The path jutting across the grass by Bobb Hall began as a faint scuff. A few thousand steps later, it became a dusty groove, cutting through the lawn and toward the sidewalks along Campus Drive. No signs mark it, but the footsteps have quietly agreed: this way is faster.
“It must save me five hours per term with all the shortcuts I take added together,” said McCormick second-year Bryce Snider.
Northwestern’s Spring Quarter has begun, and students are navigating through unfamiliar parts of campus once again. As they adjust to new schedules and locations, they try to find the quickest routes from point A to point B to establish a smooth daily routine. These manmade shortcuts are ideal, Snider said, because they make it possible for him to stay in his room a couple minutes longer before starting his journey to class.
Pedestrians create these informal trails, often called desire paths or lines, when they repeatedly stray from paved routes to create their own. They can be a worn dirt squiggle through a grassy lawn, footpaths through barkchips or across a busy intersection with limited crosswalks. They permeate public parks, snow-covered neighborhoods, residential areas and university campuses.
As quarters continue to pass, desire lines appear virtually everywhere on the Evanston campus: between the Technological Institute and Sargent Hall, on the way to Mudd or Deering Library, across planting beds to cross the street into Blomquist gym — all subtle reminders of the interaction between nature, individual and infrastructure.
“I take them for convenience,” said Weinberg second-year Grace Juarez. “I was walking to class my first day of freshman year and thought, ‘If only there was a better way to cross this big piece of yard.’ My life became so much better after I started following the desire lines.”
Juarez, who said she loves these paths, follows them because of how “worn” they are — signaling their effectiveness. While she doesn’t calculate how much time she saves, she said traveling across campus feels more efficient. Desire paths are “less of a walk,” she said.
From the students’ perspective, taking these paths is simply practicing an inference from the Pythagorean theorem — a math principle that indirectly implies the hypotenuse of a right triangle is shorter than its two sides summed together.
But for urban designers and planners, these lines are data. Often, they catch the attention of these professionals, who can use desire paths to understand how people naturally navigate the campus space compared with the routes originally planned.
“Sidewalks have a lot less power in universities,” said Neil Reindel, an urban designer at Perkins&Will, a firm that worked on the Walter Athletics Center and brand new Ryan Field. “People will oftentimes find their own way through places, so it [urban planning] becomes more strategically challenging.”
When creating a master plan — a long-term goal that eases a space’s development — colleges are often a “different animal,” Reindel said. A single institution typically owns a large amount of adjacent land, so pedestrian movement tends to be less rigid than in a typical neighborhood, he said.
This makes it harder to define boundaries, limits and directions, something Reindel said is frequent in the earlier stages of planning.
To anticipate movement through a space, Reindel describes a growing reliance on “modeling” tools that designers can use. After inputting a layout, planners run simulations that imitate human direction through the three-dimensional space. Reindel said they reveal patterns and insights that might be overlooked, overall helping designers enhance the comfort and experience for users.
“You can identify or create totally different opportunities,” Reindel said. “It’s helped me think more holistically about planning.”
But sometimes, these models still fail. Reindel said he often finds the psychology of the user trumps that of the designer, leading to desire lines that appear once a space is in use. When this happens, groundwork often takes over.
Sarah White, Northwestern’s campus planner, said student-made desire paths are an important part of evaluating a site. Before beginning a new project, she conducts “existing site assessments” to observe how people move through a space. This is all done before the pencil hits any paper. It can be revealing, she said, to compare where people naturally walk with where the original infrastructure directs them.
“We’re not trying to fight against something that’s happening,” White said. “Sometimes it’s a cue in the landscape that you need another pathway or to maintain something differently.”
For Juarez and other students alike, desire paths reflect a unique connection between people and the campus terrain. The freedom to make choices on where to walk serves as a way for students to leave their mark and experience nature on their own terms.
“People will walk past hundreds of thousands of buildings over the course of their lifetime, and only a handful will resonate with them,” Reindel said. “It’s always the space on the ground plane that leaves the biggest impression.”
