A Lawn Is a Suburb

Why do we resist letting things grow up and mature?

Recently I saw two images. One was this path mowed through tall grass not far from my house:

The other was this post from a Virginia county government my wife showed me on Facebook:

Now I’ve seen tall grass before. And, of course, I’ve seen freshly cut grass. Now that I have a little lawn, I cut the grass every week. But—maybe with my “urbanist perception” turned on—that photo I took of the path through the grass struck me.

The actual plants that make up the cut-grass path and the tall brush around it are the same. The more varied, visually diverse brush is what grass grows up into. What we call “grass” or “lawn” is grass not permitted to grow or mature. In other words, what we think of as grass doesn’t exist in nature except as a stage in a lifecycle.

I don’t think this ever explicitly occurred to me before. I thought of lawn grass and tall, wild grass as two different kinds of plants, even though I knew they really weren’t. I never really thought about the fact that a lawn is grass, stunted.

Which makes me think about suburbia.

Last year, in a long piece for Vox, I wrote about the evolution of the suburbs into more densely populated, culturally diverse places nonetheless distinct from the city. Towards the end, I made this analogy, comparing suburbia to a “first draft”:

Consider the Levitt houses of Long Island — a sort of ur-suburbia — very few of which still look like they did when they were built. Most have been modified, renovated, and expanded over the years; what was once a standard product has diverged in thousands of ways. (Some are even under-the-table duplexes, and it seems to work just fine.)

Levittown was the first draft, not the final or perpetual state. The distributed, incremental evolution we can observe with these decades-old tract houses is coming to fruition in the suburbs, writ large.

I made this argument in the piece, and have continued to make it in different ways—for example, here—that in some ways there is really only kind of urban settlement. What we call “towns” and “cities”, and maybe even “suburbs”, are just urban places in various states of maturity or growth. A town is a small urban settlement; a city is a large one. And a suburb is one that has not been allowed to grow up.

In other words, a suburb is not a type of place; it’s just the initial stage of what would eventually become a city, artificially frozen in time, encased in regulatory amber.

A suburb, in other words, is a lawn.

Maybe this is a bit of a stretch. But am I crazy for thinking there might be some underlying conceptual similarity between how short grass—stunted grass—is automatically seen as good, and how people oppose density and growth in their neighborhoods? Is there any conceptual similarity between the diversity of a field or meadow allowed to grow, and a human settlement allowed to grow?

Now “diversity” is one of those words that gets coded as politically correct or lefty or whatever. But the thing that strikes me about Northern Virginia—and that my mother remembers about New York City—is how unselfconscious the diversity is. Nobody walks around saying “I interacted with a person of a different skin color today!” It’s just the way it is. It’s ordinary, but also kind of remarkable. When a place grows, there’s more room for everyone.

Our ideas and rules about land use—from where homes are allowed to go, and how many are allowed to be built, all the way down to the characterization of tall grass as a health hazard and the apparent ban on natural meadows in a place like Stafford County—privilege a rigid, narrow, and expensive idea of order. Charles Marohn of Strong Towns calls the suburban development pattern “orderly but dumb,” in contrast to the naturally occurring, bottom-up “chaotic but smart” ethos of traditional urban development.

What urbanism has made it possible for me to do is discern, or perceive, the ideology concealed under seemingly dry and arcane things like zoning codes and grass-cutting ordinances. Single-family zoning, or the preference for lawns over meadows, are at their heart not matters of public health or public order, but social engineering. There are so many ways in which these rules have produced anomalous outcomes and squeezed out or rendered suspicious what would be, in other contexts, completely natural human behavior.

In many ways we’ve engineered an environment which turns human activity and natural, organic growth and maturity into a nuisance: an environment which we must serve by stunting a part of the world and a part of ourselves.

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Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

Going Nowhere Fast

The Train Not Taken

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