Paths

"Planners love telling us which way to walk. Our built environment- especially our mercantile spaces, shopping centres and the like - is carefully constructed to control footflow and footfall. But we do like to collectively, unconsciously defy them. This is why we see desire paths in our landscapes. Desire paths are lines of footfall worn into the ground, tracks of use. They are frowned upon in our national parkland where they are seen as scars and deviations. PLEASE KEEP TO THE FOOTPATH. You often see desire paths in public gardens and greened city spaces, taking paved paths "off road" into new trajectories, along roadsides and riverbanks. Our edgelands are full of them.

The postwar overspill developments seen on the edges of many of our cities were planned right down to every concrete walkway, subway and pathway. But their green squares and verges were soon criss-crossed with desire paths: a record of collective short-cuttings. In the winter, they turned to sludgy scars that splattered skirts and trousers and clung to shoes, and in summer they turned dusty and parched. Once established they fell into constant use, footpaths which have never enetered the literature. These footpaths of least resistance offer their own subtle resistance to the dead hand of the planner...

Desire paths are interesting because of the way they come into being: a 'bottom up' system against the 'top down' methodology of the planner, and proof of human unpredictability. Nobody decides to make a desire path. There is no ribbon cutting. These are the kinds of paths that begin over time, imperceptibly, gathering definition as people slowly recognise and legitimise the footfall of their peers. Paths are as old as the earliest transhumance, as the first drovers and movers of livestock, or even older. It might seem far-fetched to compare them to the dreaming tracks of the Australian aboriginals, but this slow erosion is how many of our roads began, navigating the earliest or best-disposed route between origin and destination on foot".

From "Edgelands - Journeys into England's True Wilderness" by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts