Between 2022 and 2023 we worked for Granada together with PreZero and Inagra, on a campaign to communicate different themes within the City Council’s street cleaning and waste collection   services which had a poor reputation among Granada’s residents.

Problems included dog droppings, furniture and other belongings left out on the street, poor use of wastepaper baskets, a lack of cooperation with selective collection of waste, sprawling outdoor drinking, and very little resort to the citizens’ help services.

The campaign puts forward something as mundane as it is basic, that for the service to work, each one of us needs to play our very modest part, and that is the only way to keep the city clean. It may be a bit like remembering that we have to keep breathing to stay alive. Of course, what we should never do is treat anyone in an infantile way.  But it’s good to remind people of things that are essential.

The formula used was through unappealable consensus-generating messages, most of which could be subscribed to by a vast majority. This was coupled with the notion of a common goal holding an implicit invitation for the least civic-minded to collaborate. The aim was to have those who did not cooperate end up perceiving themselves alone in their mindset so that they would ultimately follow the example set by the vast majority.

We started by creating a new concept and identity for the service. Granada is the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca’s city. It is a city that is sung of, danced in, and regaled with the verses it has inspired. Granada is a city to fall in love with. Using this concept as our starting point, our aim was to continue to reinforce the ties between the city’s inhabitants and its culture. To declare our love for the city, tying it to cleanliness and alluding to Lorca.

"Granada clean, how I want you clean” is the slogan that rallies all of Granada, from its institutions to its residents, to clean. It’s a shared emotion expressed from the grass roots. With the poet’s permission and acceptance of our apologies, we put together a campaign with nice poetic compliments made to the city.

We opened the campaign with an emotional presentation in the city’s García Lorca Park (Huerta de San Vicente). The very cleaning service workers, a wonderful bunch, lent it their style and grace, unbridled. And this helped us achieve an initial performance where the rhythm of’El Zahoreño’, one of the workers in the service who is also a flamenco singer, appeared at different places around in the park. Another co-worker, Miguel Ángel López, dedicated some poems to the city. Poet Alicia Choín also joined us as did singer and composer Antonio Arias. That was just the first verse in a whole campaign that was to sweep through the streets and permeate the city in the following months.

Visually, we sought to generate clean, expressive, well-focused images filled with colour and volume to fall in line with the campaign’s light, fun, pseudo-poetic messages. To achieve this, we turned to Genie Espinosa, illustrator and comic book author, who was able to put her shiny, ironic touch on the graphic campaign.

We put together a poetic compliment competition, #PiropoGranadaLimpia, where we challenged people from Granada to recite a nice compliment of their own to the city of Granada, something that had to do with its cleanly, bright nature. Th same workers preached through their example and we worked with schools, affording the communication participation and breadth.

In April 2023, the campaign came to a close with a performance by one female and two male flamenco dancers from Granada to accompany the last theme of the city’s selective waste collection, focusing on paper and cardboard and the need to fold it up well before leaving it inside the blue collection box and not on the curb!