III. Ordinary Things Essay 15
The Path Across the Grass
A worn line is a record of a decision
There is a path across the lawn from the car park to the office door. It is not straight. It bends where a corner of the building sticks out. It goes through a gate that is propped open more often than not. It avoids a bed of roses that nobody remembers planting and everybody steps around. And there is a second, fainter track that goes more directly, which exists because the first one was closed for repairs for three weeks in the summer, and which has been fading ever since.
Nobody made this path. That is the first thing to understand about it. The path was made by walking, and by the grass failing to grow back, and by a hundred separate decisions to turn a few degrees left rather than a few degrees right, each of them made by somebody in a hurry, none of them about the path.
A path is a loop. The more people walk it, the more worn it gets, and the more worn it is, the more people walk it, because a worn track across grass is easier and faster than grass. It is a reinforcing loop, and it is running on a surface that slowly gives up. The path is what happens when a loop wears a groove in the world.
Watch the path for a week and you will see the loop running. A person steps onto the grass to avoid the puddle. The grass is not damaged by one step, or by ten, or by fifty. But a hundred steps, spread over a few weeks, and the blades in that strip stop standing up. The next person sees a slightly paler line and steps on it, because stepping on the pale line is easier than stepping beside it, and now there are two lines and the second one is barely used.
Now change one condition. What if the grass in that strip was a different variety, one that recovers from being walked on? Then the pale line would heal, the two lines would merge back into one, and the reinforcement would stop. The path would not exist, and the people would keep arriving at the same place anyway, and the trace of the path would be gone. So the path is not just a record of walking. It is a record of walking on a surface that could not heal.
And now change a different condition. What if the puddle had been filled in? The route that avoided the puddle would lose its reason. The wear would stop, the grass would come back, and within a season the shape of the path would be gone. The path was never a decision about where to walk. It was a decision about where not to walk, taken by about forty different people, none of whom knew they were deciding anything.
What the shape is made of
The shape of a path is a record, and the record is legible if you know what to look for. The bends are detours around something: a rose bed, a corner, a muddy patch, a sign, a tree root, a slope too steep to cross. The places where the path is widest are where the traffic is heaviest, usually where a second route joins it. The places where the path fades are where the reason for it went away.
There is one feature that catches people out. Paths almost never take the shortest line, and they almost never take the most obvious line either. They take the line with the fewest obstacles and the least effort, and the difference between those two can be several metres, and the several metres are usually made of a flower bed and a desire not to step on it.
The gap between the plan and the route is the interesting part. Planners draw a straight line from the gate to the door because straight is the word for good design, and the grass is a surface for decoration and the path is a surface for function, and the two are kept apart in the drawing and are mixed up in the world. Walkers do not have that separation. They have grass, and grass is slow, and the door is over there. What they actually optimise is not distance and not appearance. It is the number of seconds between the gate and the door that cost them nothing.
Designing for how people move
There is a fairly standard piece of advice about public places, which is to design for what people actually do rather than for what they should do, and then to make the intended route the easiest one rather than the only possible one. A path that people are meant to use but that has a shortcut across the grass will get a shortcut across the grass, and the shortcut will become the path, and the paved path will be the one that gets ignored.
The alternative is the opposite approach, and it is also sensible. Make the route you want the only route, by putting something in the way of the alternative: a hedge, a fence, a line of trees, a change of surface. This is the approach that produces a place where people walk where the designer wanted them to walk, and it produces a place that is a bit of a machine, and it is easy to end up with a beautiful paved route that everybody uses and nobody enjoys.
What if the office laid a paved path from the car park, straight, wide, and well lit? For a month, everybody used it, because it was the obvious thing. By the end of the summer, the grass on either side of it had begun to go, because a paved path is a barrier and a barrier is an invitation, and the shortest distance from the car to the door is not the paved one. The path had cost money, and the building had spent the summer quietly undoing it.
