Building Community One Front Yard 

at a Time

Plenty of evidence shows that grass is a poor, environmentally damaging ground cover that has been overused and consumes an unreasonable amount of resources, like time, chemicals, and water. In response, a growing number of suburban homeowners are replacing their turf lawns with alternatives, such as wildflowers; edible, pollinating, and rock gardens; native shrubs; and perennials. 

This Dundas homeowner replaced their front grass with wildflowers and native perennials. Lots of people stop to chat about the change and compliment them on how it looks.

But in addition to addressing environmental concerns by replacing the idle grass that has typically appeared in front of their houses, suburban homeowners have responded to basic human social and psychological needs by altering the way they use the space in front of their homes and making it more personal and interactive. The pandemic clearly strained our ability to socialize and highlighted the inherent drive to feel part of a community and connect with and help others. To satisfy these fundamental needs, people instinctively reached out with small gestures that capitalized on the liminal space of their front yards, a space which belongs to them but faces outward in a publicly available way.

Although visits to Little Free Libraries dropped off at the beginning of the pandemic because of the fear of Covid spread, in many communities, the number of these libraries has grown since 2021. The boxes provide a place to exchange not only books, but other items, like hand sanitizer and non-perishable food items. They are a reminder to passersby that they are not alone and the community cares. 

I noticed an increased number of people purposefully seeking to engage the public over the pandemic. The first sign of people coming together was the 7 pm nationwide initiative to head out front and bang pots and pans to show appreciation for healthcare and other frontline workers. Another example is the increased number of Little Free Libraries appearing at the edge of people's front yards. These give-a-book, take-a-book exchanges have been around since 2009 but grew in popularity — more so in the second year of the pandemic after the initial hyper-cautiousness about Covid had diminished — as a way to build community and spread good will. According to the Little Free Library website, the structures are intended as mini-town-squares that help residents meet, and make neighbourhoods feel friendlier. In addition, according to a Los Angeles Times article, residents have been using their existing libraries or building similar units, like "Blessing Boxes," to share non-perishables and pandemic supplies like hand sanitizer or toilet paper.

"Who stole the soap out of the bathtub? The robber ducky!"

Amid the pandemic seriousness, one creative Dundas homeowner gave neighbours a daily guffaw by posting a riddle at the edge of her front yard.

This inclination to connect to our fellow human beings, especially ones that live in our everyday space is basic but has gone largely unaddressed by post-war architects and urban designers who centred their creative efforts around the home's interior where all the creature comforts, like TV and air conditioning, could be enjoyed. In addition, the front porch — that perch from which to view the world and be viewed by the world — has all but disappeared. Front porches provide an ideal setting for safe, brief encounters with passersby, both strange and familiar, or a place to sip a drink, read a book, or otherwise live your life as a visible member of the community.

James Howard Kunstler points out the bias that privileges indoor over outdoor life, and in particular the disappearance of a useful front porch, in his Atlantic article, Home from Nowhere, which examines the crisis of urban sprawl and supports New Urbanism principles to bring back human-scaled public spaces. In the article, Kunstler says,

Likewise, the front porch is an important and desirable element in some neighborhoods. A porch less than six feet deep is useless except for storage, because it provides too little room for furniture and the circulation of human bodies. Builders tack on inadequate porches as a sales gimmick to enhance "curb appeal," so that the real-estate agent can drive up with the customer and say, "Look, a front porch!" The porch becomes a cartoon feature of the house, like the little fake cupola on the garage. This saves the builders money in time and materials. Perhaps they assume that the street will be too repulsive to sit next to.Why do builders even bother with pathetic-looking cartoon porches? Apparently Americans need at least the idea of a porch to be reassured, symbolically, that they're decent people living in a decent place. But the cartoon porch only compounds the degradation of the public realm.

