The alley kept clean improves journeys that rarely appear in anyone’s description of the neighborhood.

Every place has a set of routes that nobody puts in the description: the cut-through, the service lane, the path behind the shops. They carry deliveries, night shifts, school runs and shortcuts home, and the state they are in shapes a great many ordinary days. Because they are not part of the story a neighbourhood tells about itself, they are also where attention runs out first.

Notice which of your own regular journeys pass through places nobody talks about. If one of them is neglected, it is worth reporting or tidying, since the people who use it are unlikely to be the people who get asked.