Paceville Master Plan: greed or need?

Land use planning is essentially public control over the use and development of land, so it necessarily follows that it should not be a speculators’ shopping list, implemented by the state.

An architect and civil engineer, the author is deputy chairman of Alternattiva Demokratika – The Green Party in Malta. cacopardocarm@gmail.com, www.carmelcacopardo.wordpress.com

Unfortunately, the Paceville Master Plan is just such a shopping list, as it collates the requirements of nine mega projects and presents them as a ‘master plan’. In fact Sandro Chetcuti, on behalf of the Malta Developers’ Association, reacted to the Master Plan by stating that it “fails to address the possibility of new projects that could involve existing buildings and concentrated too much on nine particular sites.” Mr Chetcuti’s Association is also feeling excluded.

And the residents have the same feeling; they have been excluded by a master plan that focuses on the interests of business – in particular the interests of mega-speculators.

Not so long ago, in May 2012, The Social Affairs Committee of Malta’s Parliament published a 63-page report on Paceville in which it emphasised the fact that right there, in the midst of this entertainment Mecca, there was also a residential community. The conflicts between these two interests can at times be substantial and yet the Master Plan ignores these conflicts completely. The only residents in which the Master Plan is interested are those who will purchase apartments in the new developments.

The five over-arching objectives of the Master Plan emphasise the creation of a development vision that can be described in one word: ‘Dubaiification’. Painted in glossy words as ‘Clear Brand and Identity’, ‘Access and Connectivity’, ‘Planned and Managed Change’, ‘Quality Place-Making’ and ‘Private-Public Partnerships’, at the end of the day ‘Dubai-ification’ is what the Paceville Master Plan is all about.

The problems currently faced by Paceville are basically no different from those faced by other parts of Malta. Yet the Master Plan document wastes a substantial number of its 234 pages in order to emphasise the obvious. For example, it emphasises that Paceville is dominated by traffic and onstreet parking. However, the consultants drawing up the plan then stopped short of proposing – as a preferred option – measures that would radically address the area’s dependence on cars. They did not choose the option to create an environment that is not dominated by the car, thus missing an opportunity to eliminate traffic congestion in Paceville that would have had the additional benefit of improving local air quality.

While the Master Plan consultants went into great detail about issues that are covered in various national environmental policy documents, they did not consider it necessary to examine in any detail the area’s tourism-carrying capacity. The Master Plan does not examine whether it makes sense to keep on encouraging hotel construction in an area that is already saturated with such development. It takes the issue for granted and opts to propose reserving the Paceville coastline for future hotel redevelopment and expansion. This matter calls for some serious consideration, as tourism cannot continue on a never-ending expanding trajectory due to the substantial environmental constraints that we face on a daily basis.

The cherry on the cake is the reference to “potential land reclamation” on the Portomaso site. The Master Plan warns that, though relatively shallow, the site lies very close to a Marine Special Conservation Area, a fact which necessitates a very sensitive approach.

The manner in which the Master Plan is presented tries to camouflage its obvious speculator “shopping-list” features. Most of the projects indicated have been in the pipeline for years, and for each and every one of them there is a growing list of concerned residents from the whole of Paceville and neighbouring localities. By trying to present the mega-speculators’ greed as a national need, the proposed Master Plan is doing a disservice to the neverending debate on land use planning in Malta.