The need for human interaction is so basic, perhaps we take it for granted; but the truth is creating spaces that facilitate social behaviour is not necessarily easy or a priority for architects.  Jan Gehl is a pioneering Danish urban planner who observes that it is "inherently human to want to be around other people, that being in the presence of other people is highly interesting, and we should build our cities accordingly — at the human scale" (listen to Gehl discuss his urban planning philosophy on SPACE10 Design Lab's Imagine podcast). For his more than 50-year career, Gehl has focussed on creating spaces that are "good for people."  Gehl describes his architectural education as preoccupied with interior spaces:

Everything I was taught in architecture school was about life inside buildings. It was always believed that by changing the inside of buildings, people could have a better life. Then we started to think, maybe ‘good for people’ is not inside the buildings, but also outside the buildings. Maybe, ‘good for people’ is very much what is happening between the buildings and not in the buildings themselves.

In our neighbourhood, where porches and verandas are rare, homeowners took matters into their own hands during the pandemic and worked a desire path* back to their front yards, finding ways to use this space and thereby interact with their community. Anecdotally, I've heard people say they met people during the Covid shutdown they never even knew were neighbours. After all, a sense of togetherness, belonging, and community are important factors to being happy, and in the case of the last few years, people got creative to stay social. 

* Desire paths are unintended trails or walkways that emerge naturally, usually skirting the formal paths installed by indifferent officials. A sitting area created by the homeowner in the front yard is a type of spacial desire path that addresses an unfulfilled need intuitively and creatively. Listen to the wonderful 99% Invisible podcast discuss desire paths. 

Many homes in the "Sherwood Forest" neighbourhood in Dundas lack front porches. Their midcentury modern style tend to feature carports (a bit strange given the climate), but no porch. The owner of one of these homes likes to sit in the front yard because it is more interesting and gives him the opportunity to chat with neighbours and enjoy his perennial garden. In 2021, he hardscaped a section of his front yard and situated two Adirondack chairs where he and his wife often read or talk.

Back out front 

The first summer of the Covid 19 pandemic, I started to notice a trend in my suburban Canadian neighbourhood that was mundane, made sense, but nevertheless nagged at me as potentially significant and culturally meaningful. 

 

Because of the deadly coronavirus that sieged the world in 2021, and its rapid spread by way of respiratory droplets, social activity in public spaces like restaurants, movie theatres, and shopping malls was restricted. Stuck at home with limited options for human interaction, people began spending greater time socializing outdoors, specifically in front of their houses, pulling chairs out onto lawns, stringing up fairy lights in garages to make them hospitable to humans not cars, or planting vegetable and pollinating gardens where there once had only been decorative idle grass. 

This Dundas homeowner replaced a portion of her front yard grass with garden boxes and planted a variety of dahlias, a tuber flower that is dug up each fall and replanted in the spring. Passersby have commented that they purposely walk by the house to see the flowers and thank her for adding a little beauty to their day. 

Suburban homes, intended as respites from the everyday grind of work and the “real world,” had become confinements, and in response, we began to spill out front to live and socialize with our fellow humans. 

This shift in behaviour seems like an obvious coping tactic and yet the way we use and define our front yard, that liminal space between a house and the street that is privately held yet publicly exposed, is culturally significant, a kind of anthropological look at the quotidian. The changes that have occurred over the pandemic are part of a meaningful history comprising ideas and theories regarding ownership, status, race, culture and technology. Like so many other aspects of the everyday, social and cultural forces are at work, transforming how we live. Even in our own front yards.  

 

At least in my neighbourhood, this change toward lingering out front was especially conspicuous because our homes, a swath of midcentury modern split levels in Dundas, Ontario, just outside of Hamilton, were not designed architecturally to have a “public facing” life. 

 

The Sherwood Forest and Pleasant Valley neighbourhoods where I live (just their names indicate an aspiration for suburban Shangri-la) were developed over two decades beginning in the early 1960s and attracted a largely white professional class of homeowners – many of whom worked at McMaster University or the McMaster Medical Centre. 

