What makes a high-trust city, and can Bulawayo become one?

In Tokyo, if you lose your wallet on the train, the most likely outcome is that someone hands it to a police box and you get it back, cash included. In Copenhagen, parents leave babies asleep in prams outside cafés while they drink coffee indoors. On Swiss farm roads, vegetables sit on a table by the gate with a price list and an open cash box. Nobody is watching. Almost everybody pays.

These are not stories about rich people or strict police. They are stories about trust. And trust is the thing this study is about.

What we mean by a high-trust society

A high-trust society is a place where people expect strangers to do the right thing, and are usually right.

Notice the two halves. People expect good behaviour, and the expectation is usually correct. Both have to be true. If people expect the worst and are proved right, you have a low-trust society. If people expect the best and get robbed, trust collapses quickly.

Trust is not softness. It is a kind of wealth. In a high-trust city you do not need a padlock on everything, a receipt for every promise or a relative inside every office. Time and money that would go into guarding things go into building them instead. Economists have found that countries where more people say "most people can be trusted" tend to be richer and to grow faster, though which causes which is still argued over.

The elements, one by one

When we looked at the cities people call high-trust, the same ingredients kept appearing. Here is the list we are working with, and what each one looks like in daily life.

1. Honesty with strangers' property. The lost wallet comes back. The vendor who steps away for a minute finds her table untouched. The bicycle is where you left it. In the largest honesty experiment ever run, researchers "lost" more than 17,000 wallets in 40 countries and watched how many were reported. Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark came out near the top, and, against most people's guesses, wallets with more money in them were returned more often, not less (Cohn and colleagues, Science, 2019).

2. Personal safety. You can walk home after dark. You can take a taxi alone at night without a second thought. Children walk to school. Dubai and Singapore are the examples people reach for first: both report very low rates of street crime, and both will tell you that strict enforcement is part of the reason. Tokyo manages it with small neighbourhood police boxes, called koban, within walking distance of almost everyone.

3. Keeping your word. The plumber comes when he said he would. The deposit is returned. The shop honours the price on the tag. In Switzerland and Germany, a verbal agreement is treated as a real agreement, and being late is treated as a small insult. This is the everyday version of what lawyers call contract enforcement.

4. Following the rule when nobody is watching. The queue holds without a guard. Drivers stop at a red light at 2am on an empty road. In Japan, a railway platform at rush hour is a study in quiet lines. This is the hardest element to fake, because it only shows up when enforcement is absent.

5. Care for shared things. The benches outside City Hall stay clean and unbroken. The public toilet is flushed after use. The pavement is as clean at 5pm as it was after the morning sweep. We have a painful local example of the opposite. Not long ago a solar-powered phone charging station was installed at the corner of 8th Avenue and Jason Moyo Street, by the CBZ building, free for anyone to use. It was vandalised in no time. Nobody gained from breaking it; everybody lost it. That is what "this is nobody's" looks like, and it is why this element is where our first study begins, through litter. We have given it its own post.

6. Fair and reliable public services. The bin is collected on the day it is meant to be. The clinic has the medicine. The licence is issued without a bribe. Researchers who study trust across countries keep finding the same thing: people learn whether to trust each other largely from how fairly institutions treat them. Where officials are corrupt, people assume their neighbours are too (Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005). The Nordic countries, which top every trust survey, also top the lists for honest and effective government. That is not a coincidence.

7. Truthful public information. The timetable is right. The price list is the price. Official numbers can be believed. When people cannot trust the notice board, they stop trusting the people behind it.

8. Kindness to strangers. Someone gives directions without wanting anything. A shopkeeper lets you come back and pay tomorrow. This is the element Bulawayo is often praised for already, and it is a real asset. Warmth between people who know each other is common everywhere; a high-trust city extends it to people you have never met.

The examples, with honest caveats

Dubai is famously safe, and lost items really are handed in. It is also one of the richest cities on earth, with heavy policing, cameras on most corners and severe penalties. Some of what looks like trust there is deterrence. We want to learn from it without necessarily pretending Bulawayo can copy its budget or would want its laws.

Singapore went from a city of open drains and spitting in the 1960s to one of the cleanest and safest in the world. It did it with campaigns, fines, a huge workforce of cleaners and a government that did what it said. Its own officials admit it is "a cleaned city" more than a clean one.

Japan is the clearest case where ordinary people, not police, carry the trust. Children clean their own classrooms. Lost property is returned because a law makes it easy and rewarded, and because almost everyone around you does it too.

Denmark and the Nordics score highest in the world when people are asked whether most people can be trusted. They are also among the most equal societies, with the least corruption. Trust there was not engineered in a decade; it grew over a century alongside fair institutions.

Kigali is Africa's most quoted example of order and cleanliness. It got there partly through a compulsory monthly community work day and firm, sometimes harsh, enforcement that human rights groups have criticised. It shows what is possible on this continent, and also what price we would not pay.

Where Bulawayo starts

We should be honest about the starting point. National surveys in Zimbabwe find very few people saying that most people can be trusted, and only about half say they trust their local council. Bulawayo has recorded the highest theft rate of any province in recent police statistics. At the same time, the city has a long memory of being the cleanest in the country, a strong culture of neighbourliness, and churches, schools and residents' groups that already organise people every week.

Trust is low. The raw materials for building it are not.

Why we are studying this, and how

We do not believe a city can be made trustworthy by posters or speeches. We want to find what has actually been measured to work, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, and test it on real streets with real counts.

This post is the map. Each element above is a question we intend to study on its own, starting with the most visible one: the care of shared things, through litter. That study is already under way and has its own post. Others will follow: honesty with lost property, keeping time and promises, and the fairness of the services we all depend on.

If you have lived in a city where you could leave your bike outside and find it there, tell us in the comments what made that possible. If you have ideas about which element Bulawayo should work on next, we would like to hear those too.

Si ye phambili.