“Desire paths”: visible, virtual, and figurative
The first time I can recall encountering the term “desire paths” was in Tom
Hulme’s TED talk, “What can we learn from shortcuts,” TED February 2016: He was referring to a muddy “trap” in a great
green space in Highbury Fields in north London: “People clearly don't want to
walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and
that shortcut is self-reinforcing. Now, this shortcut is called a desire path,
and it's often the path of least resistance,” or what he later terms a path of
“low friction.”
Hulme finds such paths “fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge” (emphasis added).
So, in a sense, it is not what they connect or how they connect that makes them
fascinating, but how they mark a line of disconnection between what the “official”
design might be and what popular use says is more important. Maybe that is also
why a large site on Reddit,
/DesirePaths, collects pictures of long and short desire paths from all
over the world. Hundreds of them. And the Comments that accompany the photos
give voice to an evident urge to define these paths, to differentiate them from
other kinds of dirt and pressed sod byways. For example, one commentator, who
has followers, insists that desire paths have to connect officially designed
and paved routes in order to be true desire paths. Paths across vacant fields
with no paved edges are not true desire paths. Think of them more as goat
trails.
I have to admit to a certain interest in desire paths about this city,
Edmonton, and with the debates about their nature and functions. That said, I
do not buy Hulme’s claim that “path of least resistance” is necessarily the
motive for these paths’ coming into existence. It seems equally significant
that these paths can in fact be read as acts of deliberate resistance: “Make all the nice formal concrete patterns
you want—we will go the way that suits us.” Similarly, desire paths are not
necessarily matters of “low friction.”
They can be read as statements of people rubbed the wrong way, now rubbing
back. And we seem to like this evidence there is still room for “we the people”
(individually, or collectively) to vote with our feet, reinforcing each other’s
choice not to go “that way,” the paved way, but to go the way that for our own
reasons we have declared the better, more practical or preferred way. Some
designers, as on several university campuses I have heard of, have figured out
the best way to “go” is to grass everything in between buildings, then let the
people create the paths that work for them, then pave the “desire paths.” I
have also seen new desire paths appear in the grass to cross paths with the newly
paved routes. There is something in asphalt or concrete that demands a “Don’t even think of fencing us in”
response.
I also think from experience and observation that some desire paths are
invisible—like at the crossing at an intersection not far from where I live:
111th St and 51st Ave. The whole is pavement and
concrete, with LRT tracks running N/S on 111th St. It is a risky intersection
even when a pedestrian follows the walk signals. Not as risky as a desire path
Hulme uses to illustrate his talk. That highly dangerous path is in Brasilia.
It crosses fifteen lanes of traffic along its route. Brasilia was designed on
the expectation walking was on its way out as a mode of moving human about,
that people would use cars to get where we wanted to go. People have
demonstrated otherwise. In fact, Brasilia desire paths come up often in
internet searches.
Apparently people in Edmonton have also decided we can dodge cars to get
where we want to go. So at 111th St and 51st Ave, I
watched a young woman in a black dress walk halfway across against the traffic light
on 111th, smiling as she listened to music coming from the smartphone or iPod
she was holding. She walked through a gap in the northbound traffic and around
the gates designed to protect pedestrians from moving trains. Then she stood on
the divider in the centre of 111th St, and waited for a gap in the
southbound lanes before finishing her crossing.
Now, admittedly, she left no visible mark on the pavement or the
concrete, but there is a virtual desire path there nonetheless, intersecting at
times with the painted crosswalks, but only where they happen to coincide with
her preferred angle of passage. And she is not the only person I have seen make
this crossing, or one parallel to it. But the surface does not take an easy
impression from their feet. It is not yet like the stone steps that Henry
Kreisel’s protagonist, Jacob Grossman, encounters when he returns visit family
in pre-WWII Vienna: “The steps, though of stone, were worn down by the
tiredness of the feet that had climbed them through the long years” (The Rich Man 72). There just has not
been enough time yet. Or maybe enough tiredness. Moreover, the virtual desire
path at 111th St and 51st Ave. illustrates that there
another principle as work beyond the shortcut in physical space. Desire paths result
because, Hulme asserts, “People are resourceful. They'll always find the
low-friction route to save money, save time.”
So, if desire paths, visible or virtual, are marks of resourcefulness in
making connections, are they not perhaps recognizable as metaphors for
metaphors? For figures of speech that connect some “here” to some ”not here,”
as my friend, the poet Alice Major, understands the construct. The here and the
not here can be separated by space, time, gender, mythology, history, or any
other such “container” as Lisa Martin, another Edmonton poet, calls them.
Containers are necessary for us to approach what Martin calls the “puzzle of
materiality.” We need some structure to help us distinguish things from each
other, even as in Major’s analysis, we use the structure to help us see and
acknowledge shared properties as well as differences. Martin writes of a
character named Pascal, the Quebecois fiddler,
“…working his feet / to artfully dislodge
the desired feeling, dancing / the path to understanding…” (“Dancing the path to Understanding,” Believing is not the same as Being Saved,
84).
Creating visible, virtual, or
metaphorical desire paths is in part about collectively dancing that path to
understanding, even as we (perhaps) unconsciously go our own individual and
collective “separate” ways, “dislodging” official (or “authorized”)
instructions about how and where to go, what to understand, share, and conform
to, and why and how or how far. It is also, in a sense Martin talks of
elsewhere, about “authorizing” ourselves—of exploring our own spaces, knowledge
or forms of knowledge against other uses of space, time, knowledge or forms of
knowledge. We may find ourselves taking the official or “normal” route perhaps
part of the way, but deserting it or rejecting it when it does not get us where
we feel the need to go, not efficiently, not with due respect for our own share
in whatever field we traverse or passage of understanding we negotiate.
Meanwhile, a poem I wrote and submitted
in response to a call for poems about “unknown Edmonton:”
Desire Paths Don Perkins (Aug /18 version)
Whose feet, whose need,
pressed into sod and soil
this soft tracery,
these lines intersecting and by-passing
public pavements for private urgencies on
private matters?
Official names designate official, planned,
and produced streets
to honour those who have made official, designated
concrete
contributions to our official history.
How, though, do we name and acknowledge
the anonymous agents who created
these records of and for our collective
self-authorizing passage,
these gentler, friendlier, unsanctioned
markers of “us”?
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