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 

Tactical Urbanism in Cairo

Photo Joseph Dana Next City

GUEST BLOG: I met Angela LaScala-Gruenewald during work in New York City and she later attended our Philadelphia SafeGrowth training. Angela is a recent college graduate with research currently focussing on criminal justice initiatives and public safety. She offered this blog on tactical urbanism in Cairo, Egypt.   

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The image above depicts what appears to be a strategic piling of dirt and trash; it serves multiple purposes -- an informal structure, a small seed of resistance, a necessary public good.

I first learned about this Do-It-Yourself highway exit ramp while taking a class at the University of Chicago. A teacher’s assistant flashed this photograph on the lecture hall wall and launched into a discussion on the control of space in Arab urban centers, and the tension between private and public, formal and informal, recognized and subversive movements – all motivators of the endless conflicts in the Middle East.

Take for example the use and transformation of public squares, from Tahrir Square to Yemen’s Freedom Square on the doorstep of Sana’a University. While there is nothing new about protesting in squares and fighting for control of space during periods of political change and popular uprisings, the significance of the transformation and importance of these spaces still hold.

The highway exit ramp in the peripheries of Cairo plays a role in this narrative as much as the large downtown plazas. While thousands of protestors fought for control of Tahrir Square, smaller transformations took place across the city through growing informal construction projects in these peripheries and informal areas known as ashwa’iyyat (slums).


SLUMS COME TO LIFE

The ashwa’iyyat contain over 60% of Cairo’s population, but are largely ignored by Egypt’s government and denied access to public goods, such as highway exit ramps.The Cairo highway ramps served as examples of innovative urban design, part of the Do-It-Yourself movement, but less couched in the concept of the political.

Meshing these two perspectives together highlights the importance of informal transformations of public space, especially in communities fighting for access in the face of a negligent regime. The highway exit ramp in Cairo’s ashwa’iyyat brings the two together. It is a quiet protest simultaneously delivering a necessary public good. It is political and it is practical. 


Tactical urbanism

The latest tactical urbanism in San Francisco is called the Market Street Prototyping Festival. It symbolizes the 21st Century form of public engagement. Public engagement is a linchpin for success when it comes to placemaking, SafeGrowth and all sorts of good things urban. Safety and crime prevention too depend on it, at least if you believe in life beyond target hardening.

Tactical urbanism is the key.



Tactical urbanism, coined from the book with the same name, is what Portland  has been doing for ages during the Intersection Repair projects. It is a low-cost and learn-by-doing strategy reminiscent of so many social action strategies of the 60s except this time the result is physical changes within neighborhoods that avoid long planning processes.

San Francisco is the latest to try tactical urbanism by welcoming artists, urban designers and others to set up their innovations along Market Street. A few selections occupying the upper register of my cool-o-meter: Data Lanterns that glow brighter to announce arriving trains, metal walls that turn into a musical instrument on touch, and street seats made from compacted mushrooms for composting afterwards.