Pastoral ideals embodied in the stately mansions of Jefferson and Washington created a baronial relationship to the landscape difficult to replicate in mass housing. Yet the cultural ideal of the private, detached home, its domestic and public spaces, scarcely ends at the door. A well-tended grass front lawn, for example, became the ornament of American homes after the Civil War. Its setback from the streets shapes a characteristic American urban residential geography: lawns, sweeping or minute, landscaped with trees, bushes, ornaments and fences but often left to flow as a green sward along the street. This green sea reached its acme in suburban developments demanding one- to five-acre lots.

Lawns are simultaneously private and public display spaces with their own technologies and investments, ranging from the lawn mower—pushed, powered or ridden—to chemicals and irrigation that create grass in deserts, at the cost of ecology and energy.

In cities, especially in working-class neighborhoods, this lawn abuts on places of semi-private sociability engaging windows, porches, stoops and alleyways that mesh street and home (as in Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing). As suburbs sprawled, these front areas became engulfed and isolated by the gaping lawn—vestigial spaces for guests, vendors and other callers.

“Back” spaces are rather different. Urban homes may have sheltered gardens, service porches or multipurpose yards (with kitchens or bathrooms). In postwar suburbia, backyards grew in size, physical features and equipment to integrate them into the home and to extend domestic life into the healthy outdoors. Concrete or flagstone patios and wooden decks, connected to living areas by glass doors, epitomized a “California” style (associated with Richard Neutra), copied even in less welcoming climates. Barbeques, redwood, wicker, wrought-iron or plastic lawn furniture and children’s play sets convert the yard into an entertainment area for summer holidays, while flower and vegetable gardens provide hobbies and occasional resources. After the war, even swimming pools came within the reach of the middle-class home, especially in the Sunbelt.

These outdoor yet domestic areas have become common backdrops for family comedies on television and in movies (especially when male characters take over the gendered tasks of outdoor cooking). Landscaping and fences ensure familial boundaries and privacy as well as security for children, invited guests and pets. While some backyards are connected from house to house, shared outdoor spaces are more likely to be found in parks, around schools and at country clubs.

Apartment houses, motels, office parks and even urban housing complexes have came to provide similar outdoor spaces: balconies, tiny patios and community-access gardens allow some negotiated privacy. Yet, these developments also create public/private outdoor spaces for a casual American community whether poolside conversations or structured neighborhood events. Nonetheless, such outdoor spaces (sometimes indoors) often generate noise and conflict.

Since the 1980s, New Urbanism has championed the porch and yard as spaces of sociability Urbanists have also played with attaching aban-doned urban-spaces to nearby homes and institutions to create a fabric of domesticated nature in the city. Yet the dialectic of public and private, individual ownership and community, are continually played out in complicated ways in these interstices of home and nature.