Zurich is terribly clean – we feel complicit.
Today’s “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” describes Zurich as a “terribly clean city”. There is a cleaning mania. Heads has contributed to this tragic state of affairs.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s litter on the street or graffiti on the walls of a house: Everything is removed immediately. It would be nice if the city did not exaggerate so much.” So says a commentary in today’s NZZ. Zurich’s relationship with cleanliness is legendary: “Even James Joyce noticed this peculiarity. The famous Irish poet and author of the monumental work “Ulysses”, who found refuge in Switzerland during the First World War, is said to have said of Bahnhofstrasse during his years in Zurich that it was so clean you could eat minestrone off the floor.” Joyce’s words are apparently still an incentive for Zurich’s city leaders today. What’s more, while the reputation for cleanliness was once confined to a few boulevards, the authorities have now managed to make cleanliness the norm throughout the city. The NZZ wonders, with so much nitpicking, “whether a little too much detergent has got into the heads of the city’s leaders”.
We feel partly to blame, because we have helped to create an obsession with cleanliness, not just among the authorities, but among the population as a whole. Five years ago, we were asked to create a “Fix my street” brand for the city of Zurich. “Fix my street” was the name of the initiative that in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Manchester and Dublin made it possible for the public to quickly point out defects in their streets to the public services. Now, of course, a name like “Fix my street” would have been nonsense for Zurich, which was already working very well: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” So we found a more appropriate name for Zurich’s defect reporter: “Züri wie neu” (“Zürich as new”). We drew attention to the initiative with a poster campaign. In the first three weeks, the city received 92 tips from the public on where Zurich could be spruced up. A total of 12,676 tips have been received so far, or about 50 a week over five years, which the city is following up and, where possible, getting repair and cleaning teams on the job. The authorities are thus responding to a widespread obsession with cleanliness and not, as the NZZ suggests, sniffing too much detergent. On the NZZ’s Facebook page, NZZ reader Christian Weiss then aptly quotes Sybille Berg, a newcomer to Zurich and a voter: “I don’t need to step in dog shit to feel at home in a city”. And reader Hajo Hiernich from Germany says dryly: “For those who find Zurich too clean, I recommend a week in Berlin over New Year’s Eve.”