The Urban Legend

As the larger world surrounding us descends into a state of constant turmoil and an inescapable sense of helplessness, I recently turned towards focusing on micro-resistance; daily mundane choices that provide a glimpse into the very real impact that consistent, repeated, and most importantly united, action makes. As an Urban Studies student who is yet to find a city I particularly enjoy, the city landscape served as the obvious choice for exploration. As I wandered around Paris attempting to find an avenue for agency in a city that I’m still largely foreign to, I found myself walking along the very urban oddity that had pushed me into this field of studies in the first place: a desire path. 

Gaston Bachelord, a French scientist, philosopher, and poet is often credited with the first usage of the term in his book La Poétique de l’Éspace. He defined ‘desire paths’ as paths created through usage by pedestrians wishing to walk the shortest route possible. Hence, these paths are often simply those of least resistance. They emerge due to repeated use over time, wearing down the original material and allowing for a new route to emerge, often one that diverges from the official paved route set by city planners and official design. 

While the more apolitical would question the link drawn between practicing political agency and veering off the sidewalk, the importance of diverging from the set pathway is not a novel concept nor one I can take the credit for (as much as I would like to). Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist as well as a Situationist discussed extensively the ways in which agency is eroded from the lives of urban residents as we follow the same routes daily, seldom steering off track and discovering something new. In his work The Theory of the Derive, he conceptualizes the ‘derive’, an experimental unplanned walk through the city, highlighting the importance of discovery, spontaneity, and critical awareness, aspects otherwise lacking in the everyday urban journey. 

Over the years, I hope I have contributed to the construction of numerous desire paths, leaving a literal imprint of agency onto the physical fabric that shapes our lives, inviting others to veer off the designated route and rethink how movement is structured and informed. While it may seem frivolous to many, desire paths are one of the key ways in which bottom-up placemaking may be cemented into the urban landscape. While a more authoritarian approach towards desire paths may seek to block them off through signposts or prevent them entirely with the use of fences, numerous planning initiatives have sought to employ a participatory approach by solidifying routes based on the emergence of desire paths. For example, Michigan State University in the U.S. decided to construct concrete pavement post the emergence of desire paths, paving over routes that were constructed by users, flipping the usual chronology of the planning and construction process. 

Amidst critics, users, and enjoyers, there consequently emerges a general consensus over the disobedient nature of desire paths; and their role in documenting collective disagreement and consequent action. I have begun to walk the city intentionally looking out for these paths of protests and discontent, often going out of my way to walk over one. As merely symbolic as the gesture may be, it helps serve as a reminder that resistance is always possible. That there is strength in numbers and no act is too small when performed together. Desire paths help serve as proof that in the face of repression, there is always something you can do, even if it’s simply veering off the set path of action.