Built on Sand

(2019-20)

When I moved to Malta back in 2017, I thought it would be a small paradise. A little quiet island with 300 sunny days per year, boasting breathtaking natural landscapes. The reality turned out to be quite different. What caught my attention, instead, were the omnipresent, noisy and dusty construction sites. It was difficult to find a town, or even a street, which was not affected by the real estate boom. Many times I heard the joke that a typical Maltese landscape is no longer cliffs and sandy beaches, but the cranes, bulldozers, and unfinished buildings.

In the newspapers I would read articles warning that the construction boom was unplanned and not regulated properly. Numerous natural heritage sites were at risk of degradation because of building permits that did not respect the environmental protection rules. What is more, several inhabited buildings collapsed as their foundations were weakened by the vibration generated by a nearby construction work. At the beginning of 2020, a similar situation led to a fatal accident, burying a woman underneath a pile of rubble.

There is something incredibly alluring about economic growth. A booming market creates jobs and generates financial prosperity, and it gives people a feeling of security, raising their expectations about the future. This fascination, however, may mask the possible downsides of a growing economy: environmental degradation, rising income inequality, and risk of a financial crisis.

Any kind of stability built upon unstable institutional foundations turns out to be as precarious as an unsound structure. It may collapse at any time.