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| Trash bins placed curbside the afternoon following Trash Day |
Once per week, residents of American suburbia know a recurrent ritual: Trash Day. That’s the day when every family trucks their household waste to the curb for collection. A few years ago, this ritual involved metal trash cans with lids, loose plastic garbage bags, and even paper bags and cardboard boxes. More recently, as trash collection has become automated, this menagerie has been replaced with standard plastic wheelie bins.
Trash Day doesn't only exist in suburbia, of course. Urbanization requires waste removal, and before cities standardized the process, it resulted in either street dumps or anarchic, foul-smelling communal landfills. Centralized waste collection resulted in two markers of modern urban life, Trash Day and the professional garbage collector. Suburbia didn't invent waste collection, but it changed where it happens: in front of the house.
Post-World War II suburban design removed the alleyway from the land plat. Yesteryear, the back alley was the principal access point for waste removal, besides being where home builders put the carriage house or garage. Alleys exist purely for practical convenience, and are often not very aesthetic. But they provided a place for the uglier parts of urban life, like garbage collection, mucking out the stables, or home oil changes.
As James C. Scott writes, grid-style urban design reflects a top-down government hierarchy. Straight, wide streets with curbside parking; single-use zoning restrictions; and yards with wide setback lines make it easier for governments to police neighborhoods and keep their populations homogenous. In their origins—in places like Manhattan and Chicago—this included alleyways, because keeping carriage houses off the street made quick egress difficult.
But as horses and dairy cows gave way to cars, alleyways became a liability. When police or tax collectors knock on the front door, alleys make it possible for residents to escape neatly out the back. Though the state could prevent this by simply deploying more officers, that makes enforcement more cumbersome and expensive. So much simpler just to write alleys out of urban plans and have builders put garages on the front of the house.
Sadly, as Jeff Speck describes, America’s architects and urban planners simply accepted this change. Back alleys didn’t just disappear; as countless movies like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause show, back alleys became synonymous with crime, delinquency, and general seediness. Americans not only put garages in front of our houses, but we made our garages so large that they make our actual houses seem paltry by contrast.
Combined with the setback lines, the garage renders our front lawns useless. Nor is this coincidental. Many municipal codes or homeowners’ association covenants expressly forbid growing vegetable gardens, building swingsets, or otherwise doing anything public and useful in front of the house. The mandatory lawn renders the house prohibitively expensive for working-class residents, and in return, those who can afford the buy-in are forbidden from even using the land.
Yet somehow, this completely front-facing urban design makes us use the front lawn for one thing: waste removal. Every week, we dump our household refuse curbside in chunky, foul-smelling wheelie bins and plastic bags that easily burst. Codes and covenants generally dictate when households can put their trash out, and when they must bring it in, rules that greatly inconvenience shift workers, but which keep our streets politely controlled.
This demonstrates a conundrum amid suburban polish: to remain slick and orderly, we must periodically dump our entire weekly waste curbside. Like placing an outhouse on the lawn, it makes the grosser, unsanitary parts of our lives visible for everyone. State-sponsored orderliness is only possible by permitting public nastiness at preordained times, like a low-level Purge. It exposes the underside of urbanity.
The phenomenon we call “suburbia” doesn’t merely happen. It emerges from the residents’ relative wealth and privilege, but also the laws and zoning regulations that keep property expensive enough to price out the peons. It comes from residents’ willingness to mow their large lawns, but also the government’s willingness to subsidize ongoing road construction. Most of all, it derives from everyone’s willingness to accept the illusion and follow the rules.
Not to say these secret rules and tacit illusions are bad. They make a certain way of life possible, certainly. But because the rules and illusions exist, the inherent lawlessness and dark reality they conceal occasionally poke through. Trash Day occasionally reveals that humans are trash-producing species, and if we want to appear polite and organized six days a week, our ugly side must reveal itself on that seventh day.
