Spatial relations

With a new design to her blog, Sharon Spiteri of Lost in Thought writes that 'our attitude to asylum seekers and refugees is perfectly reflected in our spatial relations':

..We house them in cut-off areas: Safi, Marsa, Hal Far… and we give them wide berth when we meet them: we don’t sit next to them on a bus, we do not make eye contact, we do not speak to them, we try to pretend they do not exist, we claim to be crowded enough without having to make space for newcomers.

And then there is their living space: of all the empty buildings on the island (and there are many), did we have to earmark an old school stuck in an industrial zone to house an open centre for asylum seekers? One surrounded by an open ditch full of stagnant water and the accompanying stench? One stuck in a space reminiscent of the war zones refugees are fleeing from?

Approaching the Marsa open centre, it struck me that there is little which is open about it, except maybe the open-ended works in progress. The approach is definitely closed and the building is a run-down ruin surrounded by a moat. And then, once inside the building, the crowded conditions make something of a grim joke of the argument that the island is crowded. To understand crowded, one would have to spend a night inside one of the dorms of the open centre.

Little wonder that the one thing on the minds of those asylum seekers and refugees I spoke to was integration. They hardly get to socialise with Maltese people except the ones who work with them and the ones who provide them with services. They are totally segregated. Shades of apartheid?