Elephant Paths

by on 18. Jul, 2004 in Mobile Society

Pasta and Vinegar have a nice definition of Elephant Paths:

“Elephant path is a name for a path that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts; it is an unofficial route. Elephant path is an anarchist way of moving in a city, a town or a village. It is an overlaying system of going from a place to a place in a space regardless of the city/town plan. Still, it is connected to the streets and the architectural forms.”

One of the great opportunities for Urban Planning will be using Elephant Paths to work out how people use their environment and adapting it accordingly. A kind of user-friendly planning system, made available by location tracking – assuming that they can get permission to use the data like this from say, GPS feeds.

I heard of an architect recently who refused to pave the outside of the building. Instead he planted lawns. After 6 months, he sent his people back to pave the paths that had been made by the occupants on the lawns.

Clever.

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  • (Let me find out where I read this.) The idea was as outlined in the post. But after they had the paths paved according to how the people chose to walk on the lawn, people started to •shortcut• these, too.

    Maybe there was a general problem with pedestrians feeling •patronized•.
  • The original location this was tried was, I believe, University of Oregon, detailed in Christopher Alexander's "The Oregon Experiment". My experience when I started there was similar to Richard's -- "What the hell, who layed out these pathways?"

    But of course they were exactly where the pathways should be, and after a week I stopped noticing them.
  • The University of Miami pathways were created in this way - the entire place was planted to grass and then, a year or two later, they paved the paths that were most obvious. You can see this clearly near the library, the student building, and the residences, where there are some diagonal paths that aren't what you'd expect in a 'normal' campus.
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