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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/05/desire-paths-the-illicit-trails-that-defy-the-urban-planners

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e've all been there. You want a short cut - to the bus stop, office or corner shop - but there's no designated path. Others before you have already flattened the grass, or cut a line through a hedge. Why not, you think.

So goes the logic of "desire paths" - described by Robert Macfarlane as "paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning"; he calls them "free-will ways". The New Yorker offers other names: "cow paths, pirate paths, social trails, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l'âne (donkey paths), and Olifantenpad (elephant trails)". JM Barrie described the m as "Paths that have Made Themselves".

Reddit has desire path threads, tens of thousands of people strong, delighting in the more mysterious or illogical-seeming of them. They can form anywhere from apparently forgotten corners of cities to the grounds of national governments, as has happened around the National Congress of Brazil; some are so well established that they are visible on Google Maps.

Desire paths have been described as illustrating "the tension between the native and the built environment and our relationship to them". Because they often form in areas where there are no pavements, they can be seen to "indicate [the] yearning" of those wishing to walk, a way for "city dwellers to 'write back' to city planners, giving feedback with their feet".

Desire lines present evidence about movement, which is important

Riccardo Marini, urban planner

But as well as revealing the path of least resistance, they can also reveal where people refuse to tread. If you've been walking the same route for years, an itchy-footed urge to go off-piste, even just a few metres, is probably something you'll identify with. It's this idea that led one academic journal to describe them as a record of "civil disobedience".

Rather than dismiss or even chastise the naughty pedestrian by placing fences or railings to block off "illicit" wanderings, some planners work to incorporate them into urban environments. This chimes with the thinking of Jane Jacobs, an advocate of configuring cities around desire lines, who said: "There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them ... that we must fit our plans."

Architect and urban planner Riccardo Marini takes desire lines very seriously. He has seen plenty of evidence of what happens when you don't. "Somebody has spent a fortune putting in granite steps with a piece of landscape next to it, and people have gone up the slope because their brain tells them that's the quickest way to do it, even if they get muddy," he says. "Desire lines present evidence about movement, which is important."

Marini has spent decades working with the Danish urban planner Jan Gehl, famous for putting people and the way they interact with a space at the core of his work. Desire paths are about "listening to a place" - and listen Marini does: he has even drawn up bubblegum and cigarette butt maps of Regent Street in London to help inform where to place benches.

Using this kind of evidence to inform planning is not entirely new. Many college campuses have waited to see where their students and teachers choose to tread before adding paving. Michigan State University was one such institution, and its campus is now a pleasing etch-a-sketch board when seen from above.

Desire lines tell us about the endless human desire to have choice

Professor Andrew Furman

In the 90s, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas spearheaded one of the best-known examples, letting the footfall of students inform his plan for the Illinois Institute of Technology. Hospitals, too, have been known to respond to organically produced footpaths: at the US National Institutes of Health, the footpaths that developed in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s went on to be paved.

There is historical precedent, too. According to some urban planning experts, Broadway was New York City's earliest desire line, following as it does the Native American-made Wickquasgeck Path, which is thought to have been the shortest route between pre-colonial settlements in Manhattan that avoided swamps and hills. Broadway is the only remaining one path, according to Marini, that "wasn't wiped out by the European grid being overlaid on it".

As such, desire lines can reveal the roots of cities. "When they do not fade, or until they fade," writes Erika Luckert in a paper mapping the desire lines of the Canadian city of Edmonton, "[they] serve not only as paths, but also as historical records - making past patterns of footsteps apparent, and allowing the past to directly inform the present". Marini points to Edinburgh's Cowgate, which he says was originally "a desire line expressed by a shepherd or a herder and their animals [travelling] from the farm to the market".

For Andrew Furman, a professor in interior design and architecture at Ryerson University in Toronto who has spent years looking at desire lines, they tell us something about "the endless human desire to have choice. The importance of not having someone prescribe your path". In a heavily constructed city, there are "rules as to how public and public-private spaces are used", he says. Desire paths are about "not following the script" - he calls it a "resistance". "An individual can really write their own story. It's something really powerful if you do have that agency to move."

He points me to a passage in Rebecca Solnit 's book about the history of walking, Wanderlust: "Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it."
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Desire paths: the illicit trails that defy the urban planners

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We've all been there. You want a short cut - to the bus stop, office or corner shop - but there's no designated path. Others before you have already flattened the grass, or cut a line through a hedge. Why not, you think.

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https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/RisomJeff_NACTO.pdf

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https://architizer.com/blog/practice/tools/how-architecture-is-born-mvrdv/

https://www.oma.com/projects/parc-de-la-villette

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https://www.architonic.com/en/story/archdaily-15-minute-city/20173719

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https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/

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https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/films/manufactured-landscapes

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MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES:

BY JENNIFER BAICHWAL

Manufactured Landscapes is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of 'manufactured landscapes' - quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization's materials and debris, but in a way people describe as "stunning" or "beautiful," and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.

The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country's massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai's urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.

Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky's photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.

AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS

Winner: Best Documentary - Ecocinema International Film Festival 2008
2007 Genie Award for BEST DOCUMENTARY
Winner: REEL CURRENT AWARD at the Nashville Film Festival (NaFF)

Winner: Genie for Best Feature Documentary 2007
Toronto International Film Festival - One of the Top Ten Films of 2006
Winner: TIFF Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film 2006

Winner: Best Canadian Documentary, Atlantic Film Festival 2006

Winner: Best Canadian Documentary, Calgary Film Festival 2006

Winner: Best Feature documentary & Best Canadian Film, Toronto Film Critics Association 2006
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival Nominated in the best documentary competition at 2008 film independent spirit awards.
REVIEWS AND OTHER MEDIA:

Montreal Gazette, December 14th, 2006:
Award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal stands out on horizon after turning her camera on photographer's scenes.
Review by John Griffin

Victoria Times Colonist, November 19th, 2006:
Glorious wastelands.
Review by Michael D. Reid

Ottawaxpress, November 16th, 2006:
Beautiful devastation.
Review by Matt Harrison

Vancouver Sun, October. 10, 2006:
Landscapes that weep toxic tears.
Review by Katherine Monk

National Post, Sep. 29, 2006:
Photos worth a thousand frames.
Review by Chris Knight

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Films: Manufactured Landscapes - Edward Burtynsky

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BY JENNIFER BAICHWAL Manufactured Landscapes is a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of 'manufactured landscapes' - quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization's materials and debris, but in a way people describe as "stunning" or "beautiful," and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.

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https://archeyes.com/plan-tokyo-1960-kenzo-tange/#:~:text=Kenzo%20Tange%20declared%20the%20goals,architecture%20into%20an%20organic%20unity.

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Kenzo Tange's 1960 plan for Tokyo was proposed when many cities in the industrial world were experiencing the height of urban sprawl. With a unique insight into the contemporary city's emerging characteristics and an optimistic faith in the power of design, Tange attempted to impose a new physical order on Tokyo, which would accommodate the city's continued expansion and internal regeneration.

A plan for Tokyo 1960 Technical Information

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.
- Kenzo Tange

A Plan for Tokyo 1960 Photographs

The decentralization of Tokyo

The ideals of the Metabolist Manifesto were perhaps best exhibited and advocated by Kenzo Tange in his 1960 Plan for Tokyo. In 1958 the Tokyo Regional Plan was released, which proposed a series of satellite cities and general decentralization to solve Tokyo's rapid population boom (rising from 3.5 million in 1945 to 10 million in 1960).

Tange argued that the movement that the automobile introduced into urban life had changed peoples' perception of space and that this required a new spatial order for the city in the form of the megastructure, not merely a continuation of the radial zoning status quo. He proposed a linear megastructure based on a 'fixed' open network of highways and subways around which a 'transient' program would create as the population's needs dictated. The scheme, featuring a linear series of interlocking loops expanding Tokyo across the bay, has often been regarded as initiating the decade-long megastructural movement.

Kenzo Tange declared the goals of his Plan of Tokyo redevelopment:

1. To shift from a radial centripetal system to a system of linear development.

2. To find a means of bringing the city structure, the transportation system, and urban architecture into an organic unity.

3. To find a new urban spatial order that would reflect the open organization and the spontaneous mobility of contemporary society.

Tange incorporated urban concepts such as mobility, urban structure, linear civic axis, and city as a process into a powerful architectural language and tried to elevate them to a new notion of the relationship between the whole and the part, and between the permanent and the transient. However, Tange's approach to these concepts was symbolic rather than practical, an orientation that was also manifest in his later works. His vision for establishing a new spatial order for the continuously expanding and transforming metropolis was ultimately a utopian ideal.

In the past, people walked along streets until they came to their destination and then simply disappeared into the door. With automobiles on the street, however, everything is different. In the first place, it is necessary to divide pedestrians from vehicles, to create highways and streets that are for the exclusive use of vehicles. Thanks to the coming of the automiobile, there is needfor a new order in which a vehicle can move from afast highway to a slower one and then come to a stop at the destination.

- Kenzo Tange

Though unexecuted, the Plan for Tokyo heralded Tange's works in the following years. In 1964, he experimented with the concept of "city as the process" in the Yamanashi Communication Center design in Kofu. Again, the idea was based on the notion of differentiating the two types of space units, namely those of a permanent character and the flexible zones depending on future development.

A Plan for Tokyo 1960 Plans

About Kenzo Tange

Kenzō Tange (1913 - 2005) was a Japanese architect, winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism. His career spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, producing numerous distinctive buildings in Japan and worldwide.

Tange was also an influential patron of the Metabolist movement. He said: " It was, I believe, around 1959 or at the beginning of the sixties that I began to think about what I was later to call structuralism" (cited in Plan 2/1982, Amsterdam), a reference to the architectural movement known as Dutch Structuralism.

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Kenzo Tange ' 1960 plan for Tokyo was proposed at a time when many cities in the industrial world were experiencing the height of urban sprawl. With a unique insight into the emerging characteristics of the contemporary city and an optimistic faith in the power of design,

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https://www.librarysearch.manchester.ac.uk/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma992975778010601631&context=L&vid=44MAN_INST:MU_NUI&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=any,contains,drawings%20in%20urban%20design&sortby=rank&mode=basic&pcAvailability=false