Early houses of the Sherwood Forest neighbourhood, 1963, Dundas, Ontario.

These suburban houses were built at a time when creature comforts like air conditioning and television were widely available to the middle and upper classes that lived in them. The homes were designed with a focus on the interiors and oriented toward the nature out back. The front yards were mostly decorative and idle. Aerial photograph from McMaster Library

At the time they were built, these houses generally lacked the kind of architectural features, like a front porch, that encouraged interplay between the public space of the street and the homeowner’s private space. They functioned as “cocoons” for living away from the busy, commercial, more diverse urban downtown. Up until the early 20^th century, the traditional front porch had been a steadfast feature of many Hamilton, Dundas and Ancaster homes but began to disappear when the automobile mandated that garages occupy a large part of the residential footprint and outside air became polluted with exhaust fumes, making lingering outdoors less appealing. 

In addition to the large garages that adorned newly configured homes, air conditioning — which was an increasingly popular domestic comfort — eliminated the need to get outside on hot summer days to enjoy cooler temps on a shaded porch or veranda. Factors such as these led to fewer front porches included in the architectural plans of suburban homes and turned to privilege car space, most notably garages and carports, over social space at the front of the home.  

 

Throw in the lure of television, which was becoming a common, even dominant, household feature in 1960s households, and we can see why domestic life turned inward, away from public interaction, and residential architectural design followed suit. 

However, fast-forward to March 2021: Covid hits and people are forced to hunker down in their houses. As the pandemic progresses and socializing with others eventually becomes justifiable and, frankly, necessary for mental health, outside becomes the gathering spot of choice. In neighbourhoods like mine, where porches were non-existent, people adapted and created their own public-facing settings, thereby putting to use previously dormant parts of their properties. These different, more pragmatic uses for the front yard seem to indicate a new, long-lasting attitude towards this space. I see my neighbours tearing up turf, planting edible and pollinating gardens, creating sitting areas, and putting in Little Libraries or other community-minded resources in front of their houses. One resident has even offered up a portion of their property as a community garden and host weekly permaculture lessons. 

Throughout this site, I will explore other aspects and histories of the front yard, how it has encouraged or discouraged a sense of community, how it has evolved into much more than just a tidy plot of manicured grass, and what this all says about us as a society.  

Many Dundas homeowners are opting for a grass-free front yard full of pollinating plants.

What Makes a Front Yard Beautiful?

I used to think a beautiful front yard meant manicured green grass with a small, well-defined garden providing a measured degree of colour. Certainly, this was the aesthetic growing up in my hometown of Ancaster, a Hamilton, Ontario, suburb near Toronto. Front yards were places to drop bicycles, occasionally pitch a political sign, or exchange pleasantries with neighbours before ducking inside the house. For the most part, however, they served as a kind of no-man's land where not much transpired. This outside antechamber acted as a buffer zone between the inner activity of the private home and the public arena of the sidewalk, street, and greater community. It was largely for show, not really a space for living.

Grass has been the default choice for front yards for decades. But is a decorative, idle grass lawn just the landscaping equivalent of Muzak? Bland and inoffensive. Photo by I Do Nothing But Love on Unsplash

Perhaps, what makes the space in front of the average suburban home meaningful is the role it plays in unifying the overall neighbourhood and creating conformity and compliance through either enforced or implied quality standards. The front yard is a manifestation of the agreement we make to live together as a community. Although privately owned, it is visually shared, making it part of everyone's streetscape.

Civil society to a large extent relies on conformity: upholding a set of democratic government rules. To achieve conformity, the City of Hamilton, like most other local North American governments, maintains a bylaw that requires homeowners to keep grass and weeds trimmed under a certain height. Furthermore, the Province of Ontario offers a lawn care guide on its Minstry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs website, citing mowing, watering, and fertilizing as optimal ways to keep a lawn healthy.

