The Grass-Scape

Kentucky Blue Grass fills our empty space. We like it because it locks down the landscape. It looks tidy when trimmed. It’s manageable though it takes a lot of management.

Pleasant Park used to be a parking lot.

Someone has to mow it, which takes a machine and typically gasoline. With such small lot sizes in South Hills, it would be absurd for every house to have a mower. I’ve seen a few houses in the area with push mowers—a throwback to my childhood in Kenya. Growing up, we would share that little contraption with our next door neighbors to mow our postage stamp yards in the city.

If neighbors aren’t mowing it themselves, they are paying others to do it. Many people in the area, mostly men, earn their income mowing lawns. This profession or way of life usually involves owning a pick up truck and doing odd jobs all over town. Through an extensive social network and maintaining good relationships, men make a living doing yard work, fixing things, moving things, shoveling snow, and generally being useful.

But if the city owns a vacant lot covered in grass, they will hire a company to mow it rather than an unlicensed neighbor. We operate within our social networks and within our spaces of trust. We work the most quickly this way and the most efficiently. Deeper than that, we operate this way as an expression of love, but in a strange twist, love becomes exclusion.

Unfortunately, in South Hills, trust is not tied to geography and social networks are not necessarily spatial. Our networks of trust and the geography of our affection has become institutional rather than tied up in the soil. But Jesus asks, "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?" 

A recent windstorm stripped MLK Leadership Academy's
garden of its straw and distributed it evenly across the grass:
a free mulch job. Nobody had to be paid for that.

When it comes to grass, institutionally determined aesthetics and pragmatism determine the care plan and where the money goes. “Institutionally” does refer to individual people or groups of people making aesthetic and pragmatic decisions, but such concerns are often dislocated from the economic concerns of those neighbors who fall outside the institutional identity or network of trust.

Because of the broader American dislocation from our ecology, individual’s concerns—institutional or not—are often at odds to the health of the soil, air, or watershed. Potential uses of land, such as nutrient building, food production, carbon sequestration, air filtering, water filtering, flood prevention, or water table recharge are not typically considered. Food production is perhaps the exception here, as it constitutes a direct ecological relationship between ourselves and the land. The others are abstract to us. We respond better to beauty and order.

Beauty and order brings us to placemaking, a potential solution to the toil and boredom of grass. By placemaking, I mean designing or gardening a space to give it an identity and utility for the particular people who occupy the space. The utility may be aesthetic, but thoughtful people can be more creative. Placemaking creates a human habitat with cultural resonance. A place becomes a poem with multiple uses and meanings. The term has grown out of the writings and work of Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte in the 1960s, and is used by various groups to describe creating “a sense of place.” I want to be more specific to say that placemaking is done most effectively when the people using the place are active in designing the place. By being agents in creating a place, the cultural resonance is increased. The place becomes part of a shared story and project. The beauty of placemaking comes from the people themselves.

Outdoor spaces have the potential to be welcoming and restful even in the winter. Empty lawns alone do not achieve this purpose, nor do bare parking lots. Rather, spaces designed collectively by neighbors and built with shared sweat become places with more potential to create shared spatial identities and to redefine networks of trust.

An excellent playground at Pleasant Park

Two excellent examples come to mind for South Hills—Pleasant Park and the vacant lots on Thomas Street. Pleasant Park was designed more formally through a process of neighbor input and buy in. What was once a bare parking lot is now a great park with space to play and exercise. Neighbors are still responsible for the upkeep of the property. Such input allowed for great ideas such as a sledding hill and a rain garden. Young trees were planted around the park. Recreational and ecological considerations came into view and became reality.

On Thomas, a more informal re-drawing of place has occurred. The Latino men and Congolese boys on the block have turned this space into a place—a human habitat with cultural resonance—with the use of only two rocks. They created goalposts and play soccer most evenings in the warmer months. They’ve created an informal, international, all-inclusive soccer league. Because the field has been temporarily abandoned, they have turned it into a place of their own.

I contradict myself as the space is almost entirely lawn—flat lawn. A slight rise to tall trees for shade and tall, disheveled grass on the edges gives the space an area to rest and an unmanaged look. A small forest behind it gives it a sense of wildness. Not all grass is bad. This grass is lived in.

Probably just some kids...

On a more personal note, American city spaces—suburban or urban—often seem to lack this human character and leave me feeling placeless. Most urban space is not

designed for people but for cars and for passing through, leading others to re-create unused spaces in positive ways or like the one to the right. In response to a visceral sense of not belonging, humans reach out and make their mark.

Most Americans center their placemaking on the inside of their homes or institutional settings where we live out our lives. An overdeveloped sense of private property and the limitations having to do things according to code creates in me a sense of public sterility.  Nairobi, Kenya where I grew up was hardly an ecological wonderland, but somehow the intersection of the British garden and Kenyan conviviality created spaces I could spend hours enjoying. On the other hand, American city spaces are characterized by a radical democracy compared to the abundant barbed wire, walls, hedges, gates, and fences of many African cities. It just seems a shame that a society with a landscape set for building trust abandons empty grass lots for lives indoors.

Pleasant Park Playground

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share them.