Desire paths to real paths... User-generated urbanism

Walkways and desire paths - a major player in urban design and safe walkability

by Mateja Mihinjac 

In our urban design work, we often confront the issue of pedestrian mobility, which is referred to as desire paths (or desire lines). We have previously discussed desire lines and their impact on crime in our blog on Happy Trails. We have also touched on the related CPTED concept of movement predictors in our blogs on laneways. All this comes down to the concept of walkability.

If we are serious about increasing walkability in our cities and towns – and if we listen to the CPTED message of increased safety through “eyes on the street” – then we must pay attention to the formal, and informal, paths that exist to get people from one place to another. 

Sidewalks, one-way or two-way streets, paths, gates, and trails are only one part of the movement picture. Desire lines are equally important since they predict how movement can trigger, or eliminate, crime opportunities. Leslie Malone’s urban design book Desire Lines calls them “the paths people create through simple usage.” It all depends on how we do them!

 

Ease of access, simple travel routes, or pathways to crime?
Desire lines are everywhere and offer CPTED clues to prevent crime

USER-GENERATED URBANISM

We tend to expend as little time and as little effort as possible to achieve our goal. This least effort principle also translates into our choice of routes traveled. This often results in the emergence of desire paths, what wiki calls the unplanned convenient shortcuts humans create on frequently navigated routes.  

Why don’t traffic engineers or landscape architects incorporate these desire paths into their designs and engineer the streets as people naturally use them? It turns out an approach termed user-generated urbanism might do just that.

John Bela, an urban designer and landscape architect, describes user-generated urbanism as: 

“the synthesis of top-down and bottom-up practices engaged synergistically to cultivate greater participation. This synthesis help us achieve the goals we outline with the adaptive metropolis of resilience and social justice.”

He suggests desire paths should inform the installation of permanent routes - but not before the users indicate their preferred pathways. This is similar to tactical urbanism, a community-driven style of permanent public infrastructure. However, while Bela refers to tactical urbanism as DIY urbanism, user-generated urbanism stresses the importance of combining bottom-up and top-down planning practices.

 

The  Ohio State University "Oval" today - a sophisticated network of user-generated walkways. It began in 1914 when urban designers paved the pathways on new laws that were created by users - Photo Google Earth 

One of the most famous successful examples of this strategy emerged in 1914 at Ohio State University. 

The University intentionally had no plan for the walkways between buildings across the campus and only paved them once the most eroded routes in the lawn – desire paths – clearly communicated to the architect where the routes should be installed. This resulted in an interesting intersection of routes across the large campus lawn, the Oval.

Listening to the principal users of streets may help us avoid the mistakes and unintended consequences, including potential issues such as vandalism and movement predictors, the concerns that Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) practitioners often deal with. 

 

Ad hoc attempt to block a natural desire path across public lawn

COLLABORATION DRIVES SUCCESS

In an ever-changing world user-generated urbanism teaches us the importance of adaptive designs and designs that serve the purpose of their users. This is why collaboration in designing our streets is as important as ever. In Second Generation CPTED and SafeGrowth we teach the concept of Connectivity, which ensures the neighbourhood is connected to outside actors including the government and agencies to realise their goals. 

Engineers, architects, planners and landscape architects should therefore strive for collaborative practices as much as possible – doing so might just give them the answers they’re looking for when designing the streets the users want.

We're Using Our Streets All Wrong 

- Dead Metal versus User-Generated Urbanism 

Happy trails

Groomed nature walkway in Singapore

by Gregory Saville

Many years ago I spoke to Paolo Soleri, the visionary (and apparently flawed) architect who created arcology, the marrying of architecture and ecology into a new type of city.

I met him at Arcosanti, his experimental city lab in the Arizona desert, and asked him where, among his artistic walls, curved roof apses, and dense architecture, did he plan to include greenery, parks and nature trails? He replied that arcologies attempt to build high density in every direction, including vertically, but do so by leaving nature alone as much as possible. However, Soleri assured me, access to nature will be easier in an arcology because no arcology dweller will ever be more than a kilometer from nature, untouched and pure – parks, streams, and forests. 

That was an inspiring vision, one that seems far away today. I’m unsure how realistic, or desirable, it is to remove nature from within cities, especially given the many environmental and psychological reasons for walkable green space as Stephen Mouzon reports in his book The Original Green. 

Path and pedestrian bridge along a Denver creek

As we describe in Third Generation CPTED, nature, parks, trails and greenways have a deep psychological role in creating safe places and they will remain an important asset within large cities – whether it's New York’s Central Park or the massive Stanley Park in Vancouver. This is especially true in a time of COVID when everyone wants to get out from cabin fever. 

What about crime along those trails? Park pathways, greenways and nature trails are known in the CPTED business as “movement predictors”, sometimes called architectural desire lines. It is possible to design movement predictors safely or otherwise (unintentionally), depending on where and how designers construct them. 

A few years ago, we were asked to help design a Rails to Trails bikeway from a California train station through some very high crime neighborhoods. The project never happened, but it became clear to me that the single most important method for designing safe movement predictors is insuring users of those spaces are part of the design process. That's why it is such a central feature of all SafeGrowth programming. 

California rail-to-trail bikeway - never built, still scary

Collaborative design far surpasses the landscape architect’s penchant to: 1) look for published design guidelines; 2) design the trail; 3) show residents the results afterward; and 4) hope for the best. 

Our COVID world is creating a powerful impetus for city dwellers all over the world to take to the trails and experience nature. That is a good thing. Let’s ensure those trails are shared and safe.