The Corinthia and ‘sophistication’

This week the Planning Authority gave the go ahead for 400 luxury apartments to be built at SmartCity.

Mr Alden is the Deputy Leader of Partit Demokratiku

The Corinthia project has also been sold to us as a way to make Malta more “sophisticated”. The way the project is being sold makes our developers look even more like moustache twirling comic villains and clichés from the box cover of Monopoly.

It would be difficult to find a worse way of insulting Malta’s entire culture, history and identity than the Corinthia telling us we need to sacrifice St George’s Bay and build a 6-star hotel that we will never enjoy, just to be more “sophisticated”. The sophistication of our outof-touch elite is not dignified, cultured or respectable at all. It is shameful, perfidious, dishonest and corrupt. It is the betrayal of the social pact.

Furthermore, as our ODZ and historic buildings are bulldozed in the name of progress, that “progress” is betraying itself to be regress as Malta’s quality of life is vanishing fast. No politician or developer can ever justify the further rape of our country by saying we are running out of space, when the developments being built are luxurious and will never be within reach of the average man and woman. Why are we using our space to build luxury apartments instead of social housing, if we are using the excuse of space?

The spectre of incompetence often looms over our government when it comes to planning. Our solutions are short-sighted because they wreak collateral havoc and make no sense. When I got into activism, I overestimated the influence of greed and underestimated the many decisions that were taken in ignorance of the facts. It is quite possible the bigger picture is being bypassed entirely when this contradiction arises between soaring rent and luxury apartments being rubberstamped on public land.

These contradictions must be pointed out over and over again, keeping in mind the lack of vision of past administrations that got us where we are today. It is ultimately up to us to stop this madness. Too many of us have our fingers in the pie, perhaps, to effect a change. Yet if we do nothing, it is not sophistication we will get, but an ever declining quality of life and all the misery that modernity has so creatively invented in the face of luxury.