Looking at front yards in the United States, the aesthetic model is similar to Canada's. For example, Celebration, Florida, a utopian project developed by the Walt Disney Company and envisioned as an ideal American community*, features supposedly optimal design elements at all levels. The town's design guidelines inform residents that their "primary consideration is of the overall “streetscape” to which each property should contribute, with no single property dominating its appearance....(owners should) locate favorite pieces of decoration in the Private Zone (behind the home) which provides greater opportunity for personal enjoyment." In addition, lawns should be maintained to between three and four inches.

The ideal front yard aesthetic from Hamilton to Celebration and in suburban developments right across the continent were intended to maintain a semblance of order in communities, especially since the 1950s when these developments surged in numbers. Keep the front neat, tidy and free of vivacity. Live your life and express your personality out back, out of public sight. Stick to the government handbook and we all get along. 

However, human beings are wired to question conventions and buck trends, and their attitude toward front yards is no different. Upsetting conformity, even in a small gesture such as treating your front yard differently than your neighbours is, at its core, an act of dissidence. Furthermore, world events and technologies constantly alter how people live. Customs, like maintaining a cropped front lawn are hard to break and take some societal adjustments. It feels like an adjustment period is happening now with our use of the front yard.

This Dundas homeowner (ok, it's me) does not keep a pristine, weed-free front yard. What must the neighbours say?

When we first moved into our suburban Dundas home in 2008, our front yard was like most of the others on the street: a carpet of green grass with some small shrubs that hugged the brick facade. Within a couple of years, our front lawn was less than ideal, reflecting a bit of the chaos that was going on inside. Between work and managing two young kids, lawn maintenance was low on our priority list. We kept the grass trim with a motorless push mower but did not feel inspired to spend a lot of time pulling weeds nor did we believe in applying pesticides. The truth was, we wanted to be respectable neighbours but really didn't care if our lawn fit some suburban paradigm. Our feelings led to tearing up most of the grass and planting drought-resistant shrubs and ground cover. Easier for us and better for the environment. What could be wrong with that?

How "beautiful" does your front yard need to be? The aesthetic ideal of a cropped green lawn seems to be changing, but alternatives are wide-ranging and represent different interpretations of "beauty."

Well, what could go wrong is if you have a neighbour that does not ascribe to the same landscaping aesthetic. After all, what is beautiful is extremely personal. Some homeowners resist considerations of conventional "beauty" altogether, yielding their yard over to nature to have its way and allowing weeds and all manner of flora to grow wild. One gardener in our area uses their yard in a completely functional way, having converted it to permaculture, or "permanent agriculture" that is sustainable and regenerative. The downside according to a few neighbours is that it looks cluttered and messy.

Just a few days ago, a CBC article described how one London, Ontario, woman returned home from vacation to find her pollinating garden, cultivated over two decades, had been mowed down by city workers after a neighbour complained.

This Dundas homeowner, a landscape designer, did away with grass but still wanted a pleasing aesthetic. They sourced native plants left over from jobs and made their own water feature out of a large rock. 

Plenty of homeowners in Dundas and elsewhere prefer the decorum of a grass lawn and appreciate the structure it gives the neighbourhood. I spoke to some neighbours who claim to actually enjoy mowing their lawns. They refer to achieving a zen-like meditative state by creating perfectly patterned lines and a delightful heady rush from the smell of freshly cropped grass.

Nevertheless, increasingly, there are signs to suggest the pristine, green weedless lawn is falling out of fashion. Even if some homeowners continue to prefer a grassy front yard, at the very least, alternative treatments are gaining in presence and acceptance.

For example, our next-door neighbour did not even complain when our milkweed plants drifted over to their side of the property line and started rooting themselves en masse. Milkweed is the sole diet of the monarch caterpillar and thus critical to the survival of the monarch butterfly. Once thought to be an invasive weed, milkweed today is welcomed by many gardeners who want to propagate the dwindling monarch population. In fact, a gentleman in his 60s who recently moved into the neighbourhood came knocking at our door asking to dig up some of the perennials for his own grass-free front yard. He did away with turf shortly after moving in, opting instead for rows and patterns of organized shrubs and perennials.

