It is easy to measure a plot of land by what could be built on it. It is harder, and more important, to measure what would be lost.
Malé’s handful of public gardens are not grand. They are small, shaded and ordinary — which is precisely their value in a city this dense.
A garden asks nothing of the people who use it. That is rare in an urban landscape organised around buying and moving on.
Protecting these spaces is not nostalgia. It is a modest, practical bet that a city needs room to simply be.
