The promise and the perils of a revived Georgetown

Sep 20, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – There is always something touching about plans drawn up on the government’s drafting table. They begin with such clarity. The lines are straight, the hues are bright, and the future lies before us, waiting to be neatly coloured in. The latest such rendering concerns Georgetown, a city that has borne many titles in its long and sometimes weary life, the most cherished being “the Garden City.” To revive it, to polish its avenues and clear its drains, is the government’s current ambition.

Both the Private Sector Commission and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry have hailed this ambition with polite applause. They have heralded the government’s plans, though one cannot quite tell whether they were consulted in the shaping of them, or if their role is limited to cheering once the announcements was made.

This is no small distinction, for a plan imposed from above, without the textured input of those who live and work among the city’s streets, is more a wish than a blueprint. Georgetown is not a city that belongs politically to the ruling party, and where the Opposition holds ground, formidable hurdles can be raised. A plan not built on inclusivity is like a bridge without foundations. It may look sound, but it will not last the first stress test.

If you never walked through Georgetown when it was in its prime, you would have little sense of what the title “Garden City” meant. The name is not mere nostalgia. It marked a certain civility, an understanding between residents and the place they inhabited. To revive Georgetown without knowing this past is like trying to resurrect an old song without ever having heard its tune.

To imagine a clean and orderly Georgetown is to picture what would have to be undone: the sprawl of pavement vending, roadside stalls clinging to the edge of the drains, squatters on parapets and reserves who, by some miracle of paperwork or patronage, enjoy water and electricity connections that a homeowner would struggle months to obtain. It is an arrangement that seems to defy logic. One wonders: who approved these meters, who looked the other way, and why? A city cannot rise again while its sidewalks are choked with stalls and its drainage reserves treated as housing lots. Yet these are the very problems to which the government has often pandered, seeking favour rather than resolution.

Then there is zoning, or rather, the absence of it. Georgetown today is a patchwork quilt with no discernible pattern. Where residential neighbourhoods bore clear identities, one now finds the jumbled mixture of residence and commerce, lumberyards rubbing shoulders with parlors, warehouses looming beside small homes. The delicate distinctions of planning have been erased by the slow creep of convenience. Without a reassertion of zoning, the city will continue to unravel into something neither residential nor commercial, neither garden nor city.

And always there is the traffic. The snarl of cars inching along streets too narrow for their burden, the horns blaring with the impatience of modernity pressing against colonial design. Congestion has become the city’s daily lament. To revive Georgetown without solving its traffic is to dress a wound without closing it.

All of this makes one wary of the glowing words on paper, the neat diagrams of future boulevards. It is not that one doubts the sincerity of the government’s intent, or the eagerness of the business community to support it. But sincerity is not strategy, and applause is not a plan. Without inclusivity, without a reckoning with the squatters on parapets, the vendors on pavements, the tangled mess of zoning, and the daily misery of traffic, the revival of Georgetown will remain an aspiration.

Still, there is value in the aspiration itself. Cities, like people, need to imagine themselves better than they are if they are ever to improve. But let us be clear-eyed about the obstacles. The Garden City is not merely a label that can be reapplied like fresh paint. It was a spirit of order and respect for public space that has since been abandoned. To revive it, we will need more than maps and proclamations; we will need discipline, inclusion, and the courage to untangle the very problems that have been left to fester for decades.

Until then, the plans will remain hopeful lines on a page, a dream of a city that remembers it was once a garden, and wonders if, with enough will, it could be again.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• Garden City, Georgetown, Peeping Tom, revive

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