The Maltese Palimpsest: Urbanism and Utopian Ideals in Contemporary Valletta [Valletta, Malta]
under the tutelage of Dr. Sandra Annunziata + Dr. Claudia Meschiari
INDEPENDENT RESEARCH at Cornell-in-Rome | Spring 2013
“We have seen a joust between two competing utopian images of the city – one is essentially pre-industrial, certainly pre-modern, and is built on a whole set of mental images that are filled with village greens, neighbors whose names you know and problems you share in, and with places for social gathering near at hand – a community centre, a church, a sports hall, a café or a pub. The other image of the city is metropolitan, and certainly modern, but it is a modernity, as Walter Benjamin would have it, that is hewn from the marble of ancient stone.”
Located in the middle of the Mediterranean, Malta is a small southern European country. In the 16th century, with the Renaissance in full bloom in central Europe during this time, Greek ideals of order and organization were in vogue. So, when Francesco Laparelli was commissioned to design a city, he was influenced by Hippodamus of Miletus and designed Valletta on a rectangular grid with wide and straight streets. The entirety of the city of Valletta was built at once, and follows a regimented plan that is enclosed by large defense bastions that surround it on all sides. Of course, such decision to deviate from traditional Maltese building practices stemmed from an idealistic desire to establish a new city with utopian ideals—ones that could be first exhibited through its enlightened design and construction. However, as intentioned as the new city was to establish a new paradigm of urbanism concurrent with Renaissance ideals, has Malta, and more specifically Valletta, remained the veritable utopia it hoped to embody or have developments in the last 20th century been stifled by its enclosed milieu?
This research project/paper (which included a trip to Valletta, Malta in March of 2013), was thus approached by a division into three parts:
PART I - Utopian Ideals: In the Search for Urban and Societal Perfection
Beginning with Sit Thomas More's first conception of utopia, this first part of the research involved a historical survey of previous theoretical writings on the architecture of urbanism. Figures such as Vitruvius, Philibert de L'Orme, Christopher Wren, William Cobbett, John Stuart Mill, and Ebenezer Howard (and their associated writings and philosophies) were analyzed and synthesized to begin the formulation of some of the concepts that create the current conception of "urban utopia."
PART II - Principles of Urbanism and Modernity
In this second part, more contemporary writers such as Ash Amin and Robert Maxwell were observed, while taking note of important case studies such as Barcelona. Along with a few more "urbanist" oriented writings (such as those by Simon Parker, Oscar Newman and Francisco-Javier Monclus), this section aimed to provide a counterpoint to the historical development of the concept and question the validity of such assumptions.
PART III - Contemporary Valletta: An Urban Utopia?
Lastly, this final section aimed to apply the dichotomies that were investigated in the first two portions and evaluate Valletta under these standards. How closely it passed certain criteria like: aesthetic cohesion, economy, equilibrium between "town" and "city, " territorial bounds, fisicalismo, defensible space, public ownership, and ecology dictated the objective lens by which one could begin to make a claim either in favor or against the question: can contemporary Valletta be considered an urban utopia?
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