Patrik Park in Aerodrom has a new outdoor fitness zone - the first of five the municipality has planned for this year. The next ones are coming to Ostrovo, Novo Lisiče, Todor Čangov and Dolno Lisiče. The equipment is for calisthenics and outdoor training, free to use, and designed for different ages and fitness levels.

Mayor Dejan Miteski says: "We want Aerodrom to be a municipality where an active and healthy lifestyle is accessible to everyone."

The idea is good. Free equipment in your own neighbourhood is exactly what people need if they are not going to pay a gym membership, and there is nothing to argue with there.

Except the photographs themselves show something else

The grass around the equipment has turned yellow - as it has across a large part of the municipality. And when you tread on a dried-out surface like that, the dust rises into the air.

So the person who came to train outdoors precisely because of the fresh air will be breathing dust. And most of all in the summer months, when the vegetation is parched, the temperatures are high, and most people actually go outside to move at all.

The equipment is not the zone

This is the distinction worth drawing. Installing equipment is a one-off cost with a photograph at the end of it. Maintaining the greenery around it is a recurring cost with no photograph - mowing, watering, regularly.

What is normal and expected for a space like this is that the grass around it is green, cut low and kept up. The value of an outdoor gym is not in the metal, but in whether it is pleasant to stand there at all.

Five zones have been announced. Four more are coming. The question for every one of them is the same: will the municipality maintain the ground around the equipment with the same enthusiasm it installs it with - or will dust become standard issue?