Word of the Week: Desire Path

Desire path: A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn't designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.

A close look at any city park or green will typically reveal footprints that break away from paved walks, trails that countless pedestrians have worn into the grass. Such a trail is a desire path: the route people have chosen to take across an open place, making a human pattern upon the landscape. --Lan Samantha Chang, fiction writer and director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney.

View photos of desire paths on Flickr.

Listen to an NPR interview with Michael Collier, one of the contributors to Home Ground, and read excerpts from the book.

Photo: Pengelly.

Comments

[Kim]

There is a story that MIT at one time planted grass in an area of new development, and after a while (6-9 months?) paved the areas that were worn away. I can't find any confirmation doing a web search, though.

[Mark Gunnion]

Kim:

The version I heard was that, at my alma mater, Northwestern, which has severe Chicago lake-effect winters, they were going to lay steam pipes between buildings. They waited an extra winter so they could see where the desire paths were between the buildings, then laid the pipes there, and put the sidewalks over the pipes. The heat from the pipes kept the sidewalks clear thru the winters.

[Mark Gunnion]

But then, maybe it's an urban myth:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/desire_paths/discuss/72157594191460118/

[Mary Sullivan]

There's a marketing metaphor here! I've been campaigning for years for tech marketers to focus on customers' desires, not on their product's features. Customers will beat their own path, despite where marketers put down the paving. Smart marketers look at customers' desire path, and then communicate there.

[Two Dishes]

I've always loved the university-only phenomenon where a spontaneous shortcut in the lawn gets official approval within a year of it appearing by asphaltification.