Make sure you tend your lawn in the land of the free

[Louis VI the Fat]

What strikes me, is not the police brutality - we have plenty of that. No, for me, it's the lawn, the American psyche, and the incoherent view of property. How can a people, so obsessed with private property and individuality, have turned a, for me, such private, individual and ultimately petty institution as the front lawn, into a communal battlefield?

I should deconstruct America's lawn, but this article goes a long way:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Decoding the Lawn

The American lawn has become a strategic battleground between the collective image of democracy and the property rights of the individual. The utilization of "borrowed views," in which one neighbour’s vista is another’s property, evolved into a standard for suburban design unique to North America. The goal of making private properties park-like, and thereby communal, led to the development of "no-fence" agreements with the lawn itself as a fenceless barrier. Yet the omission of enclosures around suburban gardens jeopardized the privacy afforded by fence or wall. This ambiguity of the lawn as a threshold between the public space of the street and private domestic space has remained a constant of the American landscape from the moment of its colonization.

This dynamic comes to the fore in publications on lawn aesthetics. Frank J. Scott’s The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, for example, stated that responsibility for the beauty of the lawn as a publicly viewed surface falls under the owner’s civic responsibility. In the same year, Weidenmann’s Beautifying Country Homes described the proper composition of suburban residences as one that opened the front yards to view, a continuity and transparency that forms one of the chief pleasures of the suburban landscape. The lawn, it seems, acts as a great communal house, a vast universal yard. But while the absence or erasure of overt partitions and barriers produces a sense of apparent democratic openness, an array of laws, codes, and restrictive covenants regulates the use and appearance of privately owned lawns, thereby ensuring the visual conformity of these communities. A defining mark of suburban life, the "visibility principle" describes a visual arena that permits residents to observe each other’s behaviour and lifestyles with an unprecedented ease. Civic duty is thus linked to the aesthetic of the landscape ultimately as a moral law: inhabitants must maintain their lawns as a community place. In this environment the subtle yet unmistakable frontier, where the manicured lawn brushes against the unkempt one, is enough to disturb the peace of the neighbourhood.

More.

[BigTex]

What strikes me, is not the police brutality - we have plenty of that. No, for me, it's the lawn, the American psyche, and the incoherent view of property. How can a people, so obsessed with private property and individuality, have turned a, for me, such private, individual and ultimately petty institution as the front lawn, into a communal battlefield?

I should deconstruct America's lawn, but this article goes a long way:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Decoding the Lawn

The American lawn has become a strategic battleground between the collective image of democracy and the property rights of the individual. The utilization of "borrowed views," in which one neighbour’s vista is another’s property, evolved into a standard for suburban design unique to North America. The goal of making private properties park-like, and thereby communal, led to the development of "no-fence" agreements with the lawn itself as a fenceless barrier. Yet the omission of enclosures around suburban gardens jeopardized the privacy afforded by fence or wall. This ambiguity of the lawn as a threshold between the public space of the street and private domestic space has remained a constant of the American landscape from the moment of its colonization.

This dynamic comes to the fore in publications on lawn aesthetics. Frank J. Scott’s The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds, for example, stated that responsibility for the beauty of the lawn as a publicly viewed surface falls under the owner’s civic responsibility. In the same year, Weidenmann’s Beautifying Country Homes described the proper composition of suburban residences as one that opened the front yards to view, a continuity and transparency that forms one of the chief pleasures of the suburban landscape. The lawn, it seems, acts as a great communal house, a vast universal yard. But while the absence or erasure of overt partitions and barriers produces a sense of apparent democratic openness, an array of laws, codes, and restrictive covenants regulates the use and appearance of privately owned lawns, thereby ensuring the visual conformity of these communities. A defining mark of suburban life, the "visibility principle" describes a visual arena that permits residents to observe each other’s behaviour and lifestyles with an unprecedented ease. Civic duty is thus linked to the aesthetic of the landscape ultimately as a moral law: inhabitants must maintain their lawns as a community place. In this environment the subtle yet unmistakable frontier, where the manicured lawn brushes against the unkempt one, is enough to disturb the peace of the neighbourhood.

More.

Something I havent seem people mention is the fact that over grown lanws out in the west can become severe fire hazards. One of the main reasons arizona started to promote those desert friendly lawns was to cut down on the risk of fires around houses. Over in CA FL and even in Texas they are going quite hard to promote fire safer lawns out in the country. May not be the reason for this code, but there is a good reason why they exist and why they should exist.

[Bijo]

People and their lawns. Barrgh!