Example: https://emergencemagazine.org/op_ed/desire-paths/
The Area: Fort Langley Park , Vancouver
Travelogue Entry #2:
Desire Paths
Fill 3-4 pages of your travelogue:
Please read the following passage from Edgelands by Farley and Symmons-Roberts (2011):
“Planners love telling us which way to walk. Our built environment – especially our
mercantile spaces, shopping centres and the like – is carefully constructed to control
footflow and footfall. But we do like to collectively, unconsciously defy them. This is why
we see desire paths in our landscape. Desire paths are lines of footfall worn into the
ground, tracks of use. They are frowned upon in our national parkland, where thee seen
as scars and devations.
PLEASE KEEP TO THE FOOTPATH. You often see desire paths in
public gardens and greened city spaces, taking paved paths “off-road” into new
trajectories, along roadsides and riverbanks. Our edgelands are full of them.
The pot-war overspill developments seen on the edges of many of our cities were
planned right down to every concrete walkway. But their green squares and verges were
soon criss-crossed with desire paths: a record of collective short-cuttings. In the winter,
they turned to sludgy scars that spattered trousers and skirts and clung to shoes, and
during hot summers they turned dusty and parched. Once established, they fell into
constant use, footpaths which have never entered the literature. These footpaths of
least resistance offer their own subtle resistance to the dead hand of the planner. They
lead across borders, into open fields and woodland, along drainage brooks, away from
the backs of houses. On a housing estate, a path leading through a hole in the fence is
still freighted with possibility. Each one offers promise and danger, whether what lies
ahead is known or unknown. Each one has a flavour or a mood (or several moods) all of
its own.
Desire paths are interesting because of the way they come into being: a ‘bottom up’
system against the ‘top-down’ methodology of the planner, and proof of human
unpredictability. Nobody decides to make a desire path. There is no ribbon-cutting.
These are the kinds of paths that begin over time, imperceptibly, gathering definition as
people slowly recognise and legitimise the footfall of their peers. Paths are as old as the
earliest transhumance, as the first drovers and movers of livestock, or even older. It
might seem farfetched to compare them to the dreaming tracks or songlines of the
Australian aboriginals, but this slow erosion is how many of our roads began, navigating
the easiest, or best-disposed route between the origin and destination on foot.”
This week in class, students were to embark on a ‘meandering walk’ provoked by the methods
discussed in Banack and Berger’s (2019) article.
Instructions for the walk were as follows.
Students may choose to retrace their steps and meander more than once as their meandering
story comes to life.
• While you walk, please do not listen to music or podcasts – be as present as possible.
Slow down and pay attention to what is around you. Notice your feet and where you
place them. How are you moving? Are you moved by your own desire path, or others?
What ideas are you carrying with you as you navigate them? What ideas or narratives
about nature might these desire paths be informed by? Make critical connections with
course readings so far.s so far.
• Make sure to bring with you tools to document your ‘meandering story’ (i.e a notebook,
audio recorder phone camera, digital camera). Record traces of your experience:
images, audio recordings, video, thoughts, encounters, moments of inspiration,
connections to what we have learned so far. Use the traces to inform in process working
documentation which makes visible the processes of attuning to assemblages of desire
paths.
• Your working documentation should:
• Make visible in some way your emerging understandings of the readings you
have engaged with so far in this course, grappling with concepts such as (but not
limited to): anthropocentrism, settler colonialism, consumption/extraction as a
relation, romanticism, the nature/culture divide, nature’s child. You do not have
to create a vocabulary list or definitions, but choose a term or idea that connects
to your experience on the walk.
• Attend in some way to the following provocations (but not answer completely or
entirely – this can be subtle, speculative and in process) from Nxumalo
(2019,p.42):
• What might be set in motion by beginning to notice that which is often
taken for granted and normalized in this place?
• What ethical possibilities might be brought into view from close attention
to the situated more-than-human specificities of encounters with(in)
place?
• What contradictions and ambivalences emerge in each specific encounter
that might create new ways of seeing?
