achieve such ideal. We could therefore argue that the Structure Plan, therefore, is
Malta’s equivalent of the blueprint for the ideal city, or, in our case, the ideal city-state. But, if the
Structure Plan is limited to a set of rules, and the planning approval process to the evaluation
against a check-list of regulations, and their enforcement, where is the vision? Where is the
vision of what our city-state, or our environment, should be, in the near future, and beyond? And
this vision cannot be a merely an aesthetic one – even though this aspect will be remain an
important component - but necessarily extends to socio-economic and, yes, political issues.
Arthur Drexler, a prominent Director of Architecture and Design in the New York Museum of
Modern Art, has pointed out that an alternative to political romance is to be an architect. To
presume that planning the environment should not be a political concern, with the widest
meaning of the word, is therefore clearly wrong.
This year, the name of our Faculty was changed from the Faculty of Architecture and Civil
Engineering to the Faculty for the Built Environment. The objective of this change was not to
devalue, in any way, the importance of “architecture” or of the “architect”, but rather to widen our
understanding of what holistically constitutes the built environment; and to highlight many links,
and dependencies, that exist between various aspects of the built environment - which links we
ignore at our peril. The term “built” does not seek to limit our area of study to urban groups, and
to ignore the rest. On the contrary, it acknowledges that most of our “natural” or “green”
environment, from the terraced fields to the rubble walls, is “built”, or “manufactured”, or “manmade”. The concept is, therefore, that the Faculty should widen its perspective to all of that
which concerns man’s deliberate interventions in the environment, so as to ensure that all such
interventions conform to the agreed image of the ideal city-state, assuming, that is, that we
manage to agree on the appropriate vision for such a utopia.
The environment is an important part of our life, and not only in terms of air quality, or water
quality, or climate change. Practically all the National Strategic Documents that have been
approved over the last few years make reference to the link between environmental
“attractiveness” and economic progress. Out of ten topics reviewed in the chapter in the
Operational Programme for the ERDF Cohesion Fund, analysing Malta’s Socio-Economy, at
least eight are directly or indirectly related to the Built Environment, including tourism, and
hence the built heritage and the environment, including transport, urban development, housing,
health and educational infrastructure, including energy consumption of buildings and energy
efficiency, including infrastructures, such as sewage and water supply, and including natural
resources such as water, minerals, and waste. At the same time, in the same document, a
SWOT analysis shows that out of 26 topics identified as weaknesses, 11 are related to the built
environment; one of the more important threats is environmental degradation.
Rather than merely teaching our students how to design houses and apartments, it is therefore
important that the Faculty for the Built Environment addresses these wider issues, in
technological terms but also in a socio-political context, without ignoring, however, the overriding requirement for all that we do - with the Greatest Beauty as Alberti puts it.
Jesuits’ Church, Valletta
26th November 2009