“Public spaces – our streets and squares, parks and pavements – are the stages for public life; the public realm is at the heart of our life as social animals.”

Richard Rogers wrote this in 2017 in an article entitled ‘When public space is eroded, our democracy suffers’. That was one year before Valletta took its fated name as European Capital of Culture. The title held a premise and promise for urban uplift. Instead, it became a watercourse to hyper-gloss and ugly trade.

Street adverts, decking, shiny plant pots, spindly heaters, flapping tents, signposts, delivery bikes and other consumer trappings now obscure what used to be pavements and pedestrianised streets. There is no looking down or forward, no possibility of walking in a straight line, much less at ease. In under six years, Valletta has fully sowed a culture of capitalism, with public space as its sacrifice.

It’s not a unique problem. The lament over public realm given to private hands in Europe stretches back to late-1960s France, where uprisings condemned the growing social condition of capitalism and consumerism.

The protests’ specific cry, “sous les pavés, la plage!” (beneath the pavement, the beach), served a belief that the city should belong to the people and not the establishment. Le Droit à la Ville (The Right to the City) was written in 1968 by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, opining the role of urban space as a citizen domain, not as a canvas for market forces.

The years around Valletta’s ascension to Capital of Culture were similarly characterised by a wider escalatory moment in private encroachment of public space. In Belgrade, in 2015, protestors decried the €3.5bn redevelopment of the Sava River waterfront. In Beirut, in 2018, resi­dents vocalised fears over the city’s last public beach, Ramlet al-Baida, being swallowed by commercial endeavour. Both examples of swapping citizen well-being for billable leisure. 

Back in Valletta, in the new year of 2024, streets are lined with accessories for consumption. They welcome visitors who will come, go and leave cash as they do. The city increasingly defies that initial definition around the staging of a public life. It has, for some years, been systematically erasing the power of that ‘stage’ to comfort and give balance to the lone citizen.

By nature, a public square – with its symmetry and commitment to space and light – can bring a person in tune with their senses, along with their haptic prerogative to experience joy within a human-made built environment.

The way a crowd disperses within a well-planned piazza – tempered and balanced, leaving neither too much distance nor proximity between its users – reminds one of their participatory vocation, of being part of something bigger than individuality.

But space can also have the opposite effect. If serving priorities of fashion or outright profit, it can become neglectful in nurturing a balanced society. It transforms into a site of anxiety, cultivating spatial alienation incrementally – corroding the city’s duty to uphold, and nurse, public life.

Valletta has fully sowed a culture of capitalism, with public space as its sacrifice- Ann Dingli

By this definition, Valletta’s public spaces are disappearing. Surveying major public zones within the city demonstrates the degree to which the city’s commercial footprint has interrupted public space. Merchants Street is unwalkable. St John’s Square is not a square. The dominance of tented, barriered, signposted swathes of hospitality over habitable, open, occupiable space is palpable. This is what public space amounts to in our capital.   

There is another side to this argument – that people are in favour of Valletta’s current condition.

Ten years ago, the city was a fallow land, its revival desired and warranted. Maybe this is the course it had to take to achieve that revival – maybe this is what progress looks like and what everyone wants. If we were to evaluate the health of our capital’s public life by its consumption, taking the view that people are “voting with their feet”, then the results of what we define as public good might look different.

Last Christmas in Valletta, however, streets looked comparatively limp. Earlier in December, I vowed to friends that I would be boycotting the capital during the holiday season, scarred by the audio-visual excess of the city’s recent festive years. But Valletta is inevitable. And so it should be.

Walking through what felt like a skinnier crowd than ever on Republic Street days before Christmas, I imagined a hybrid Valletta of sleepy past and gluttonous present. I remember living in the city briefly in 2010, waking up to blended sights of domesticity and civic grandeur. Back then, a sprinkling of polish held the potential for real and measured improvement, for becoming a modern-day totem of Valletta’s rightful splendour – a reminder of its role as a virtuous mercantile hub and a haven for the peripatetic. 

That potential has succumbed to something else – a place where everything you see and touch asks for money. There is a dissonance now between the stage of public life and its actors. But now it is a new year – a time to call in new direction, to realign the squares and streets with the people that seek to roam them. So, give us back space. Give us back the city.

Ann Dingli is an independent art and design writer, editor and curator based in London.

Write to culture@timesofmalta.com with the subject line: ‘Space Matters’ with suggestions and/or comments.