By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus
Walk through St. John’s on a Tuesday afternoon and the heat sits on the streets like a punishment. A vendor on Market Street arranges her produce under a tarpaulin that has survived three hurricane seasons and looks it. A civil servant edges his car through water pooling where the drains failed again, the same drains, the same places, year after year. A cruise ship towers over the harbour and a few hundred passengers step ashore into a town that cannot quite decide whether it exists for them or for the people who live there. On Redcliffe Street, a young woman home for Christmas looks at the shopfront where her grandmother once sold fabric and sees a locked door. She has a degree in environmental engineering from Toronto. She will fly back next week.
The government has announced the redevelopment of St. John’s. Whatever one’s political persuasion, this is the right decision at the right time. For too long the capital has been the subject of lament rather than action, and leadership means going first. On this, the government has gone first, however, a launch is a beginning, not a conclusion. The harder question is whether the rest of us, citizens, professionals, the private sector, residents, the diaspora, will own this project and shape it into what this moment demands and whether the government, having invited us in, will actually let us through the door.
In three previous essays I have argued that the international order that once protected small states is collapsing, that no external power is coming to rescue us, and that the ancient instruction the prophet Jeremiah gave to a displaced people, build houses, plant gardens, seek the welfare of the city where you find yourselves, is the Caribbean’s mandate now. That instruction was not sentimental; it was given to people who had lost everything and were tempted to wait for deliverance. Jeremiah told them to stop waiting, the government has given us the building site, the question is whether we will build on it like people who intend to stay.
Every Caribbean development document invokes climate resilience. The phrase has become an incantation, spoken at conferences, printed on summit banners, inserted into funding proposals. We are world champions at describing the crisis and world laggards at demonstrating the response. No Caribbean city has ever shown, in a completed, functioning, living place, what climate resilience actually looks like when you stop talking and pour the foundations.
St. John’s can be that demonstration. Consider one detail, drainage. The water pooling on the streets of the capital after every heavy shower is not an act of God, it is a design failure. Permeable paving, bioswales, retention gardens, and properly graded stormwater channels are not experimental technology, they are standard urban engineering in cities that take flooding seriously. A redesigned St. John’s could capture and reuse rainwater instead of letting it rot in the road. Scale that principle across every system, energy, transport, waste, building codes, and you have a city rebuilt for the storms that are coming, powered by the sun that is already here. Climate resilience not as branding, but as engineering. No one in the region has done it, Antigua and Barbuda can be first, and being first has a value that being third never will.
The young woman with the engineering degree is not a metaphor, she is a category. The expertise required to build a climate-resilient city, renewable energy, sustainable drainage, green architecture, smart water management, is precisely the expertise we keep exporting via the airport every August. This project can reverse that flow, but only if it creates genuine professional pathways, not junior roles for locals while foreign firms collect the fees. The default must be local, of course we partner with international expertise where necessary, but we structure it as knowledge transfer, as China did, not as permanent dependency. Every foreign specialist should have a local counterpart being trained to replace them, anything less is colonialism with a consulting fee.
However, reversing the brain drain is only half the challenge. The deeper question is one of ownership. Antigua and Barbuda sits on hundreds of millions of dollars in idle capital, bank deposits earn next to nothing, and pension fund returns barely keep pace with inflation. Private savings circulate in a narrow loop of consumption and real estate while productive investment starves, not because our people lack money, but because they have never been given a credible way to put that money to work building their own country.
This has to change, and the redevelopment of St. John’s is the place to change it. Imagine a St. John’s Development Bond, or a community equity vehicle, designed not for foreign institutional investors but for the Antiguan on the ground. A schoolteacher invests five thousand dollars, a taxi driver puts in two thousand, a retired civil servant commits a portion of her pension. They are not donating, they are buying a stake, a real, return-generating stake, in the transformation of their capital city. Transparently governed, independently audited and with small investors given priority over large ones.
Why does this matter beyond the economics? It matters because ownership changes behaviour. An employee watches; an owner asks questions. People who hold equity in their own national development do not sit on the sidelines while contracts go to friends and costs balloon without explanation. They demand standards because their money is on the line. For too long, the Caribbean development model has offered ordinary citizens only two roles, worker or spectator, this project can create a third, owner! That is not a financial innovation, it is a democratic one.
The government has launched the project, now citizens must own and shape it if allowed to. Here we must be honest, because we know the old model, we have lived it. In one Caribbean country after another, the pattern repeats, a contract quietly steered to a connected firm, procurement technically open but practically predetermined, a community consulted after the concrete has already been poured. I remember a regional infrastructure project, I will not name it, where the “public consultation” was held forty-eight hours before the contract was signed. The room was full of people who understood, with perfect clarity, that they had been invited to ratify a decision, not to shape one.
None of that is inevitable, citizens can choose differently by demanding differently. Open procurement with published criteria. Independent oversight with civil society teeth, public reporting on expenditures and contracts, a citizen advisory structure with real authority, not decorative consultation. These are not radical proposals, they are standard practice in countries that take their own development seriously. If Antigua and Barbuda gets this right, not just the buildings, but the process, this project can do for the Caribbean what Viv Richards did with his bat and Andy Roberts did with the ball, prove to the world, and more importantly to ourselves, what we are capable of when we refuse to settle for less.