Now change the condition. What if the office had put a hedge along the edge of the paving, with two gaps, one near the car park and one near the door? The route would be the paved one, and it would also be a longer walk through a gap in a hedge, and the paving would be used, and it would not be the shortest thing by about ten metres. The difference between the two plans is not a better path. It is a path plus a decision about what to put next to it, and the decision is the part that decides whether the path survives.
"Desire paths are vandalism and should be blocked." Sometimes they are a nuisance and sometimes they are a report. A desire path across a lawn is a piece of information about where people actually want to go, delivered at the cost of a few hundred square metres of grass. Blocking it is a way of refusing to read the message, and the message does not go away. It comes back as a complaint, or as a formal request, or as a path in a different place, which is worse.
The other misconception: "people are naturally lazy, and good design removes the effort." Most desire paths are not about laziness at all. They are about avoiding a step, a puddle, a rose bed, a dog, a locked gate, or a gravel strip that is unpleasant to walk on. The desire path is the shortest route through the world as it actually is, and the paved path is the shortest route through the world as it was planned.
Paths as feedback
The reinforcing loop is simple and it is also slightly sinister, because it runs on somebody else's resources. A path is worn by feet, and the grass that grows back is paid for by whoever maintains the lawn, and the lawn is maintained to be a lawn, and a lawn is supposed to be grass with no marks on it. The path is a place where the two obligations collide.
And a path is a hard-won piece of information. Getting the shortcut to happen requires somebody to take the first step across wet grass for no reason at all, and to do it when there is nothing to gain from it, and to do it where other people can see, which is the part that makes it hard. Once a path exists, it is a free gift to everybody who comes after, and a gift that costs the first person something and the last person nothing.
Which is why the presence of a path in a place tells you something about the place that the plan does not. If there is a path, at some point somebody decided it was worth walking there. If there are three paths, three separate decisions have been made, and the three of them are probably not the same decision.
Paths and the people who make them
There is a small politics to desire paths, and it is worth naming because it is usually invisible. The people whose routes are honoured by a path are the ones who are confident. The people who are not sure they are allowed to take the shortcut are the ones who walk around the roses. The path is a record of who felt entitled to take the shorter way, which is a much more interesting thing to know than where the shortcut is.
This is why a path that opens up for everybody can change the character of a place. A shortcut worn in by people who knew they were allowed to use it is a different shortcut from one worn in by people who were not sure. The second says the place does not really want you cutting across, and the first says it does not mind. The ground does not record the difference. The behaviour does.
Limits
The path is a good example and it is not a model you can lift. A path is physical, it is visible, it leaves a record you can look at, and it takes years. Most feedback loops are invisible, leave no trace, and operate in minutes. The example is useful because the mechanism is identical and because the trace makes the mechanism obvious, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous as a model. The moment somebody says "this is like a path" about a situation with no visible trace, the analogy has done more work than the reasoning.
Second limit: a path is a slow, physical, and rather stupid mechanism. It cannot be optimised, it cannot be steered once it is established, and removing it means waiting for grass. People, unlike grass, can be asked to change, and usually would prefer to be asked.
Third limit: the shape of a path is a record of a past, and it is a poor guide to a future where the reasons have changed. The gate that the path avoided has moved. The building that made the detour necessary has been demolished. The path is still there, and it is still worn, and it is still steering people to a corner that no longer has a reason to exist, and the loop is strong enough to keep it alive for years.
Stuck
You are stuck at the loop level with a path when you can describe the reinforcement perfectly and are trying to apply it. The trap is that a path is not a design you can specify, and somebody with a good understanding of the loop will try to design one, and will be baffled when the grass does not comply.
The way out is to change the ground rather than the behaviour. Loops that run on people can be changed by changing what the ground is made of, and by making the desired route the easy one, and by removing the small frictions that make the effortful route attractive. If you want people to stop cutting the corner, change what is in the corner, not how strongly you ask.
Sources
- Desire paths are widely described in landscape architecture and in the study of movement in public places. No specific study, designer, or date is cited here.
- All examples are ordinary situations described from general experience rather than from a documented case.
- The reinforcing loop reading is the author's own, and is offered as a lens to try rather than as a claim about any particular path.