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Making SZ a real garden city
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Song Yingwen
IF you think we can sit back and relax after winning the Nations in Bloom competition as well as praise from home and abroad for the beautiful environment of our city, you are wrong. Huang Fuquan, deputy director-general of the Shenzhen Urban Management Office, said during a recent conference on environmental sanitation that the city still has a long way to go to become a real international garden city, and in fact making improvements is much harder than before.
“People eye Shenzhen with more strict demand and higher expectations because we are now an international garden city. Yet the problems left for us to settle, like unauthorized construction and bills posted almost everywhere in defiance of rules, are difficult to solve than those having been taken care of previously," Huang remarked.
According to Huang, besides illegal construction and postings, other tough nuts to crack in maintaining a good environment also include getting street peddlers under control and clearing litter, especially in rural areas, markets and food streets.
Actually, Huang and his colleagues have been battling these ills for a long time, but the situation has shown little improvement. "The problem lies in our philosophy of dealing with environmental problems," Huang said.
As we can tell from our previous practices, the city tends to approach environmental sanitation in a rushed manner, cleaning up the city in preparation for occasions like the China Hi-Tech Fair.
"The fact is that what the city lacks is not effective regulations on maintaining long-term control over sanitation, but a supervisor to monitor daily efforts. This is why our efforts in improving the environment never last long," Huang admitted.
To solve the problem, Huang said that the government has developed a new approach to monitoring efforts and result of environmental sanitation on each sector of society. Instead of judging these efforts through scheduled inspections, from now on the annual result will be concluded based on random visits and observations.
"The results will be publicized. But the difference lies in the fact that before, we honoured those who contributed much, and now we will also lay bare those companies who did a terrible job in maintaining the environment of their neighbourhood," Huang added.
Huang revealed that the city aims to plant more trees and flowers across the city, making Shenzhen even more gardenlike than it already is.
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