Child-friendly neighbourhoods
Cleaning the ugly wall and painting
Summary
A segment of the school boundary wall will be selected and students/children of different classes will clean it along the main roadway and will then paint pictures portraying road safety issues. Alongside children, their guardians and schoolteachers will also be involved in planning and implementation of the scheme.
Context
Posters and graffiti are a form of self-expression. However, the walls of Dhaka rarely get to experience the creative genius of aspiring artists or the ingenious creations of self-expressionists. Instead, they are infested with a constant stream of commercial ads pasted, usually without permission, in the form of posters on public walls, as well as slogans of different student organisations. While this is just visual obtrusion for most city dwellers, homeowners, in particular, suffer the consequences of an inconsiderate social mind set. Most people are unwilling to do anything about an illegality that has no bearing on their lifestyle, so many have to suffer quietly.
Transformational measures and activities
Bangladesh has had a long problem of “postering” along the walls, and thus eventually creating dirty walls, especially around the schools and other educational institutions. As such, it might be a good initiative to clean a particular wall around the school and colour it, within public view, in the form of paintings portraying road safety issues. This can be handy, as a way of promoting road safety issues. It will also be greatly appreciated by residents and passers-by. This sort of affirmative action in the form of paintings is usually done in BUET during different cultural events, especially the night before the Victory day, in order to celebrate it. Students from all batches participate and paint all through the night and it is a culture of BUET from the very beginning.
In this scheme, students will actively participate in selecting different popular safety related slogans and safety related thematic paintings, and eventually implementing them as per their colour schemes and plan. Considering the importance of the school and its level of exposure to public view (given that it is located adjacent to a busy road), it is expected that the initiative will contribute to building awareness among road users. Moreover, it will create an inviting environment for students as well, as they will be able to inculcate different aspects of road safety by regularly seeing their own creations.
Wall paintings (source: BUET)
Results
This low-cost measure has the benefit of cleaning property walls and maintaining them sustainably, which is now a big problem for all the road adjacent landowners. Thereby, it has good prospect in promoting road safety. A particular advantage is that, as the wall belongs to the BUET School authority, there will be no need to request permission from any authority; instead, the activity will be fully aligned with the recent governmental ‘Keeping Boundary Wall Clean’ policy. There is a strong possibility of replicating this affirmative action by other roadside establishments and it is envisaged that in the longer run this will help promote a safer road environment by raising road safety awareness among the general public and ensuring children-friendly road environments, particularly for the ever-growing number of unsupervised school-going children.
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