The city and its symbol : gentrification and the overtaking of a living space by its own potential for marketing

Abstract

My dissertation’s main focus is built on the premise that the native inhabitants, both of Valletta and (more abstractly) of Malta in general, are losing their capital city for its own symbol (“symbol” in this context being the cultural simulacra created by its aesthetics and historical/cultural value). By this I mean that the cultural and social significance of Belt Valletta is being eroded both by neo-liberal gentrification as well as by the re-formulation of the city towards being a large scale marketplace and tourist destination rather than an organic city with strong socio-cultural significance for its local inhabitants. The symbolic aspect I mentioned pertains to how Valletta's own perceived identity as a site of heritage and significance is being utilized as a marketing tool to further the ends of said gentrification. I view the V18 program as a critical precipitating factor in this large-scale reorientation of the Belt Valletta and argue for the possibility that Valletta is itself a case example/microcosm, rather than an anomaly, of what is happening to the Maltese Islands in general. Other than the data gathered by the fieldwork undertaken, the dissertation was also underpinned (both theoretically as well as in the data’s ability to contextualize) by several articles from the Times of Malta mainly penned in the last three years, Ambivalent Europeans by Jon P. Mitchell (used to establish a pre-contemporary perception of the culture of Valletta), Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” to provide the conceptual tool of “the simulacra” and several articles done on the subject of gentrification and heritage commodification such as Pablo Alonso Gonzalez’s “Heritage and rural gentrification in Spain” and Wouter Van Gent’s “Neoliberalization, Housing initiatives and Variegated Gentrification: How the “Third Wave” broke in Amsterdam” amongst several others.