Alleyway in the north end of Boston.Getty Images
Christopher Brown’s most recent book is A Natural History of Empty
Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places.
In his 1973 book The Ecology of Stray Dogs, author Alan M. Beck documented his research on the lives and behaviour of free-ranging domestic dogs in the heart of Baltimore. He figured out where the estimated population of 45,000 strays in a city of more than a million people came from, where they lived, their mating patterns, when they were most active and what their sources of sustenance were.
The creatures proved somewhat elusive, on the move at twilight in the liminal spaces of the city. But there was one constant: The dogs did almost all their feeding and most of their movement through the back alleys. In an era when trash was still put out back in simple metal cans, that was where the easiest food was – human leftovers to be scavenged by knocking over the cans, waiting to see what was left after the garbage trucks came through and sometimes hunting the rodents who foraged the smaller bits. It was also where water could be reliably found, in the pools of dripped condensation that would accumulate under window air-conditioning units. In the maps Dr. Beck drew based on his data, you could see how the city’s network of alleys and empty lots functioned as a wild ecosystem, if one that would make urban planners and Chamber of Commerce-types cringe.
In 2020s Austin, Tex., where I live in a historically industrial and working-class neighbourhood, free-ranging canines still use the back alleys as their main way of stealthy movement through our domain. But they are rarely stray dogs. Fifty years of improvements in animal control and waste management have rendered Dr. Beck’s packs of urban mongrels an endangered species whose disappearance no one laments. In their absence, wild dogs have moved in – coyotes and foxes. Not just here, but in the really big mid-continental cities such as Chicago, where coyotes have been documented prowling alleys in the heart of the Loop. They avoid us even better than Dr. Beck’s strays, hunting when humans are mostly settled in for the night. Unlike the dogs who previously prowled that territory, they are not scavengers. They are predators, whose primary sustenance is the smaller mammals that feed off our trash. And occasionally, the pets we forget to bring inside. Foxes, who naturally gravitate to liminal ecologies, and seem capable of making their dens in the tiniest slivers of green, have long been well-adapted to cities. Coyotes are more recent arrivals, perhaps compelled to learn how to live in the city owing to the loss of their traditional habitat. If you are lucky enough to trade gazes with one at first light, as you are pulling your trash to the curb or out for a morning walk, you can bet it will disappear into the alley.
Whether wild but urbanized or rewilded through our neglect, the animals that share our urban habitat gravitate to alleys for the same reason petty criminals do: because alleys are one of the most reliable parts of the city where they can go about their business largely free from human surveillance. While the city likes us to think we are free to go where we want, the truth is it is a labyrinth of enclosure and access control, where almost everything we do outside of the home is under observation by others. Alleys are one of the rare zones where the city lets you be momentarily invisible, or as close as you can get to it outside your front door.
In North America, alleys have taken on a different character than the secondary rights of way that can be found in older British and European cities. Our alleys were planned, in cities that were drawn by colonial speculators over the blanked canvas of cultural and ecological erasure. Laid out in grids, they were designed for deliberately utilitarian purposes, as the places where we locate the service access and other land uses we don’t really want to see – the sewers of the supply chain. As a consequence, as the landscape architect Michael Martin observed, they always express two seemingly opposite qualities – revealing otherwise hidden aspects of domestic life and private space to the rest of the world, while at the same time hiding by the standards of outdoor space.
In the urban folklore of the 21st-century city, the alley fills some of the role the woods at the edge of the village did for our ancestors: a zone that children and responsible adults should be wary of, because it is where criminals hide, dangerous animals lurk, weirdos can be found, and, perhaps most troubling, no productive activity occurs. They are morally dangerous, the kinds of places the narrator goes in a Gordon Lightfoot song. And from the community perspective, they undermine municipal welfare through the sin of waste. In the era since the Second World War, back alleys have become land use anachronisms. The essential utilitarian purposes they served in the age before automobiles are now handled by other means. In the alleys today, no activity occurs that advances the value of private property in a way that can be credited on a spreadsheet.
Which is why in an era desperately in need of a greater supply of affordable housing, one cannot blame planners and architects for casting their eyes on all that square footage wasted on back alleys that have outlived their original purposes. While some urban wildlife may take advantage of alleys as pathways and locations where food can be found, alleys are rarely green, and often are already part of the city’s impervious cover. Nothing, one can argue, will be lost by filling that space with more shelter for our growing population – unless you value the freedom represented by the possibility of an urban space you can go where no one will see you. And in that loss may lie a better opportunity: to use these not-quite-streets as the paths to a different sort of connection.
Urban back alleys are one of the last remnants of the commons, the part of the land whose enjoyment and caretaking is shared among neighbours. In the colonial era, the commons played a critical role in the welfare of the community, typically embodied in expanses of unowned property at the periphery of the town that was available to all for hunting, foraging and pasture. What’s left today is an interstitial commons made from the rights of way set aside for infrastructural uses. When those uses become obsolete, the reflexive instinct of contemporary planners is to maximize the economic value of such spaces through private redevelopment. But other paths can be seen, with a little imagination – witness all the abandoned railway routes that have been turned into beautiful hike and bike trails across the continent.
In our back alleys, we have the potential to revitalize a different species of commons, and transform them into the backyards we share. Turning the places we hide into the places where we see and collaborate with our neighbours, revitalizing a sense of authentic community we’ve mostly lost. And maybe even, by realizing the opportunity to re-green our alleys into communal gardens, linear prairies and the like, using them as a laboratory to cultivate an even more inclusive conception of neighbourhood – one that works to share our urban home with the plant and animal life we have otherwise pushed into the margins of our dominion.