Did you hear? New York is getting garbage cans!

It's true. Instead of setting out their trash in huge piles of seeping, stinking black plastic bags, New Yorkers will soon be able to dispose of their waste in wheelie bins or large, shared, on-street containers.

A photograph of a New York streetcorner. Litter is strewn on the ground and there are black garbage bags piled under a lamp-post. The sign on the store on the corner reads 99 cent pizza, and there is a wire trash bin on the corner. — Photo by Lukas Rodriguez

New York has a long and messy history of grappling with its trash, and a lot of it is down to the lack of crucial piece of urban infrastructure: alleys. When New York's general plan was created in 1811, it didn't include alleys. The reasons why are lost to history, but speculations include that Manhattan is an island and alleys were seen as a waste of space; that Manhattan's short blocks are so short that you don't need alleys to cut through them; or that the city designers were distracted with another, more ambitious project (the Erie Canal) and simply screwed up.

If you don't spend a lot of time in New York it's hard to imagine that it doesn't have alleys — in movies and TV shows set in New York, seedy things are always happening in alleys. People get mugged, sell and consume drugs, have trysts, and do other plot-advancing things that are best kept in the shadows.

And maybe it's the seediness of alleys that inspired those city designers to leave them out. But it's safe to say that removing the setting for those behaviours didn't do anything to prevent them from happening.

The people who wrote those alley scenes needed a place for their characters to do the seedy things that move a plot along. But alleys in real life are the setting for lots of useful, relatively more wholesome activities. They're a place to store and pick up trash, to clean cars and bins and other unwieldy items, to make deliveries, to take shortcuts. Alleys are a necessary part of city life.

Alleys are valuable because they're in-between and out of the way, but still easy to access. They're not the beautiful, aesthetic part of a building — the glorious facade or cozy living space — but they're close by, adjacent to loading docks and kitchens and the other utilitarian spaces that are necessary to life.

Spaces like this — practical, accessible, but set apart — are not necessary only in cities. We need alley-type spaces in our homes, too.

Everyday life has messy and unsightly tasks that deserve their own space. Somewhere to soak laundry, wash the dog, accumulate recycling, or store the vacuum cleaner. A place to saw a wooden shelf down or strip paint off an old dresser.

A photograph of a large cement sink in the corner of a room with textured cement walls. A bottle of bleach and two washtubs are balanced on the sink, and a washing machine and boiler are beside it. The picture is dark and moody. — Photo by Pau Casals

One of my complaints about the design of most condo apartments in Toronto is that they're not designed for adult life. When my children were one and three years old and we were living in a two-bedroom condo, I took a series of frustrated photographs of things that didn't have a place: the stroller, the plastic bin our farm-share veggies were delivered in, the toolbox, the chest freezer. All items that we needed as a small family, but that there was nowhere to store even though our apartment was a spacious 1100 square feet.

We ended up moving into a small house which had ample alley-type space — a basement, two backyard sheds, and an actual alley. Our house easily accommodated hobbies, projects, laundry, cleaning supplies, tools, cat litter boxes, and all the other moving parts of a thriving family.

This is not to say that more square footage is always the answer. Of course it helps, but it's not everything. There's no reason that a well-designed small apartment can't have a closet for a vacuum cleaner, or a small utility room for laundry and cleaning supplies.

Common areas can also serve the function of alleys in apartments (indeed, alleys usually are common areas). For example, some new apartment buildings have a shared dog shower, so you don't have to wash your muddy mutt in your bathtub (or track him through the building lobby). Some buildings have bike storage, so you don't have to keep your bike in your front hall. It seems like developers are starting to design for the complexities of real life, but there’s a long way to go.

But this isn't just a rant about poorly designed apartments. Let's get metaphorical with our alley talk.

An alley is a place where things can be messy, in service of keeping the other places tidy, and literal alleys are necessary. There are behaviours and activities that function like alleys, making it possible to deal with messiness, and they’re as important as real alleys.

A photo of someone writing in a notebook. All that is shown are the person's forearms, and the picture is blurred so it's not clear if the notebook is on a table or in mid-air. — Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

Sleep is like an alley, a chance for your brain to sort out the jumble of things that happened during the day and figure out what's important enough to store and what can be cleared out.

Daydreaming is like an alley, a chance to let your thoughts wander and play, discovering and remembering, connecting and understanding.

Journalling is like an alley, a chance to take your mental trash cans out and give them a good hosing off. Writing down messy, tangled thoughts, hopes, fears, regrets, and disappointments gives them a chance to get straightened out, or just aired out, so you can go into the rest of your day with a clearer head.

A difficult conversation is like an alley, a chance for everyone involved to air out whatever has been bothering them and to figure out, together, a way to make it right and move forward.

Just like a city, a life needs spaces, apart but close at hand, to be messy. Do you need more alleys in your life?

We Need Alleys

I’m Not Sorry About Being a Coach