Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1502331
18 | Architecture & Design "Gian – insa li ha taghddi minn hemm" I hear another pedestrian bark from behind me. As I manoeuvre my way through one of the main squares in Birgu on my way to one of my local hangouts, lorries and cars are all claiming precious space in what was once a large pedestrian zone. Now the only seating area is squeezed into two of the peripheral parking spaces that block the ground floor tenements on the piazza. The people are secondary, and they feel it. With the importation of the car, Malta gradually moved away from the pedestrianisation of its village cores as the vehicle increasingly became the prime means of transportation – the tarmac was laid down and we all piled into our cars. Traffic has become the bane of the whole population, yet ironically it is the population that uses the car to create that very same traffic. And we push back on pedestrianisation as a great inconvenience; the thought of walking to and fro experiencing the village has become a vestige of a different era or an absurd waste of time. In his book The Image of The City, Kevin Lynch introduces and describes five elements - nodes, paths, districts, landmarks, and edges - that give shape to the mental representation of the city. Despite what research suggests, we seem to be ignoring all that leads to a solution and instead we are increasing the number of cars, widening our roads and erasing the paths that link the nodes that create an intrinsic part of our community. The place from where we buy our morning coffees, the barber, the lotto office, our pharmacy, the bars that we frequent or even that bookshop that we find ourselves browsing through even though we have an e-book reader – these may be some of your nodes – they are different for all of us. We have landmarks in common. "Meet me in the square." "I'm in front of Parliament" "I left my car next to the police station". These nodes and landmarks are linked by paths that enable us to navigate through towns, villages, and cities. With the widening of our roads and the annihilation of our pavements we are eliminating pedestrian pathways. Feeling that we have no choice but to drive, we have become reliant on our cars. Over the years, we have seen our European counterparts understand the errors of their ways and give priority to pedestrians over cars and re-establish pedestrian priority in their cities, yet we continue to DESIGN CONNECTIONS. W o r d s b y P e r i t A l e x a n d r a M a n c h e a t A m a n c h e A r c h i t e c t u r e Plaza de la Encarnación, Seville, Spain Vittoriosa Square