If you can tell a man by his shoes, you can tell a city by its pavements and, surely, by its bus stops and beaches too. So what do Abu Dhabi’s litter-ridden bus shelters and the cigarette butt-covered sandcastle being created by Dubai Municipality say about the habits of some of the country’s residents?
The photographs were in The National yesterday. Dubai Municipality’s cigarettes’ sandcastle is a public installation that’s rather uniquely meant as a rebuke to the thousands who casually stub out just about anywhere, including on its miles of public beaches. Last year, a one-hour clean-up by volunteers turned up 50,000 discarded cigarette butts on Umm Suqeim beach. Such statistics underline that all of us should clean up our own mess. It should not always be the responsibility of the authorities or volunteers to tidy up.
The bus shelters have been cleaned up since The National’s report, which suggests that the spirit is willing but implementation is weak. It cannot be this way if Abu Dhabi is to achieve its ambition of becoming one of the world’s five cleanest cities within a few decades. For Dubai, which has the stated goal of becoming a smart city, the cleverest start has to be for residents to change their ways.
By all means have campaigns such as the April 2013 Asematy (My Capital) initiative by Abu Dhabi Municipality to discourage graffiti and spur civic pride in children.
But by and large, the basics boil down to this: city authorities must provide lots of waste bins and residents must take care to use them – it should not just be down to street cleaners to sweep up after the rest of us.
If this seems a big task, consider Calgary, consistently ranked in the top three of the world’s cleanest cities for the past five years. In 2007, Calgary began imposing steep fines for littering and stubbing out cigarettes on the ground, as well as introducing a raft of other measures. Its sparkling rivers and litter-free streets illustrate the sweeping change in the city’s mindset. We can do this too.
