Sprucing up the capital

The Greater Amman Municipality’s push for beautifying the capital is continuing unabated, a move that is welcome and should be supported by all citizens.

A June initiative, followed up on more recently and supposed to continue for as long as it takes to complete the job, concerns rooftops that need to be cleaned up in a way that makes them less of an eyesore.

It is a wonder it took so long to adopt this initiative.

Houses in many areas are indeed in need of sprucing up; inhabitants should put some order in the mess that rooftops-turned-storage space present, give a new coat of paint, where it applies, or have the beautiful limestone that sets Amman apart cleaned of layers of grime left by time.

Any move to make the city more pleasing to the eye is always good, provided its momentum is maintained.

Things, however, should be done systematically and not in a haphazard way.

Targeting rooftops presumes that the job of cleaning the city at ground level is complete, which is clearly not the case.

So maybe in parallel with the rooftops, effort should be made to ensure that Amman’s streets and parks are cleaned to the satisfaction of the public.

Visits to public spaces in various districts of the capital readily reveal that a lot more still needs to be done to make the city clean. Or at least as clean as we use to remember it a few decades ago.

True, the population growth and, with it, the exponential increase in the number of vehicles, makes it difficult to keep the city in top shape.

Too much is expected of municipality workers and too little is done by city inhabitants, and that has to change.

We still have a long way to go to develop some civic responsibility, a culture for keeping public places clean.

Littering is done with no remorse, with a sense of entitlement even by many who believe that paying taxes obliges the municipality to clean after them.

Seldom does one see fellow citizens walking down popular streets bother to throw trash in bins — which, by the way, are not often at hand and in certain areas inexistent.

A cleaning campaign must begin early in schools.

Cleanliness is godliness, but how many among us give this adage a thought beyond the front door of our houses?

Still, the municipality must persist in its determined efforts to make Amman cleaner, and cleaning rooftops that could ruin the landscape when neglected and dirty is surely a worthy goal.