By Sean Kurth
Interaction
George Mason University’s largest athletics and recreation complex on the original eastern portion of campus, the Recreation & Athletic Complex (RAC), has many entrances from the street. There are sidewalks and stairs from the rear, sides, and of course the bus dropoff area. What’s missing, though, is a direct connection to a boardwalk through the woods immediately in front of the building. This is an important omission because that boardwalk is part of a straight-line path from the core campus residential area, so it’s the route most residential students take to get to the gym.
The path running up the middle of the hill
A full view of the area, showing the abrupt end of the boardwalk
There are sidewalks connecting to marked crosswalks at either end of the bus dropoff zone, but those require a small amount of doubling back most students avoid. Instead, they jaywalk across Patriot Circle and climb the hill immediately across from the boardwalk. Over time, this has created a “desire path,” which in urban planning is the name for the worn hard-packed surface that develops along the easiest path to the most popular destination, even if sidewalks are laid out differently (Scovanner & Tappen, 2010).
Resource Characteristics
This hill may appear to be a manicured landscape home to nothing but grass, garden beds of invasive daffodils, and a few dozen trees, and it’s true that this forest understory has been completely denuded by human activity. However, it still has several roles to play as an ecological resource. The vegetation and soil absorb water to lessen overflowing of a nearby stream, and the vegetation also reduces erosion (Grace, 2002). Earthworms, beetles, ants, moles, and many other animal species live beneath the surface and thrive best in loose, easily-tunneled soil. Birds eat the worms and insects, and although far from their only source of food, deer also obtain food by grazing the grass.
Resource Governance and Social Context
When the RAC’s last major renovation – executed in 2009 (George Mason Athletics, 2009) – would have been proposed in 2007, the bulk of the campus resident population lived in President’s Park or The Commons, which are closer to the Aquatic & Fitness Center (AFC). The Rappahannock neighborhood, from which the shortest route to RAC runs through the center of campus and up the hill, was still mostly under construction. The Student Apartments, which have since been demolished, had a path running from the center of that neighborhood to the side of the RAC’s grounds, meaning the shortest path for those students was actually the official sidewalk.
Nowadays though, the vast majority of central and north campus students pass through the boardwalk path, which abruptly ends at the hill, to get to RAC. The renovation planners made the choice not to put a sidewalk with stairs at the end of this boardwalk, so people just climb the hill. The resource governance here is a tragedy of the commons: if individual students don’t climb the hill, they won’t save the grass or the wildlife because other students will still climb the hill, but they’ll give themselves a longer walk to the gym. Most students do avoid this path when rain makes it slippery and squishy, mitigating the problem somewhat, but those who don’t degrade the path further for other users and worsen erosion.
The model of building infrastructure for what you want people to do rather than what they actually do has failed here as everywhere. Although urban planners often have lofty ideals of changing human behavior, making us healthier and subordinating function to form, in reality the path of least resistance is usually taken by the users, whether it’s intended by the designers or not. The aesthetic and social visions of urban planners and architects move architecture and society forward, but in doing so must compromise with the realities of how people actually use space. The questionable legacies of Le Corbusier’s towers-in-parks (Samuel, 2007) or Washington, DC’s socially dead L’Enfant Plaza are a case in point.
What Has Been Done, and What Needs to Be Done
There are pieces of gravel scattered around, showing that the university has acknowledged people are going to walk that way and tried to make it safer, but the missing link in the sidewalk still isn’t patched, and the rut will deepen faster as the GMU student population continues to grow. Until there’s an asphalt path or concrete stairs, the hill will continue to erode, the subterranean animals will keep being hurt, and a small part of the RAC parking lot could eventually be structurally undermined. I use that path just like most residential RAC users do, and I’ve noticed the rut getting deeper and the dirt pulling away from the RAC parking lot’s curb more over time. There’s also another desire path along the right side of the hill going to an outdoor football field, but it runs diagonally over a flatter area and isn’t in a major runoff zone, so it doesn’t need to be turned into a sidewalk. Scattering some gravel should suffice there.
The desire path running along the flatter area to the right, with football field fencing in the background
Works Cited
George Mason Athletics. (2009, September 2). Mason athletics celebrates grand opening of the RAC. George Mason University Athletics. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://gomason.com/news/2009/9/2/205045098
Grace, J. M. (2002). Effectiveness of vegetation in erosion control from Forest Road sideslopes. Transactions of the ASAE, 45(3), 681–685. https://doi.org/10.13031/2013.8832
Samuel, F. (2007). Le Corbusier in detail. Routledge.
Scovanner, P., & Tappen, M. F. (2010). Learning pedestrian dynamics from the Real World. 2009 IEEE 12th International Conference on Computer Vision. https://doi.org/10.1109/iccv.2009.5459224