Quo vadis, Paceville?

Over the past couple of weeks, anthropologist Elise Billiard has helped coordinate a series of seminars on ‘The Future of Paceville’, organised under the banner of the University of Malta’s Work in Progress Seminars.

But Paceville has long been a pet project for Billiard, who has written penetrating studies of Malta’s primary nightlife hub, bringing to the fore the tension between Paceville’s more popular night-time culture and its increasingly marginalised residential areas, all the while speculating on the endgame for this expansive, and increasingly speculative, area. 

Bringing together academics and professionals from various fields, the seminars ran the gamut from historical overview to ethnographic analysis, also taking in legal and archaeological perspectives pertaining to various aspects of Paceville’s continued existence. If there’s one thing that the seminars confirmed, it’s that Paceville means many things to many (Maltese) people – either as a fond memory or a persistent social bugbear, either as a blight to be scorned or a ‘necessary evil’ to be cherished despite its many recent, and not always commendable, permutations. 

While the first session of talks forming part of the seminar – held on April 15 at Europe House, Valletta – focused primarily on architecture, urban design and the legal parameters that allow for some unsavoury developments in the area, the second and final session, held the following week, took a looser approach, welcoming discussion on the social fabric of Paceville and its history. 

Blazing through the history of Paceville and flagging up the problematic social segregation that the newly-sprouting gated communities like Pendergardens are bringing into the Paceville mix, anthropologist Marguerite Pace Bonello asked whether or not we should consider Paceville as a bona fide city – with the kind of complex urban fabric that that implies. Elise Billiard’s suggestion that rather than a city in and of itself, we should consider Paceville as a ‘global village’ first and foremost was taken up by MaltaToday journalist James Debono, who picked up on how recent developments in Paceville cater to a very globalised economy first and foremost. 

Apart from the drive to welcome high-income earners by means of projects like Pendergardens and Portomaso, Debono noted that “unlike Valletta, which appears to be catering to some form of cultural diversity”, Paceville is catering to the “unregulated business niche” – evidence of which is the proliferation of strip clubs which, as an audience member went on to suggest, appear to be built in part for the benefit of the ‘conference culture’ of affluent businessmen who visit the island on a regular basis. 

But anthropologist and DJ John Micallef sounded a somewhat more optimistic note in discussing what he deems is a still thriving and heterogeneous youth culture within Paceville’s confines. Refusing to take a monolithic view of the area, Micallef instead described it as “a multiverse hosting a variety of universes”, with a clearly stratified variety of clubs still thriving in what may, to an outsider, look like an increasingly homogenised place. 

Speaking to MaltaToday, Billiard said the seminar made one thing abundantly clear: that each Maltese individual appears to be familiar with at least one particular part of Paceville, “which once again gave the impression that Paceville is a cluster, an entanglement of lines of life, more than just a space in which people congregate together,” Billiard said, adding that “after all, Paceville is the international hub of Malta – much more than Valletta. It is a real global village characterized by the fluidity of capital, the fluidity of people – prostitution and finance workers are placed on the same footing – the different languages and dress codes on the street”.

Asked whether interventions such as this seminar could potentially help shape the future of Paceville, and influence politicians and other stakeholders, Billiard remained sceptical, but also pointed out precisely why those hell-bent on focusing solely on Paceville’s gentrification and speculative potential are “wrong”.

“Politicians and businessmen are wrong, not only as regards social justice, but also because without knowing, they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Their uninformed decisions prove detrimental to their own colossal investments,” Billiard said, stressing the key role anthropologists could potentially play in this conversation. 

“There should be an anthropologist in every urban design team. Why? Because space is about people, and only anthropologists have accumulated knowledge and skill to understand how people live in society.”

Billiard stressed how her field work in Paceville revealed one thing above all – every participant in Paceville, from resident to club owner and from language school directors to bottle shop owners, agreed that Paceville needed to be better – that the state of the streets was abysmal and that the long-standing neglect was starting to show.

Billiard suggests that “nothing happened” as a result of this because instead of implementing long-standing change, the government focused on superficial ‘fixes’: “basically re-paving two streets, and making the only public garden a private one”. 

“In my opinion this is useless, even counter productive,” Billiard said. “You would only need to listen to Paceville both by day and night to understand what really needs to be done. It doesn’t even have to be all that much: a couple of – nicely designed! – public toilets, cheaper parking fees, and the re-opening of streets and passages that have recently been closed off, would be a good start.”