Trash, Space,Control

After months of good intentions, my wife and I finally joined a neighborhood clean-up crew in our little corner of Park View this Saturday. The group is one of those informal, facebook-and-email driven projects that I'm sure exist unseen all over cities everywhere. It grew up around concern for the incredible amount of crap people were dumping on a tiny little parcel of unused and unusable land (well, unusable unless you deal drugs) in the middle of a large alley. Battles over that spot with the city have been victorious, so now the crew picks up Irving, Warder, and Kenyon Streets for three or so blocks.

This kind of activity is a good thing for all kinds of reasons: meeting nice neighbors we wouldn't have otherwise; getting broken glass out of kids' ways; protecting my property value by ensuring my block doesn't look like crap, etc. Along the way, we talked about shared concerns like rats and tagging and derelict homes. Against all of these forces, of course, we are fighting a losing battle. The trash will be back, and so, too, the rats, graffiti, and drunks. I started thinking along the way how much chaos, how much filth am I willing to tolerate as part of the bargain for living in an urban setting. Or to put it another way, how much control over the appearance of the spaces around me am I willing to cede to others to sully as they want.

Having lived in urban areas for the last five years I'd have to say the answer now is I give up quite a lot of control, or let quite a bit slide. I guess I never wanted to feel like the one neat guy trying to live in a frat house (not that I'm neat or was in a fraternity). One of the appeals of gardening, though, is precisely this maintenance of some control on one's tiny little part of the city. My neighborhood might look like shit, but damnit, my back yard's not gonna.

There is an element of this desire to control space even in community gardening, even if it is expressed in a much more communitarian way. It is taking space that otherwise would be left to others to screw up and imposing a particular vision upon it. That vision could be anything -- makeshift monument, public art, playground, grassy field, parking lot -- but more and more we're choosing "garden" for it. I'm not questioning or criticizing the idea of seizing control of such spaces from those who would rather just chuck bottles and piss in them; but it is interesting how an inherently non-spontaneous, productive, and in some respects anti-urban activity has emerged among the alternatives.