Time for county governments to regulate outdoor advertising

Campaign posters in Nairobi CBD during 2022 General election. [Stafford Ondego, Standard] According to the Planning Law, advertisements include letters, placards, and hoarding signboard notice, whether illuminated or not. Writing on a shop fascia, writing on a door aimed at drawing attention, road traffic signs, and election posters are advertisements. County governments have the power to grant permission for the display of advertisements in the same way they grant permission for the extension and renewal of leases. However, the display of an advertisement inside a building that is not visible from a street or public place is not a development. An advertisement does not have to be physical. Why? The Constitution defines land to include air. Therefore, a beam of light that produces a visible image in the air is an advertisement and requires permission. In some countries, technology for advertisement has evolved from billboards, posters, and placards to advertisements in the atmosphere in form of visible images. County governments should take note of this and adjust to this emerging international trend. Outdoor advertisements should be regulated for various reasons. Firstly, they should be regulated in the interest of amenities or public safety. The Physical and Land Use (Advertisement) Regulations, 2021 defines amenity as "attributes in a neighbourhood which contribute to the quality of the environment and to its better enjoyment for any permitted use and includes the effect upon visual and aural amenity in the immediate neighbourhood.'' Put differently, amenity refers to the appearance of buildings, landscapes, and streets. Signage colours should be compatible with the prescribed colour scheme of surrounding buildings. They should not cause "visual pollution". A pleasant neighbourhood or a sightly building can be "downgraded" by poorly designed advertisements that are out of scale, out of place, or irritatingly dominant. In processing applications for the display of an outdoor advertisement, a planning authority considers the general characteristics of a locality, urban design, the massing of buildings, and cultural considerations. With regard to public safety, advertisements should not be unsafe to motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians utilising a road, or obscure a road traffic sign. Billboards on a road draw the curiosity of motorists and may result in momentary inattention and possible accidents. A billboard should not have such a distracting impact that users of a road are endangered even though they take reasonable care of themselves. Research carried out by the Swedish National Road and Transport Institute in 2012 found that billboards attract more and longer glances than regular traffic lights and may cause accidents. Secondly, advertisements should not take up too much space, displace alternative users of land or result in clutter. Thirdly, they should not be incompatible with architectural or historic features in a locality or be unduly dominant but should be designed as an integral part of buildings or landscapes. They should therefore be compatible with the existing or desired future character of a locality including compatibility with the scale and proportion of buildings. In other words, advertisements should match the scale of adjacent buildings, landscapes, and street furniture. Thirdly, under Article, 66 county governments regulate advertisements in the interest of public morality. The law provides that permission for the display of an advertisement should be subjected to the moral character of the advertisement. County governments should therefore protect the sensibilities of children, youth, and the elderly by restricting advertisements that are obscene, vulgar, or profane. Fourthly, outdoor advertisements should be controlled to avoid clutter which may negatively affect the appearance and character of an area. Under the Physical and Land Use Planning (Advertisement) Regulations, 2021, a political candidate must apply for permission to display an election advertisement and complete a statutory form undertaking to remove and clean advertisement material after an election. County governments did not enforce this requirement. We trust the new county governments will. Sixthly, county governments should impose limitations on the content of advertisements to ensure compliance with national and county policies relating to various matters. Finally, county governments are an arbiter when attention-grabbing advertisements that may be financially valuable to some individuals, threaten or distract the public. In conclusion, outdoor advertisements are a development because they are attached to and affect the appearance of land. They should be morally acceptable to the citizenry, achieve desirable design quality, be compatible with the architectural design of buildings, and be in sync with the character of the streetscape and the size of other signs in a locality. Roadside junk mail does not contribute to the beauty, but is a scar on the environment and dominates the vision of the citizenry without their consent. Although outdoor advertising creates a vibrant economy, it positively or negatively affects the amenity or safety of human settlements. Therefore, there is a need to balance the requirement of industry and commerce with protecting the character and appearance of towns and rural areas including public morality. That is a constitutional mandate of county governments.

Time for county governments to regulate outdoor advertising

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