Desire lines are the informal pathways that occur from frequent foot movement in the environment: Landscape Architecture Thesis, UCD, Ireland

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

Desire lines are the informal pathways that occur from frequent foot movement in the environment. Various names, including footpaths, social trails, elephant paths, and tracks, identify these desired lines. An appraisal of the literature on desire lines advocates that environmental, community and financial expenses occur when these desire lines appear in a landscape. Recreation environmentalists and morphologists study the effects of pathways damage on the environment.

The authors conclude that abrasion from foot movement in natural landscapes could ignite residue effluence and disturb the safety of the ecosystems on the mouth of rivers. The public influences of desire lines comprise deterioration in the beauty worth of a landscape and endangered pedestrian protection from stumbling on an irregular surface. Kullhavy et al. (2018) conclude that amenities or other lands administration specialists naturally have four explanations to alleviate desired lines; physical barricades, vegetated barricades, reinforcing a new route, or combining built footways centred on selected tracks.

However, other studies into desire lines record their beneficial attractiveness and capability to improve pedestrian movement. City plan philosophers such as Furman (2012) and Smith and Walters (2018) argue for expanding vehicle-centric surroundings and how desire lines permit pedestrians to enlarge their municipal rights. Whereas this research dissected desire lines for their ability to be empowering for people or as examples of social deviancy, their potential to offer insight for designers to improve the value of the human landscape has been explored but needs to be adequately defined.

1.2 Problem Statement
Previous studies on desire lines highlight the best way to use the knowledge of desire lines to develop pedestrian groundwork. Though many of these studies are empirical, they stress more about setting and proposing answers to alleviate desire lines only after they have occurred. There are still necessities to carry out further study highlighting how landscape designers might comprehend desired routes at the city and landscape design scales. Desire lines have environmental, communal, and financial costs. Hence, it is beneficial to designers to identify faults at the design stage and prevent desired routes from arising in the developed landscape.

Frequently ignored in the texts on campus planning and design are these outdoor spaces – their use of circulation, study, relaxation, and aesthetic pleasure deserve more significant attention than they have yet received. For example, Holmes, Huynh & Millard-Ball, in their comprehensive investigation in 2018, emphasised the need to be more focused concerning arrangements for pedestrian movement, and they established that the walkability, pathfinding, and general direction for pedestrians suffer in university campuses across North America. This occurrence on campuses exemplifies the need for an enhanced plan of outdoor spaces and the landscape.

Desire lines can disclose a need for plan enhancement on the city design when they improve pedestrian movement to traverse large distances in place of formal pedestrian infrastructure. Lang (2011) concludes that when city planning disrespects urban design owing to an absence of apparent significance, there is the possibility for unintentional penalties. For example, in the case of Dublin, desired routes are frequently the first choices for pedestrians to negotiate the town where it is essential for footways. Desire lines have also been prominent in advancing street walking in cities where vehicular transport dominates the space.