I’m not an architect, but I spend a lot of time with them, and Desire Paths seem to be something controversial with them. My campus is a pinnacle of Modern design, with a square grid of sidewalks laid out between the cubes of glass, but the landscape crew has to keep erecting barriers and re-sodding over the Desire Paths that students keep making.

I would also argue that the Paths are crooked not because of laziness, but because humans simply don’t walk in straight lines! Minor variations in the ground and legs being different lengths make walking a perfect straight line something that has to be learned. (This is the reasoning given in discussions of why people tend to walk in circles when they get lost in the wilderness)

I graduated from U of Michigan (Ann Arbor campus) and I would completely buy that story. If you look at the campus on google maps’ satellite view you can see the evidence very clearly. The sidewalks all over central campus are nothing but diagonals at weird angles, often changing direction slightly at the intersection of two paths.

If anyone else is interested in looking: the southwest corner of central campus touches the intersection of state st and south university in ann arbor, michigan.

and then there’s the complaining about how hard navigating is in non-gridded cities…

Didn’t work out quite so well as other places.

The dorms were concentrated in particular parts of campus, on the west edge and along I-75. People would set out along a common path and then scatter to the four winds as they set out for their individual buildings. This led to several paths that went out into the middle of a field and stopped. The construction crews dutifully poured concrete on top of the path and stopped where the path stopped.

The campus was full of sidewalks to nowhere.

To give them some apparent purpose, someone in grounds later came around and planted bushes at the ends. Then we had awfully long sidewalks that went out to a bush and stopped.

The campus remained like this until the 2000 Olympics, when it got another major makeover as Olympic Village.

But I miss going out to look at those bushes.

A consultant was hired. His recommendation? map the routes in the snow… and in spring replace all sidewalks with ones that match what people really want. 30 years later and people are still “on track” with those snow shown paths, even though the surrounding university has grown tremendously.

By the way, the width of the paths was also adjusted to mirror the width of the tramped snow routes… a very accurate measure of traffic load at peak periods!

You could duplicate this idea by putting a cardboard box in the middle of a busy square or sidewalk ( or even several boxes) and watch how people navigate around them, much like water finds the path of least resistance.

Basically, if you don’t stop people from walking though your back yard then it become a public right of way.

No one has ever followed the grid of a city.

There’s an awesome web version – the book is perfect for hypertext – here is the relevant pattern – http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/ptn120.html

interesting also how, for the most part, people have no trouble with the visible boundaries of property vanishing for a while.

I do know from research for a book on urban literature that “desire lines” is a phrase used by American transportation engineers as early as the 1940s (and perhaps earlier) to refer to ‘efficient’ distances as measured between home and place of work. Since then, the phrase has been rehabilitated by both planners and poets to refer not only to ‘efficient’ pathways but also those leading to more frivolous pursuits. Its use by engineers also reflects an early use of phenomenological methods in the engineering world.

It’s really fascinating that the concept has these disparate meanings. Still, I’d appreciate it if someone could confirm Bachelard’s use of this kind of language.

My sources referencing the use of “desire lines” by transportation engineers:

Fagin, 1960. Improving mobility within the metropolis. Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, 27(1): 57-65.

Throgmorton, James A and Barbara Eckstein, 2000. Desire Lines: The Chicago Area Transportation Study and the Paradox of Self in Post-war America. Proceedings of the 3Cities Conference, Birmingham, UK.

Myhill, Carl, 2004. Commercial Success by Looking for Desire Lines. 6th Asia Pacific Computer-Human Interaction Conference, New Zealand.

If anyone can help confirm (or deny) Bachelard’s use of “pathways of desire” / “Chemins du desir” I would be most grateful.

Whats quite wonderful is that rather than churning a field into a muddy morass of competing paths, there actually is a reasonable centroid-path that collective masses preference. The wisdom of crowds..