The streets my love walks in

I have two children. My youngest has just left the stroller to explore the world on his own.

This is the world we've made for him to explore: ugly, dirty, full of garbage.

I'm ashamed to have brought him and his older brother to live in Athens, a city so deprived of nature and beauty.
Besides a few well-known spots (and a few less known ones) everyday life is defined by the same dreary rows of blocks of flats, and noisy streets full of cars and their exhaust fumes, with nothing pretty for the eye to see.
Instead, everywhere one turns one sees neglect and piles of garbage.
Greeks don't seem to care for their surroundings, the "outside", the land of strangers. Instead, they turn their attention inwards, at home, the place where they receive their friends and relatives. Their streets and neighbors are like a no man's land which one simply has to cross on the way to work or for any other reason. It is not a place to care for or try to improve, being no indicator of one's status as a breadwinner or a homemaker. Therefore, no attention is paid to it, as if it were not a part of our everyday lives.
Literally -and I've noticed this time and again- people are practically blind to their surroundings.
However, these surroundings affect them more than they themselves realize.
Besides the dangers inherent in the smog-filled atmosphere, the garbage-filled streets and impassable sidewalks, this environment of ugliness all around us affects the young who come to regard it as natural so much that they perpetuate it without seeing it for what it really is.
Will my children grow up to be part of the problem, at the same time their mother is striving for a solution?
And if so, will that be so bad, after all?
Which is better? Swimming like a fish in the water (however murky), or trying to reverse the tide?