How rule-breaking Aussies are fighting back against badly designed cities

If you’ve ever walked around Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane, you've probably stumbled across an informal dirt track. What if I told you these unassuming dirt patches are actually helping shape the design of Aussie cities?

The trails have many names such as elephant paths, cow paths, and pirate paths, but to city planners, they’re known as ‘desire paths’. And they’ve become a fundamental part of city design.

What is a desire path?

Desire paths are what happen when cities don’t plan for human behaviour. They are the unofficial routes that form when people walk the shortest perceived route to their destination, and trample the grass or small shrubs along their way.

They can form when as little as 15 people walk across grass. But over time, these paths become self-reinforcing as more people see and take the unofficial route.

Why do desire paths form?

You see many cities lay out the design of their parks and public spaces like a donut. The park will have a grassed area in the middle and a paved or tarmacked pathway as a ring around the edges.

While this may look pretty, it will often require pedestrians to take a longer perceived route to their destination. Unfortunately for architects, while pedestrian brains do enjoy aesthetic designs, we much prefer convenience. Especially when we’re in a rush.

People will almost always try and walk the path of least resistance, the most ‘desirable’ route they can find – hence the name ‘Desire paths’.

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What are the best examples of desire paths?

I raised this question to my TikTok audience last week, and it came back with some of Australia’s best and worst desire paths.

One clear favourite was Macquarie University in Sydney which you can see below. This monster of a desire path has formed from hundreds of students, patients and workers walking from the metro station to the eastern half of the university campus.

Instead of taking the much longer, formal pathway, people opt to take the now well-established desire path across up the hill and across the grass.

Another perilous desire path can be found in East Melbourne. The formal paved route around Smith Street is so inconvenient, that pedestrians are willing to regularly jaywalk across two high traffic four-lane roads, and a tram track, to get to their destination.

So what can be done about these paths? Should we be blocking off their access if they’re risking people’s safety?

Desire paths are a symptom of poor city design.

Instead of putting up barricades and punishing pedestrians, desire paths should make us question how we allowed this to occur in the first place.

At its root, desire paths are a strong indicator that people want more walkable cities. And many cities across the globe actually embrace desire paths.

Michigan State University is a fantastic example. When the university redesigned and reconstructed a portion of its campus, it purposefully didn’t build pathways. They let students establish the optimal and most desirable pathways, and then paved them into formal pathways.

So next time you decide to take that shortcut, maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad. You might just be helping to plan out a better city.

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