From Singapore to Tokyo; What clean cities get right (and can teach the rest of us)

In Singapore, the cleaning never stops. Between all the sweeping, rubbish clearing, hose downs, grass cutting, tree pruning, repair work, renovation and repainting, maintenance feels relentless. It’s sometimes performative: the lift gleams most brightly when an MP visits. But the result is a city that’s enviably spotless.

The unpleasant state of the country’s public toilets, however, remains a persistent issue. Government taskforces and a restroom association are working to fix the problem, aided by etiquette posters, star-ratings systems, smile-or-frown feedback panels, deep-cleaning grants and penalties for offending premises. Enforcement extends to inside the cubicle: on paper, if not in practice, there’s a fine for forgetting to flush.

In the war on rubbish and poor hygiene, Singapore might be closer to victory than most other metropolises. Paris has been fighting its own public-toilet battles for far longer. A pipi sauvage (wild peeing) is a local habit that’s as old as the city; to address it, the French capital has deployed uritrottoirs, street urinals that resemble flowerpots. And to deal with dog mess, it sent in Motocrottes (literally “Crudmobiles”): a now-retired scooter fleet that vacuumed pavements. Despite such efforts, the Métro hasn’t shaken its historic reek and pooch-related pavement hazards persist.

Across the Channel, fly tipping has become brazen: London recorded 480,000 incidents from 2024 to 2025. The city is combatting this with drones, name-and-shame campaigns and fines but, according to the Local Government Association, the penalties don’t match the severity of offences. Tony Travers, the associate dean of the London School of Economics’ School of Public Policy, has a word for where this can lead if it continues unchecked: “grotification”. The term, intended to contrast with “gentrification”, describes the decline of streets and neighbourhoods into squalor.

By the start of this decade, New York had lived with rubbish and rats for so long that these had stopped being seen as problems and become accepted as facts of life. In 2023 the then mayor, Eric Adams, declared cleaning up a priority and appointed a “rat tsar”, a (human) director of rodent mitigation. He followed this with his “Get Stuff Done” campaign; its centrepiece was a “Trash Revolution”, in which sealed bins replaced loose rubbish bags and surveillance cameras were deployed to catch illegal dumpers. The pavements became passable again and the rodent population declined.

There has been plenty of improvement but the job remains unfinished. The rat tsar has left office and the work of getting stuff done is now on the to-do-list of the current mayor, Zohran Mamdani. “In the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have their sidewalks covered in garbage,” he has said. Let’s see what happens.

If even the world’s richest and most cleaning-obsessed cities still struggle to stay free from grime and litter, what hope is there for the rest? Kigali is an interesting case study. Today it is considered Africa’s greenest, safest and cleanest city. Significantly, Rwanda called on Singapore’s urban planning firm Surbana Jurong to draw up the strategy. But the city’s cleanliness isn’t just the achievement of politicians, planners and an army of sanitation workers. Every last Saturday of the month, the capital pauses for a mandatory community-service programme called Umuganda. Shops and roads close, and everyone – or, at least, enough people to make a difference – rolls up their sleeves. Critics see it as authoritarian but Kigali’s transformation is hard to dismiss.

Then there’s Japan, which takes an enlightened, educational approach, rather than resorting to fines, public shaming or decrees. Its people have internalised the ideal of cleanliness to such an extent that it has become cultural. Children take responsibility for looking after their classrooms. Fans pick up rubbish when leaving even the rowdiest baseball game. Volunteers descend upon Shibuya in central Tokyo on weekend mornings to clear what the night has left behind. People’s upbringing instils a sense of duty that keeps the whole country tidy.

Every city needs to educate its residents about how to maintain their neighbourhoods and give them the right conditions to do so. And it requires good infrastructure, such as bins that are regularly emptied. But most importantly, it must foster a sense that these things matter and inspire people to leave things a little better than they found them.