Prime Minister Robert Abela has selected a cabinet which is both talented and organisationally well balanced. Bringing together environment and planning under Minister Aaron Farrugia, whose record overseeing Malta’s EU funding was outstanding, is a clear statement of intent that the new administration intends to tackle the vexed issue of the Planning Authority’s rural policy guidance and Outside Development Zone (ODZ) seriously and with alacrity.
In an editorial in the Times of Malta last November, it was rightly emphasised that: “The issue of ODZ has been probably the most sensitive and most mishandled issue in Malta’s planning and land-use development since the inception of the Planning Authority almost 30 years ago”.
Despite successive unsuccessful attempts to improve the system, we are still saddled with a policy which is ineffective and open to gross abuse by both planners and government ministers. Architects who know their way through the arcane and permissive rules governing rural policy and ODZ have invariably found a way to breach them and turn the rules to their client’s advantage. Opinion polls regularly place the abuse of ODZ as one of the issues which is of most concern to citizens – as the Enough is Enough protest march last September graphically showed.
With a new administration in place determined to make genuine improvements to the environment, it is timely to return to this issue. It will be recalled that in the wake of the Enough is Enough protest march, Simone Vella Lenicker, the president of the Chamber of Architects made an impassioned apology for the part her profession has played in the uglification and ramshackle overdevelopment which has gripped Malta.
Her statement was brave and refreshing in its candour. She declared: “Enough to planning policies that do not respect citizens. Enough to authorities that do not plan properly and do not respect the environment. Enough to large-scale construction projects and lack of transportation planning... Enough to a construction industry which is allowed to operate in an unregulated manner.”
This is why the proposals submitted by the Kamra tal Periti (Chamber of Architects) last month calling for greater protection of rural areas in response to the government’s call for stakeholders to give their views on future rural policy design are such a shot in the arm.
Rural areas have an intrinsic value beyond their monetary value
Vella Lenicker, is clearly determined that under her leadership the Chamber will make amends by using its vast experience of this area of planning to propose constructive, practical and workable solutions to probably the most glaring blot on our land-use planning systems. The Chamber has called for a radical change in the way land in Malta is classified since existing categories are misleading and poorly defined.
The current policy divides our territory into four parts: development zones; ODZ; rural settlements; and urban areas. The Chamber contends – rightly – that these territorial divisions are misleading and poorly defined, as a result of which they give rise to unrealistic and unclear planning goals and confusing and contradictory policy objectives. They lead to lack of confidence and trust in the system.
The Chamber points out that for decades villages and hamlets have been incorrectly designated as “urban areas”. As a result, “reckless planning policy decisions, driven by short-sighted speculative greed” have led to a loss of local village identity, completely disregarding the rural nature of the villages and leading to an extension of the urban sprawl and “defacement” caused by ill-thought out urbanisation of rural settlements.
The Chamber has therefore submitted proposals that deal imaginatively and pragmatically with a problem of great complexity and importance. It proposes that Malta’s land territory is classified into two broad categories: urban and rural. These two broad areas should then be sub-divided into specific, clearly defined urban or rural “typologies,” each of which would be subject to their own laid down planning rules.
It takes as an example perhaps the most vexed area of contention: ODZ. It points out that one of the main deficiencies of the current ODZ designation policy is that it makes no distinction between “natural pristine areas” and “land taken up by agriculture”. But they are clearly different.
The Chamber contends that if the separation between the two were distinctly defined, both in terms of classification and policy, the current scandalous abuse of the natural environment – which should be a no-go area for any development – would be better protected.
It also highlights that while the positive effects of the natural environment on addressing climate change, air and water quality and Malta’s dwindling biodiversity are set out in various policy documents, they are not currently incorporated into effective planning policy regulations, and they should be.
The Chamber argues that rural areas have an intrinsic value beyond their monetary value. The unique, traditional old structures that lend our countryside its rugged beauty are being lost.
Malta’s Rural Policy and Design Guidance, which was published in 2014 – ostensibly as a stimulus for the regeneration of the Maltese countryside – can now be seen to have been merely a pretext for promoting new construction development in the countryside by replacing current buildings, increasing existing “footprints” and “sanctioning” past illegalities.
Moreover, in its submission the Chamber damned the Planning Authority’s Strategic Policy for the Environment and Development (SPED) for being “merely a set of objectives with little to no tangible results,” instead of providing the basis for action-oriented urban and rural governance. There is an urgent need to review SPED in close conjunction with the review of the rural policy.
The Chamber of Architects’ radical and constructive proposals for a change of approach to Malta’s land use should form the crux of further policy development. Their thrust, which depends on clearly designated and legally binding definitions of what, if any, development may be permitted in each category of urban and rural area is the right approach. Their proposals should comprise the basic policy building blocks for turning back the current threat to the rural areas and villages and hamlets.
A government which cares about the environment must press for their urgent adoption. The defects, deficiencies and downright destruction perpetrated on Malta’s environment by successive unthinking administrations and weak regulators should be brought to heel through better control and tighter regulation as proposed by the Chamber of Architects.