Quarter of accommodation vacant

The number of residents in Valletta has been declining regularly since it peaked at about 25,000 in 1881. The population now stands close to 7,000 with about one third over 60 years of age.

The steep decline has resulted in 833 vacant dwellings representing 23 per cent of accommodation. Of these, 76 per cent are in a dilapidated state.

This is the indictment on Valletta delivered in a report called Regenerating Neighbourhoods In Partnership - Learning From Emergent Practices, prepared as part of the EU programme Entrust.

The report includes details of deprived zones in Glasgow, Dublin, Vilnius, Hamburg, Lisbon, Berlin and Copenhagen.

The main thrust of the report is how such areas can be upgraded through public-private partnerships.

In the case of Valletta, which is a World Heritage City, the report focuses on the neighbourhood called Il-Biccerija (The Abattoir) consisting of Bull, St Charles and Eagle streets and the lower ends of St Dominic and Old Bakery streets.

Apart from the stop notice by Unesco on the demolition of such buildings in Valletta, the government does not have the funds to revamp this zone. So what are the options to stop the rot?

This was the Lm64,000 question up for discussion during a seminar on the urban regeneration of Valletta yesterday. Held at the Mediterranean Conference Centre, the seminar was organised by the Valletta Rehabilitation Project within the Ministry for Resources and Infrastructure.

When the discussion was open to the floor, there was quite a heated exchange between those afraid that the "hidden heritage of Valletta" would be lost through internal alterations done to old buildings and those who would prefer the government to sell its property to third parties so that it would be put on the market. Profit was of the essence if the private sector was to be enticed, a member of the audience argued.

Another question was whether one should first have a master plan and a list of priorities before starting to talk about public-private partnerships.

Paulius Kulikauskas, from Entrust, noted that the fact that there was as yet no master plan should be seen as an opportunity.

Conrad Thake argued that Valletta had to re-invent itself in consonance with its rich past, with any development having to respect the collective memory of the city.

Malcolm Borg felt such ventures ought not to consider development as clearance and building but as investment in conservation.

One of the problems with the city was that one could not drive through it. The British government had attempted to eliminate this problem by adding more gates and breaching the fortifications but the transport flow did not improve much in spite of these interventions, Dr Borg said.

One of the private investors in the Environment Landscape Consortium, Adrian Zammit, pointed out the hazards the consortium had to face when it became responsible for 326 government employees. The biggest problem was to put faces to the names because a number of these workers were employed in Libya with private firms while on the government's payroll.

The productivity rate of these workers, which initially stood at between 10 and 20 per cent, had been increased to between 60 and 70 per cent.

"These workers on a daily basis abuse the fact that they are ultimately government employees and so cannot be hired and fired," Dr Zammit said.

Ray Bondin, the Valletta Rehabilitation Project's executive coordinator, asked what the situation in zones under study would be in 10 - 15 years' time when most of the elderly citizens would have passed away.

Apart from the possibility of the government putting properties it owns on the market, there were private owners who lacked the means to conserve their buildings.

Valletta mayor Paul Borg Olivier picked on the irony that there was a property at Il-Biccerija with a price tag of Lm500,000 while apartments were being leased at the peppercorn annual rent of Lm12.