Since the beginning of lockdown, a new path has sprung up in my local park – it snakes underneath a tree and up (and then down) a small hill, marking the way to the local Sainsbury’s. It is not an official path paved by keen construction workers in the dead of the night, but a “desire path” – a walkway made by hundreds of shuffling feet damaging the grass and eroding the ground beneath them. If “real” paths show us where we should go and how we should get there, then desire paths expose the complicated messiness of humanity. They are visible markers of our autonomy or, at the very least, our undeniable love of shortcuts.
My Sainsbury’s desire path runs parallel to the real deal, and has clearly sprung up as people seek to avoid brushing past each other due to social-distancing measures. There is no way of quantifying how many similar paths have emerged because of the pandemic, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s more than a few. On Reddit, a woman from Cambridge shared a picture of a dirt path created by runners’ feet in April – she estimated it lay 1.5m from the paved version. On Twitter, a user called Penny posted a photo of a curved path of dead grass in Victoria Park, London, the same month, writing, “I think [desire paths are] usually made to shorten distances, but this one has been forged in an attempt to widen passing distances on the main path.”
Desire paths aren’t anything new – the term has been traced back to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote of “lignes de désir” in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space. Nature author Robert Macfarlane has written more recently about the inherent poetry of the paths. In his 2012 book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Macfarlane calls them “elective easements” and says: “Paths are human; they are traces of our relationships.” Desire paths have been created by enthusiastic dogs in back gardens, by superstitious humans avoiding scaffolding and by students seeking shortcuts to class. Yet while illicit trails may have marked the easier (ie shorter) route for centuries, the pandemic has turned them into physical markers of our distance. Desire paths are no longer about making life easier for ourselves, but about preserving life for everyone.
Michael Mayhew, a 56-year-old artist from Northampton who runs a library of books dedicated to food, has spotted three new desire paths in his local park, The Racecourse. “Because the grass isn’t being cut, you start seeing them. It doesn’t take long for a path to develop,” he says. “There are three all running in the same direction as the functional path – I just found it fascinating.” Mayhew believes the paths demonstrate how considerate people are being about keeping each other safe.
But what do desire paths really tell us about ourselves, if anything? Are they poetic – or simply a pain for those who maintain public spaces? And what is the ultimate desire path success story: a path that is officially paved over – demonstrating the democratic power of thousands of feet – or a path that is allowed to remain as a messy marker of our messy lives?
Elena Dorato and Gianni Lobosco are academics in the department of architecture at the University of Ferrara in Italy. In 2017, they co-wrote a paper called “Designing Desire”, in which they explored how predictive models could be used to visualise (and possibly pave) desire paths before they emerge. The academics explain that it is not always common for urban planners to base their development decisions on desire paths, and they wanted to explore how behavioural modelling could better inform design decisions. Yet at the same time, the pair don’t necessarily believe paved-over dirt paths are always the most desirable solution.
“We believe the appearance of a desire line is not necessarily the marker of a wrong design choice,” they tell me by email. “We believe that a good project implementation should not perfectly retrace desire lines, but rather allow and accommodate a vast range of different behaviours and uses.” Dorato and Lobosco argue that the most important thing to consider when designing public space is “looseness” – our spaces must remain changeable so we can collectively alter our behaviours in unpredictable circumstances, such as the current pandemic. “What we’re learning from this situation is that public and collective spaces need to be as adaptable, loose and resilient as possible,” they say.
The academics also have a semi-poetic attitude to desire lines: they argue that our cities still bear the physical traces of history such as wars, earthquakes and floods, and illicit trails leave similar legacies. “In a near future, some of the Covid-19 effects on the urbanscapes will be part of this narrative, reminding us of the importance of human behaviour in shaping the city space.”
But if desire paths are so revealing, should we not dedicate more time to chronicling them? So far the phenomenon remains mostly documented by amateur photographers and bloggers – the anonymous writer “the gentle author” has shared illicit trails on his popular blog, Spitalfields Life, arguing that “each desire path tells a story. While our modern monolith, Google, ignores desire paths with its Maps service, others are attempting more official documentation. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an international, crowd-sourced project to create a free map of the world – since 2004, thousands of volunteers have input data about roads, railways, rivers and yes, desire paths.
“People like you and me have mapped 35,000-plus paths as desire paths or informal paths worldwide, including around 1,500 mapped in the UK,” says Dorothea Kazazi, a communications volunteer for OSM. Kazazi explains that desire paths should be “reasonably permanent” to be added to the map, but says anyone can add one at any time. “We map the world as it is,” she says – OSM is used by various other companies, meaning that keen gamers have noticed that desire paths which aren’t visible on Google Maps show up in the augmented reality app Pokémon Go.
According to OSM, most of the UK’s desire paths are in Nottingham and Leeds. It’s unclear if this is because there are actually more desire paths in these areas, or if these locations are simply home to avid OSM users. Kazazi puts me in touch with a Nottingham man who has documented a large number of desire paths, but unfortunately he declines to explain his motivations.
Still, other people have easy explanations: they are paid to notice desire paths. Tom Ritzer is a landcare director at the University of Minnesota who anticipates and monitors what he calls “cow paths” as part of his job. Around 2012, a new physics and nanotechnology building was constructed at the university, and a new desire path quickly emerged on a slope between the building and the main road. “It was pretty unsightly and the soil was washing away,” Ritzer explains, so around 2015, his team paved the path with decomposed granite (a more stable form of gravel good for heavily used paths).
Yet Ritzer’s paved path isn’t a direct copy of the desire path made by students’ feet. While planning the path, Ritzer added a small curve to comply with local accessibility laws that determine how steep a sloped path can be. But Ritzer also couldn’t make the curve too large for fear of students creating an extra desire path as they cut corners. “I think it turned out pretty well,” he laugh. “It does accommodate a lot of foot traffic and it’s a nice way to experience that particular part of the landscape.”
Closer to home we’ve seen similar initiatives. Councillor Damian White of Havering says a Tarmac path and crossing was paved on a grassy verge in his London borough between 2017 and 2019 for “safety reasons”. “The damage to the public green is thought to have been created by increased footfall as a cut-through from the shops and bus stops,” he explains, adding that the uneven surface was unsafe and he was “very pleased” when the official path was paved. “It has now improved the look of the area and better reflects what our residents expect.”
But not every desire path can be paved. Ritzer has been a landscape architect for 30 years and says there’s “no middle ground” between choosing to accommodate foot traffic or choosing to prevent it. He has used granite to pave over desire lines and planted bushes or constructed barriers to stop would-be desire paths in their tracks. “It’s driven by safety, or sometimes we’re trying to protect a particular tree and we don’t want compaction around the roots,” he explains. “Other times it’s just aesthetic.” In rare circumstances, Ritzer has simply left dirt paths alone – he says one that runs through a wooded area on campus is “charming” and a “nice experience” for students.
When it comes to desire paths, it’s apparent that we can’t always get what we want. Some paths will always remain illicit, while others demonstrate the power we have to change our own environments for the collective good. “We are living through a moment where we’re all being asked to consider where we go, who we go near, what our distance is,” says Mayhew, the Northampton man who discovered three new paths in his local park. “I think desire paths are very beautiful, poetic marks of democracy.”
