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“In Riverside, each owner would maintain one or two trees and a lawn that would flow seamlessly into his neighbours’, creating the impression that all lived together in a single park,” Pollan wrote.

One hundred and fifty years later, the Lawn Institute of America today boasts that lawns provide “a soft landing for kids at play, a blanket for families to picnic and a cushion for bare feet to roam.”

Perhaps that was the case in the first 100 years of suburban front lawns, but with the post-Second World War advent of noisy cars speeding through suburbs at 50 km/h, did that not change everything?

Suddenly, all that yard space wasn’t only a community garden, it was also what traffic engineers refer to as a “clear zone,” an area without any major obstructions so if a car flies off the road, it cuts down on the likelihood of car damage. This is good for the car, not so good for a little kid playing in the front yard. I can’t think of one parent today who leaves a child unattended in the front yard.

How much better would it be to allow builders to develop much more of that front yard, which would also leave more land in bigger, safer, far more usable back yards? Our new building guidelines, the Mature Neighbourhood Overlay (MNO), will provide more flexibility for front-yard development, but remains overly restrictive. It will freeze most of our mature neighbourhoods in time.

As local builder Mick Graham told council: “The post-war neighbourhoods were developed in the early stages of North America’s huge urban experiment surrounding the car. This was a period when smoking was considered healthy, cars didn’t have seat belts, and drunk driving was a minor social gaff. The intervening years have seen huge increases in knowledge about health, automotive safety and urban design. The MNO seeks to enshrine the planning mistakes of the post-war period. We know that walkable neighbourhoods are better. We know that if we move our front porches closer to the street, the neighbourhood becomes more animated. We know that animated neighbourhoods have less crime and healthier inhabitants. They didn’t know this in the ’50s and ’60s, yet we cling to these flaws and describe them as ‘character.’ ”