Can Landscaping Improve or Threaten Your Social Calendar?
Aug. 16, 2006 — -- If you have a nice lawn instead of a pile of dirt in your front yard, are you more or less likely to socialize with your neighbors?
Researchers at Arizona State University in Tempe believe landscaping has a significant effect on how we interact with others, and they've set up an unusual experiment to find out if they're right. Although the results aren't complete yet, early findings indicate that the lack of a lawn can mow down your social life.
And desert landscaping, even for people who have lived in the desert all their lives, could be deadly when it comes to getting invited to neighborhood parties.
That may be a bit surprising to people who love the desert (count me in that group), but the research also suggests that the longer people live in the desert, the less they like arid landscaping.
As noted above, these findings are preliminary and subject to revision, but the issue is important because of growing pressure to minimize lawns and maximize the use of desert plants in areas of the world where water is getting scarce. That's particularly true in Arizona, where thousands of people move every year because of the weather.
Phoenix, for example, has doubled its population in the last 35 years, and some areas of the state have been forced to limit construction of new homes because of water shortages. That set some folks to wondering: Does landscaping make a difference in how residents interact with one another? Is it a social lubricant or a barrier?
That's a difficult area to conduct research, says sociologist Scott Yabiku of ASU, because it's "a bit challenging" to mess around with people's lives. But Yabiku and David Casagrande of Western Illinois University are engaged in a multiyear experiment in the Phoenix area. They presented a preliminary report on their project during a recent meeting in Memphis of the Ecological Society of America.
It turns out there was an ideal opportunity on their doorstep. ASU also has a polytechnic campus in nearby Mesa, where its student housing includes 152 nearly identical houses. Most are occupied by young couples with children.
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