desire-paths - 3 Quarks Daily

by Jochen Szangolies

Desire path at Ohio State University. Image credit: dankeck, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you spend any time in a place with public parks, gardens, or simple green areas fenced in squarely by concrete walkways, you’ll be familiar with the sight of trampled paths cutting across the grass, tracing a muddy connection through that which the street would lead you around. Depending on your mood and disposition, you might be annoyed by the sight: can’t people spend the extra few minutes to go around? Is their time really that valuable that they desperately have to cut their walk short by a few minutes? Can’t they just, well, keep off the lawn?

Or you might have perused such shortcuts yourself. Perhaps slightly sheepishly and with a vague sense of doing something forbidden, you reasoned that going all the way around to get to the bus stop is really too much of a bother—and besides, what if you miss your bus? Better to quickly dash through; it’s not like your own footprints will do all that much to deepen the path, anyway.

Or perhaps, you paused a while to wonder. Why is there a need for such a path? Evidently, enough people at point A wanted to go to point B using the shortest route to defy city planners by voting with their feet. Why wasn’t that path there in the first place?

From this point of view, such a desire path represent a failure of top-down planning to anticipate the bottom-up reality of the person in the street, so to speak. They’re a design flaw: after all, cities and the streets traversing them are (or ought to be) designed for the convenience of the humans inhabiting them. The layout the city planners intended is not a divine law, but an all-too-human best guess at what works; and desire paths are ways to demonstrate what doesn’t, not transgressions against the way things must be. In a design perfectly attuned to human needs, desire paths would be unnecessary. It’s not the people who cut across the grass that are at fault, it’s the layout of the streets that fails to conform to human needs. Read more »

by Daniel Rourke

The urban landscape is overrun with paths. Road-paths pulling transport, pavement-paths and architectural-paths guiding feet towards throbbing hubs of commerce, leisure and abode.Beyond the limits of urban paths, planned and set in tarmac or concrete, are perhaps the most timeless paths of all. Gaston Bachelard called them Desire Paths, physical etchings in our surroundings drawn by the thoughtless movement of human feet. In planning the layout of a city designers aim to limit the emergence of worn strips of earth that cut through the green grass. People skipping corners or connecting distinct spaces vote with their feet the paths they desire. Many of the pictures on the right (from this Flickr group) show typical design solutions to the desire path. A delimiting fence, wall or thoroughfare, a row of trees, carefully planted to ease the human flow back in line with the rigid, urban aesthetic. These control mechanisms have little effect – people merely walk around them – and the desire path continues to intend itself exactly where designers had feared it would.

The technical term for the surface of a planetary body, whether urbanised, earth covered or extra-terrestrial, is regolith. As well as the wear of feet, the regolith may be eroded by wind, rain, the path of running water or the tiny movement of a glacier down the coarse plane of a mountain. If one extends the meaning of the term regolith it becomes a valuable metaphor for the outer layer upon or through which any manner of paths may be inscribed.

The self-titled first Emperor of China, Qín Shǐhuáng, attempted, in his own extravagant way, to re-landscape the regolith of time. By building the Great Wall around his Kingdom and ordering the burning of all the books written before his birth Qín Shǐhuáng intended to isolate his Kingdom in its own mythic garden of innocence. Far from protecting his people from the marauding barbarians to the West or the corrupting knowledge of the past Qín Shǐhuáng's decision to enclose his Kingdom probably expanded his subject's capacity for desire beyond it. There is no better way to cause someone to read something than to tell them they cannot; no better way to cause someone to dream beyond some kingdom, or attempt to destroy it, than to erect a wall around it. As we demarcate paths we cause desire to erupt beyond them. The regolith, whether physical or ethereal, will never cease to degrade against our wishes.

Tag: desire-paths

Monday, July 13, 2009

Desire Paths: Reading, Memory and Inscription