Leading Maltese fashion designer Luke Azzopardi criticised the take-up of Valletta’s public spaces, warning the capital city has been turned into a “Kafkaesque nightmare”.
Mr Azzopardi, who owns the couture studio Azzopardi Studio, said he is disgusted by the state of the Valletta and that the country has come to believe that more is always better.
“Somewhere along the way, we seem to have decided that dining inside a restaurant is an outdated concept,” he said.
“Why bother with walls, architecture, interiors or, God forbid, some sense of visual order when you can simply throw 47 chairs and tables into the street, erect an ugly canopy, add some uglier chairs, surround the whole thing with plastic, fake turf and perhaps a television, and call it ‘al fresco urban dining’?”
“And naturally, because apparently one assault on the senses is never enough, you can have four different songs playing simultaneously from four different establishments, 10 metres apart.”
He called out specific examples, such as cockroaches and mice in St Paul’s Street, trash piled outside the Royal Opera House, and the proliferation of souvenir shops “blocking the streets and turning Valletta into some bizarre retail obstacle course”.
“The gnome garden outside the parliament, which was once and still is a disaster, is starting to look like the best thing about Valletta,” he said.
And he dismissed arguments that Valletta has now embraced the same sort of charming chaos associated with Naples and Moroccan souks.
“The organic growth of those have a visual language, texture, history and an organic relationship with their surroundings,” he said.
“This is just stuff dumped into public space because apparently nobody has the courage to say: NO MORE.”
“Our capital has been turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare where every available square metre is monetised, occupied, covered, illuminated, advertised, fenced off or filled with plastic furniture.
Mr Azzopardi warned that responsibility for this state of affairs cannot simply be born by the Government laws but by Maltese society in general.
“We have somehow educated ourselves to believe that more is always better. More tables. More signs. More lights. More plastic. More commercial clutter. More noise. More “vibrancy”. More crap,” he said.
"We suffer from horror vacui: A real fear of empty spaces. We have confused commercial activity with culture, and illegal occupation of public space with urban life.”
“We have taken one of the most extraordinary historic cities in Europe and treated it like an empty retail unit waiting to be fitted out. And we should be ashamed.”
“Because this isn't just about restaurants, or tourists, or planning regulations. It's about standards. It's about whether we still have the ability to look at something and say: ‘No. That's ugly. That's inappropriate. That's damaging.’”
“Apparently, we can't. And Valletta deserves infinitely better than what we are currently doing to it.”