The perceived beauty of a grass lawn is imposed on and sold to us by various hegemonic structures. I mean, why is a yard comprised of pollinating flowers or edibles not accepted as "beautiful?"  As Michael Pollan argues in his 1989 essay, Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns, there is beauty in the act of gardening, which is "an infinitely variable process of invention and discovery" as opposed to the "totalitarianism" of lawns. "Gardening...tutors us in nature's ways, fostering an ethic of give and take with respect to the land. Gardens instruct us in the particularities of place." Surely there is beauty in working with and learning from the land rather than oppressing it and bending it to our will with chemicals and time better spent on more meaningful pursuits.

Since the summer of 2020, several of our neighbours have turned their front yards over to wildflowers, native shrubs and perennials, incorporated vegetable gardens, and more than a couple of households have added bird feeders and bird baths. Perhaps these changes are due to extra time spent at home over the pandemic and the need to find hobbies. Or maybe there has been a deeper appreciation for nature and wildlife given the grave scare the world underwent. Whatever the reasons, a beautiful front yard is taking different forms that move beyond an outdated but lingering grass lawn aesthetic.

* Celebration, Florida, despite its attempt to be a model U.S. town, has been widely criticized for its lack of diversity, even by Disney executives, according to an article in the New York Times.

Why Grass?

The front lawn, and grass as a ground cover in general, has become so ubiquitous and normalized in North American suburban landscapes, it’s hard to imagine communities without it. Whether a sprawling swanky neighbourhood, an urban apartment complex, schoolyard, or stretch of highway, the surrounding area tends to feature grass. Much like the brick, mortar, and timber used to construct houses or the concrete that comprises our roads and sidewalks, green grass is a presumed and prominent part of the everyday environment. But this turfy terrain has not always been so dominant, and there is evidence to indicate our preoccupation with grass is dissipating. Cheap to install, but costly and time-consuming, not to mention noisy to maintain, grass is a non-native species that hogs resources like water and — thinking in terms of its opportunity cost — could be replaced with plants, gardens, or other flora that actually benefit the environment and the humans that live there.

With so many marks against it, how did grass become such a community bedrock, spanning and uniting spaces across North America? Why do people spend so many hours tending to a plant that gives little in return? And why is it difficult to break this bond we have with it?

Grass makes up the majority of front yards, but is also used in parks, golf courses, and other spaces. Photo by J. Kau on Unsplash

The single-family detached house surrounded by grass is a North American aesthetic ideal that was sparked in the late 1700s, took hold in the 19th century and reached a peak in the post-war suburban surge of the 1950s and 60s. The original concept of the lawn was imported to the United States and Canada by North European settlers, especially those from England, who brought landscape design and grass seed varieties to their new home. Here, as in Europe, at first only the wealthy had the time or money to cultivate a well-manicured lawn that was purely decorative. Its low profile was achieved mostly by grazing sheep and goats, but eventually by hired help who took to it with scythes. Given the time period, enslaved people were likely tasked with this maintenance as well. In these early days, the lawn was a rural phenomenon, and one confined to the mostly, white upper classes, giving the lawn a baked-in connotation of status and privilege (see more about the lawn's early history at Planet Natural or read Virginia Scott Jenkins' fascinating chronicle in The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession).

Meanwhile, as the grassy verdure made its mark in high-end residential landscape design, working-class property owners could not afford to be so frivolous with their land plots; most people continued to use their front yards pragmatically for animal pasture, gardening, or socializing. The division created by the growing appeal of an ornamental grass lawn that was inoperative yet costly to maintain disclosed cultural and class distinctions. Having a front lawn quite clearly announced your status, much like your style of clothing or vernacular did. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for example, exhalted the singular home surrounded by a trim, tidy lawn at their respective estates, and postcards and illustrations of these would have been widely circulated, modelling landscape design ideals, according to Jenkins.

iStock.com / 19th century illustration of Mt. Vernon. The former plantation estate and burial place of George Washington featured large stretches of trimmed grass in the fashion of English estates and provided a landscape design model to U.S. homeowners.

