Mowing The Lawn Turned Me Into A Proto-Urbanist, Along With Parking on Black Friday

In my first summer in the US, I rended a house with some other students. One thing we had to do was keep the lawn mowed. It was my turn to mow the lawn (which I’d never done before) and it took me a whole 2 hours. Worse still, I did such a bad job a roomate had to finish the job.

Since then, I started to realize that lawns are pretty bad for the environment. This video explains it better than I do [VIDEO: 11:50], but in short:

1. They’re thirsty,
2. they use lots of nasty chemicals,
3. they’re cut down with loud and dirty lawn mowers,
4. they’re an invasive species,
5. they’re a waste of land (which could be used for better things) and
6. they’re a symbol of a time where having lots of useless land was a symbol of wealth as it signified that you could afford peasants (or slaves).

There’s just no good reason to have a lawn. In meme form:

Extended PostScript ft. Parking

I drafted this nearly a year ago and I never published it. I’m still anti-lawn but I can make an exception for communal areas like parks since that’ll fall under the public’s wealth. That’s until good native alternatives can be found.

Another urbanism radicalization would be how America has comically large parking lots which aren’t even half full on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. I saw it once where the shops were packed full and the lot still had lots of space. Maybe it’s an oppurtunity to retvurn to the original vision of malls. *See also: Strong Towns writing about this as well as well as this City Beautiful video and Climate Towns.

There’s so much parking, I’ve heard of big box retailers and even car dealerships begging cities to reduce parking requirements.

I didn’t expect this post script to be longer than the original draft I moved in but parking minimums are just ridiculous. There’s even a book on the impacts of not pricing it properly―The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup who passed away recently, so I guess this is for him. RIP dude, I promise I’ll read your book.