Paths of freedom

I think that everybody knows them, those unplanned, spontaneous tracks and paths through lawns, open grounds, ruderal terrain, etc. that we call desire paths, elephant paths, or how you like. They are used as shortcuts in parks, between roads, between paths, etc. Maybe a shortcut is used only once by someone and then it will fade away. If only this person uses it regularly, it is a kind of private shortcut. If also other persons are going to use the same shortcut regularly, it will gradually wear out. Then, what once was a hardly visible trail becomes a clear path, although an unofficial one; a path that has come into existence by habit. It came there because the users desired there to go; because so they were faster where they wanted to go; or because walking there was easier than on the official path or road. Once it is there, people may come to see it as an official path; as a real path. What once was a trail or only a casual shortcut has become institutionalized by habit. In an older blog I preferred the name “elephant path”, but here I want to call it a “desire path”, because this fits the present blog better.
Desire paths can be seen as self-willed, if not stubborn, reactions to the infrastructure made by planners. A desire path is a kind of re-interpretation, or personal interpretation of the spatial structure designed by city planners. City planners have filled in the space in a certain way and they have given it a certain meaning in terms of spaces to be used as paths or streets; or as sidewalks; or as lawns; and so on. The meanings given to these spaces are sometimes clarified if not ordered by traffic signs, information panels and signs with texts (“Don’t walk on the lawn”, “No dogs allowed”). They make the interpretation of the structured space clear to its users, especially if these meanings don’t follow from generally known customary standard meanings. (That also standard meanings are not self-evident or objective and usually are culturally dependent, becomes often clear when you are travelling around in another country. Then such meanings often are not so obvious to you as they are to the locals.)
However, people frequently don’t follow the official or accepted interpretations. Often they give structured spaces their own meanings. A desire path is such an alternative interpretation. By making or using a desire path, the user doesn’t see, for example, the lawn as a piece of nature to be protected or as a playground, but (also) as an open space that can be used as a shortcut to go from A to B, instead of following the official paths or roads. The maker or user of a desire path gives the official structure of the space a personal interpretation or re-interpretation. Sometimes city authorities follow such a re-interpretation, when they provide the desire path with a pavement; sometimes they take countermeasures by putting a barrier there in order to stop the use of the desire path or they put there a sign forbidding the use; or they simply ignore it.
Such an explanation of desire paths in terms of how planners and users interpret and re-interpret structured space is not far from an interpretation in terms of power. Roads and paths constructed by city authorities are ways to organise public life and to guide streams of traffic (walkers, cyclists, cars …). They are means to force passers-by, with a gentle hand or with a hard hand, to follow pre-determined roads and paths according to the preferences of those authorities. Such constructed passages are means to exercise power. This becomes explicit, if preferred routes are indicated by direction signs and traffic signs, and even more if not following the signs can be fined. Then the passer-by doesn’t only simply “actualize” the preferences of the city authorities, as Michel de Certeau would call it, but he or she is forced to do so. In other words, city authorities construct spaces, called roads, paths, etc., to guide and control the movements of the citizens. If less important, such spaces are merely spaces preferred for a certain use by the city authorities, but if necessary its use can be forced by signs, fences and fines. So, even in our seemingly banal, insignificant everyday movements through the city, we are constantly under pressure of forms of power. (see Lauren Daran) “I have to go here and not there, because there is no passage there” or “… because there the road is blocked” or “… because there it is forbidden.” This is what a passer-by constantly must think.
If we can see roads and paths and all officially structured city spaces (and the same for such spaces outside the cities, of course) as constructed power structures for guiding people in the right way, then we can see desire paths as ways of opposition against this power. Seen this way, desire paths are acts of resistance or at least of disobedience to the power structures that organize and construct the public spaces and that have been imposed by the authorities. Desires paths don’t follow the preferences and desires of the authorities, enforced or not by signs, fences and fines, but the preferences and desires of the users. By flouting the rules, desire paths are not just personal shortcuts but paths of freedom.