In subsequent decades, supported by factors including the popularity of golf, the public park movement, advances in lawn care technologies, and home and gardening magazines, the grass lawn ideal further rooted itself in the American psyche as a hallmark of achievement, civility, and status. By the early to mid-1900s, a well-manicured lawn became possible for a wider, middle-class population and a signal homeowners could send to neighbours that they were conscientious, collegial, and prosperous. Especially in the post-war fifties, with an influx of WWII veterans seeking affordable housing, increased car ownership, and expanding public transportation, local governments facilitated residential growth to the less populated areas outside city borders, thereby creating the artery of suburban neighbourhoods still lived in and popular today.

Burgeoning post-war suburbia manifested the dream of home ownership for the middle-class, and the foundation of this cultural fantasy was literally a plot of green turf that was to be managed and maintained to uphold community standards and conformity. A manicured lawn is part of the social contract of living together in a suburban neighbourhood: keep your lawn neat to show you fit in and play nicely with others. When it comes to living peacefully in suburbia, conformity good, independent expression bad.

Nevertheless, grassy tides started to turn in the 1970s, gaining momentum in the 21st century as people learned more about the detrimental effects of so much grass in places where it didn't belong. Because it is not native to North America and does not naturally thrive in the varying climes, grass is massively irrigated. According to Cristina Milesi, a NASA scientist, in fact, grass is the single largest irrigated crop in the United States. Not only is it steadily thirsty, but it also requires a cocktail of herbicides and pesticides, which ultimately end up in the watershed, and a host of noisy, costly machines to stay trim. Given its many downsides, people were bound to get wise and give grass the boot; however, the billion dollar lawn care industry that grew up around it has a vested interest in keeping homeowners addicted to their lawns.

Furthermore, perhaps due to the intense marketing and inculcation by the lawn care industry, grass has been promoted and sold in such a way that there are deep sentimental and even political associations that keep it mainstream. Think about a song like "Green Green Grass of Home" that equates green grass with the warmth and love we experience with family, arguably even with God. Lawn care commercials and advertising emphasize solid family values underpinning the kempt grass lawn as a means of social conformity.

But given what we now know about grass, is it time to look critically at this everyday suburban staple and question its pertinence in a world hopefully keen to tackle environmental ills and wise to the wiles of neoliberalist marketing and brainwashing?

Pete Seeger, sang about suburban compliance and conformity in his 1963 hit "Little Boxes:" "They are all made out of ticky tack and they all look just the same." 

Even before Covid hit, many people in suburban neighbourhoods like mine were starting to break away from the conventional grass front yard. When my husband and I bought our 1960s home, one of the first things we did was replace half the grass with shrubs and perennial flowers. I would like to say it was because we were beginning to learn about the toll grass was having on the environment; but, quite frankly, we just didn't want to buy a lawnmower and spend time attending to the ridiculous, pointless and fruitless task of lawn maintenance.

We weren't ready to turn the lawn completely over to nature like our neighbours a few doors down had; their front yard is meadow-like and wild, which, 15 years ago, was an anomaly. Today however, this aesthetic is more common (though there are still some community grumblings).

During the pandemic especially, in my neighbourhood and I imagine in others, people have used at least part of the time they had on their hands, to reassess their front yards. Some have planted vegetable gardens, some have ripped up their lawn to grow native species, and at least one neighbour has turned a portion of their private property into a community garden, even offering free weekly permaculture lessons.

These changes in how we view and treat the space in front of our homes I think are here to stay. Will everyone conform to this shift or will there be holdouts who love the tradition and order of a kempt grass lawn? Will they contribute to community strife or foster goodwill and exchange?

Suburbia, Photo by Pierre Metivier / Creative Commons