Clean Cities

By Grant Misse

Traveling to London was my first experience abroad without the haze of childhood hanging over every memory in my uber-soft and undeveloped baby brain. Within the United States though, I have visited plenty of cities around the country, and of course, made regular trips to our very own Kansas City. But these places gave me a false sense of what a city must be. In all of my not-tooworldly travels, I have been led to believe that all cities must be dirty. Why is that? Well perhaps it’s because most American cities have a pretty solid reputation for being trashy, full of litter, and occasionally, infested with rats. But as I stepped foot out of our coach and onto the London sidewalks, I was pleased to be greeted by a shiny clean slab of London street tile. And As I looked down the road, I saw no litter. I just saw people, cars, and well, the street. All of my trip, I kept taking peaks into the cracks and corners of the city, looking for trash. In reality, I struggled to find trash cans nearly as much as I struggled to find signs of trash itself. All of my searching for litter was to no avail. Instead I got to enjoy a nearly sparkling city with unsettlingly few trash cans. So what is the secret to keeping this city so clean?

Well, I think there are many ingredients that mix together to create such a clean city environment. But before I outline what my minimal research and hunches have to offer, I will also say that New York and Kansas City are my primary comparisons to draw upon, which are not exactly beacons of cleanliness. So take my assumptions with a good helping of salt, and please do not confuse this for a simplification of US vs. European cities. I am only referencing London, and a select number of US cities I have had the honor of visiting.

So here is my ingredient list to the secret sauce of clean cities:

1. Adequate funding for street cleaning services.

2. Effective street cleaning provided by said services.

3. A population of individuals who care about the presentation of their city and the use of their social leverage to ensure newcomers do not come to believe that litter is the norm.

I’ll admit, this isn’t a very inspiring list and it contains few surprises. But maybe it isn’t as hard to explain as it seems. In a city full of tourists, there is no way to ensure that the social norm of the city is to keep it clean and avoid litter, but employing a cleaning service that makes regular passes and does an effective job despite all of the nooks and crannies of the city, is likely to create an atmosphere that frowns upon litter and improper waste disposal. And now that a cleaning service has set the tone for this atmosphere, the population plays its role in modeling clean behaviors and keeping litter off of the streets. And no matter how hard it got to find a rubbish bin, the social expectation of maintaining the cleanliness of the city held strong. One afternoon in central London, nine of us took a pit stop in a Krispy Kreme to grab a dozen donuts as a group and provide Steven with his first experience of the most well renowned American donut. And after sitting down and taking down the dozen handily with our group of weary travelers, we couldn’t find the rubbish bin inside of the store. And as one of us was about to cave and walk out of the store with an empty box for a dozen donuts, I began to panic with a vivid image of us passing around this empty box and even taking it home with us on the tubes as we waited to find a large enough rubbish receptacle for it. So I took a deep breath, looked directly behind all of us and found our trash can in the Krispy Kreme. In a matter of days, this Londoner mindset of a clean city had fully infected me, and I was prepared to suffer a day of holding onto our rubbish before I ever considered littering. And honestly, that is a world I wouldn’t mind living in. So even if London is a bit backwards with its left side of the road driving and its preference for sparkling water over tap water, it has its rubbish in the right place.

Two Truths And A Lie

1. I took two jars of jam from the Strathmore and then declared them at customs.

2. I tried a flat white at every café I visited, and my favorite was at Gloucester Station.

3. I escaped jet lag entirely by pulling my first all-nighter from Kansas to London.