Monel Island holds enormous potential to become one of Malta’s most meaningful public spaces — a place where history, community, and everyday life come together. Our vision for Monel Island is a public space that genuinely serves the whole community, while placing young people at the centre of its design, activity, and everyday life. At the heart of this vision is the creation of a Youth Park — a free, open, and welcoming space designed to support physical activity, recreation, and social connection. While the space would be open and beneficial to everyone, it intentionally responds to the reality that young people in Malta currently have very limited access to public places where they can be active, visible, and included without financial or structural barriers.
Today, many opportunities for physical activity require memberships, fees, bookings, or strict schedules. For young people balancing school, work, or other responsibilities, this makes participation difficult. A Youth Park at Monel Island would remove these barriers, allowing young people to move, train, meet, and unwind on their own terms — whether that’s a short session after school, an evening meet-up with friends, or a spontaneous visit during the weekend.
Informal movement and sport play a crucial role in both physical and mental wellbeing. Spaces that allow unstructured activity support healthier lifestyles, stress relief, and social connection, while also acting as a form of long-term prevention to many issues that occure with inactivity. In a context where physical inactivity and youth obesity are growing public health concerns in Malta, the Youth Park offers a practical, preventive response by embedding regular physical activity into everyday life through free, accessible, and engaging spaces.
The Youth Park is envisioned to require approximately 3,000–4,000 square metres, an area that allows the integration of high-quality active facilities without dominating the island. This scale ensures there is ample space to retain and enhance greenery, trees, and open landscaped areas, which are critically needed in this part of Malta. In a highly congested and polluted urban context, Monel Island has the potential to function as a green lung, improving environmental quality, supporting urban cooling, and offering much-needed breathing space for surrounding communities.
The park would include facilities that encourage movement through sport and recreation, such as Pump Track for bikes, skateboards, scooters, Inline Skate and BMX (all wheeled Sports) alongside Parkour and calisthenics areas, multi-use open spaces, and creative zones. The Pump Track is proposed as a priority feature, as it actively promotes sustainable and active mobility, encouraging young people to use bikes and wheeled transport to reach the site and move through surrounding areas — embedding physical activity into daily routines rather than isolating it to organised training.
Equally important are seating, shade, and social spaces designed specifically for young people. These areas recognise that youth spaces are not only about sport, but also about belonging, rest, conversation, and visibility within the public realm. A successful public space is one where people are encouraged to stay, connect, and feel at home. While the Youth Park is intentionally youth-focused, this does not mean it excludes younger children or adults — quite the opposite.
Well-designed youth spaces naturally become intergenerational places, where younger children are inspired by the older youths they see moving, training, and socialising, and where adults are encouraged to reconnect with physical activity in an informal, welcoming way. By offering a wide range of free and accessible sports, the park creates space for people to grow into activity, return to it, or simply take part at their own pace.
What makes Monel Island truly unique is its proximity to Fort Manoel, one of Malta’s most significant historic sites. Locating a Youth Park in this setting creates a powerful opportunity for strengthening young people’s connection to Malta’s cultural heritage. By being active, social, and present in a place shaped by centuries of history, heritage becomes part of everyday experience — fostering awareness, respect, and long-term stewardship rather than distance or disengagement. Beyond its social and environmental value, this vision also positions Monel Island as a destination for sports and youth tourism, attracting visitors, exchanges, and events while keeping the space firmly rooted in public access and community use.
Ultimately, this vision is not about creating a space for one group at the expense of others. It is about recognising young people as central users of public space, and designing a place that serves everyone by investing in youth — their health, wellbeing, creativity, connection to heritage, and access to green, healthy environments. Monel Island has the potential to become a living, active, green, and inclusive public space that respects its past, supports its present community, and invests confidently in its future.
A strong reference point for this vision can be found in Riga, Latvia, through the development of the Imanta Sports Centre. This project shows how a publicly accessible, youth-oriented sports and recreation space can successfully bring together wheeled sports, parkour, open training areas, and social spaces within a single site. The centre has become a community hub, encouraging everyday physical activity, intergenerational use, and public events, while remaining open, inclusive, and free to access. It demonstrates how a well-designed youth-focused park can activate an area, support wellbeing, and become a valued public destination — offering a clear and relevant case study for what could be achieved at Manoel Island.