The young woman on Redcliffe Street is watching. She has heard the speeches before, she has seen plans that came to nothing, she knows the difference between a country that talks about transformation and one that practices it, because she left the first kind and is deciding whether to come back.
She will know if we didn’t.
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Good ideas but they are impossible to implement in low trust societies like Antigua today. In the current system people are incentivized to be corrupt. The fact that we have weak laws with low enforcement doesn’t help either.
Put yourself in some of the white collar criminals shoes. If you steal you get rich. If you get caught well maybe you get transferred, maybe. Plus you keep your salary and all benefits. Any sane person operating in such an environment would continue to steal.
Developed countries didn’t get that way because of luck or chance. The culture of the people and the type of society in which they operated made it possible.
You need only look at countries/islands such as Aruba, Cayman Islands or Curacao for examples of how development can be done well. Then contrast it with the other islands.
@ Right Winger,
I’d argue differently, but I will not disagree with the thrust of your argument.
To the Professor C. Justin Robinson who writes
“The government has announced the redevelopment of St. John’s. Whatever one’s political persuasion, this is the right decision at the right time”.
No: It’s not the right time. It’s long overdue. Neither is it the right decision.
As an academic writing an oped, it’s not for you to write the obvious.
An academic should look beyond the banal and prosaic, providing an opinion that is based on substance rather than playing to the politics.
If the very organization responsible for the development of St. John’s. The St Johns Development Corporation is not mentioned for its failures, and has not been disbanded, why add layers of incompetence corruption and bureaucracy?
What does the operative word in their name means? “Development”
To say: “The government has launched the project.” I’ll ask you and others: Who conducted the traffic study”?
They are launching the destruction of our history and legacy.
St. Johns has more meaning to us as a people, than the Nelson Dockyard.
Will the St. John’s Cathedral be next?
The fact that there is not outcry from the public about the proposed destruction of St. John’s as a historic town is sickening.
We have lost Parham which should have been among the towns that tourist walk and buy from local stops containing made in the Caribbean goods
The beauty of cities all over the world that draws tourists are is historic buildings and places.
The cities in Europe charging tourists a visitor’s fee is not because their so called modernization.
It’s because of their restoration.
In the US it the Inner Habour of Boston. In NYC it’s the South Street Sea Port. In San Fransisco it the Empadero
Which Government Minister has a background in Town Planning, sanitary engineering, urban planning, urban design or historic restoration?
Where is the plan? Even one that’s copied.
My biggest fear is that the plan that dies not exists will wipe out our visual memory and deny generations to come a context of our history.
Future generations or visitors will never know what were the alleys the byways the horse drawn streets our forefathers built and later denied entry.
Once lost, our generation will be the ones responsible for the destruction of our legacy.
St. John’s needs to be restored and preserved.
Doing so does not preclude the sanitary improvements. Neither does it need to exclude visual and functional enhancements.
I say restore it! Don’t destroy it!
Ok, so firstly, I don’t know what programmes UWI has in engineering but they need to offer degrees that combine environmental considerations into building e.g. can a person studying Engineering do a combination of both Environmental and Civil engineering? Or can they add that environmental component into their Civil, Mechanical and all other Engineering programmes? And, then advise up-coming students on ideal subjects to study at CSEC and CAPE to get in e.g. Math, Physics, Geography, Environmental Science, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science. Then, recruit young people into these programmes. Then, the young graduates can come together and start engineering firms. These firms could then bid on national projects and also with private contractors or construction companies. UWI itself could be leading the way in this initiative. There are lots of students studying sciences who are not sure what they will be able to do with it in the future. Many would be happy to get into such work if the pathways were clear. So, UWI leadership should not be lamenting that a graduate from North America is leaving with expertise, they should instead be offering those programmes right here. They could even recruit graduates like the young lady to help setup and run such programmes. It should be the default that every trained engineer now has knowledge of environmental best practices. Meanwhile, other local colleges, perhaps ABCAS should off architecture and interior design courses that combine knowledge of traditional artistic elements of buildings, along with modern elements, along with environmental considerations such as good air flow, healthy natural materials, along with creative ways of expressing a modern Caribbean vibe. Our buildings don’t need to be completely old school, nor do they need to be copies of North American ideas of modernity. They should reflect a Caribbean ambiance. Or, we can have different parts of the city have different ambiances as is done in some countries – so a more historical section and a more modern section.
This is a great opportunity for young unemployed people in Antigua. Persons studying in the construction sector should get together and form companies that do things like: 1) purchase old properties and renovate them then resell or rent them out to other persons looking to start a business. 2) build housing developments for local residents e.g. row or townhouses, apartments, small detached houses that are affordable but still climate resilient. 3) build wholesome entertainment businesses to revitalize the capital and other communities 4) build small strip malls in communities outside of the capital and rent spaces to villagers wanting to do business. Contractors, builders, plumbers, electricians, architects, interior designers/decorators, and even engineers and accountants should get together, start a business and meet regularly to come up with and execute project ideas for the capital and the rest of the country. Once there is a solid business plan, I am sure funding would be available, and the business could play a role at ensuring a sustainable future for all residents.
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