'Paint the City You Want to See'

One day, about four months ago, Alfred Vanderpuije told some staffers to meet him at 6 a.m. with brushes and paint. As mayor of Accra, the capital of Ghana, he had a problem on his hands. Traders near the central marketplace in Accra were increasingly encroaching from the sidewalks into the street, making for a chaotic mix of vehicular, pedestrian, and market traffic. So the mayor set out to fix things with buckets of red paint.

“Before and after, just with a red line, it made a difference,” Mayor Vanderpuije said during a discussion at The Atlantic’s CityLab 2015 summit in London. With one broad brush stroke, the mayor delineated where vendors could and couldn’t operate. The very next day, pedestrians and traders were talking about it. Vanderpuije said that the local press reported on the new rule: “Do not cross the mayor’s red line.”