A 50,000 Square Metre Mega Park on an Old Landfill in Butel: 8,000 Are Finished, the Other 42,000 Are Still a Promise

On the spot where rubbish was piled up for decades in Butel, a park of 50,000 square metres is being built. Skopje mayor Orce Gjorgjievski announced it on his Facebook profile, and from there everyone picked up the news.

What is finished is the first section of 8,000 square metres along Hristijan Todorovski - Karposh Boulevard: greenery, a square, children's playgrounds, footpaths and fitness zones. That leaves 42,000 square metres - more than five sixths of the whole project - about which Gjorgjievski says works are running in parallel, with full landscaping.

One technical detail deserves more attention than the rhetoric around it: the park will have its own irrigation system running on non-potable water. That is the difference between a park that survives a Skopje summer and another planted surface that burns off in August. If that system really is built and maintained, it is the most significant part of the whole investment.

A permanent solution to dumping?

The phrasing the mayor uses is that the space creates a "permanent solution against landfills forming again". The logic is familiar and it is not wrong - a maintained, lit and used space really is harder to turn into an illegal dump than a neglected plot.

But "permanent" is a big word. Illegal dumps in Skopje do not appear simply because there is empty ground, but because it is cheaper for someone to unload there than to pay for collection. A park at one location solves the problem at that location. Where the next truck unloads depends on municipal inspection and on the price of legal waste collection - neither of which is mentioned in the announcement.

"People's trust is earned through deeds," Gjorgjievski wrote, invoking a promise made together with Darko Kostovski that this place would not be forgotten.

That is an accurate yardstick and it is worth taking literally. Eight thousand square metres is a deed. Forty-two thousand are still a promise - and that is the ratio to remember when the next drone photograph shows the same space. The date by which the rest should be finished has not been published.