From Sara Hendren’s very enjoyable book, What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World:
Desire lines can provide low-tech crowdsourcing for urban planners and architects, letting the habits of the walkers dictate to them how a space is best traversed, rather than trying to decide it up front. Some large campuses have postponed the paving of pathways until desire lines have first been created. One celebrated case was in the remodeling of the Illinois Institute of Technology, a project taken up by Dutch architect Rem Kookhaas and his firm, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in the late 1990s. That campus presented a particular conundrum for achieving social cohesion. It had doubled the footprint of the original institution but had only half the enrollment. What kind of building would energize and unite the school? The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between on campus that were already established. The single-plane building is like an archive, capturing activities in motion. It took its form from travel behaviors made newly visible, not from a series of architectural types pre-identified for recreation, shopping, and the like.
This kind of practice is a human-centered design approach to landscape, paying close attention to the details of movement and patiently observing an area over time. […]
But desire lines may also be evidence of something more than pure practicality. The casual disobedience of a desire path as an alternative to the formally prescribed walkway is remarkably simply as a human choice, willfully out of step with the way things are. Cities and towns are often planned, well, by planners, by people tasked with creating systems that make mathematical sense for groups at the scale of hundreds or thousands. They roll out pathways conceived around the efficiencies of use and cost-benefit, shunting people up and down stairs or elevators , nudging them between turnstiles and onto trains for the fastest transport. And these efficiencies are often to the good. But the emergent, informal, human-made lines are organized not only by efficiency but by desire. The human individual is also making a path through life, through interiors and exteriors, a life that cannot be measured in abstract bureaucratic terms. […]
Interesting enough on its own. But… What if creation is meant to be something similar, or even had to be. What if, to be truly incarnational, the world had to play itself out, to be “caught” in motion by God?
What archive could ever fully house the evidence of desire in the millions of walkers who daily traverse a cityscape, all the wishing and wanting that drives each path, with all their untold forms of assistance, all the getting “organized” that got them out the door and into the street? “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust.
And walking with is a mode of being in the world as well as making it.