Beyond “Lawn People”: The Role of Emotions in Suburban Yard Management Practices

The lawn is a dominant feature in the suburban landscape that, under common resource-intensive management regimes, poses risks to human and broader ecosystem health and sustainability. This article examines the role played by emotions as homeowners maintain or change yard management practices, in order to extend existing understandings that focus on external drivers of yard management (e.g., Robbins 2007). Drawing on a high-resolution qualitative study of homeowners in the northern suburbs of Boston, this article describes how emotions circulate between homeowners, yards, and neighborhood political economies, creating collectivities of management practices bound by shared experience of emotions. Using a heuristic set of "yard subjectivities" drawn from interview data, we argue that emotional engagements are central to homeowners' decision making around yard management practices. These findings provide new insight for those working to shift suburban ecologies away from resource-intensive turfgrass landscapes, by offering a better understanding of the processes that enable or inhibit change in yard management regimes.