Nicosia Old City Challenge

Description

Nicosia, a city rich in history and culture, has been the capital of Cyprus since the 11th century. In the 16th Century, the Venetians granted the city its trademark star-shaped city walls, which separate the Old City "within the walls", from the modern developing Nicosia. Today Nicosia is a cosmopolitan capital and the administrative and commercial centre of Cyprus. The last five years, the Old City has been reinvigorated with several entertainment enterprises like coffee shops, bars and restaurants, and has become the most popular meeting place for all Nicosia residents and tourists alike.  And this brings about new challenges for Nicosia Municipality and the community of Old City

While the rapid development and increase in visitors is welcomed by the Municipality and local business owners, the community of long-term residents has been adversely affected with more noise, traffic and waste in a very densely populated area.
Over the last two years, the unprecedented increase of activity has backfired also to local business owners, who see visitor and customer satisfaction dropping because of issues like parking space unavailability as well as increase in noise and waste levels.

As recorded in Citizen’s Bureau reports of complaints, over 50% of complaints are related to health and well-being issues. Particularly, 17% of complaints were about delayed waste collection and cleaning , while 33% were about noise pollution, intense smells and waste pollution. A large proportion of these complaints is attributed to Old City area, where the provisions and procedures need to adapted to an increased but variable level of activity.

The Municipality has drafted its major strategic planning and urban restructuring to address the key challenges, as presented in Nicosia Masterplan towards 2020. The challenge posed regarding the Old City is critical for the municipality and several action plans are already in place that relate to this area.

The Municipality has invested significant effort aiming to improve and enhance the Old City, as part of its city-wide effort to provide better electronics services and citizen engagement. For example, Nicosia Municipality mobile application provides real-time information about free parking spaces in 4 major municipal parking lots. Several information and awareness campaign also were conducted to inform citizens about waste collection routes and time plans, including recycling, large objects collection, and garden waste.
Nicosia Municipality is continually improving the services and supporting technologies, aiming to better serve citizens and visitors alike, as well as local enterprises.

The main challenge of Nicosia Municipality is to Increase citizen satisfaction and reduce complaints related to waste management and noise pollution within the densely populated Old City.