Estate Living Magazine Develop - Issue 44 August 2019 | Page 52

C O M M U N I T Y
L I V I N G
A FOOTPATH
NAMED DESIRE
Developers, HOAs, municipalities and the
management of all manner of complexes,
schools and campuses are learning that there
are some things you just can’t fight. Put up
as many ‘Keep off the grass’ signs as you
like, people will take the shortest (or most
convenient) path to get to where they’re going.
So, the smart ones are giving in.
Planners, architects and engineers come in two varieties: those
who work with the elements – land, people, animals, weather
and available building materials – and those who (at least try to)
impose their will and vision upon the world. resistance. Elephants, after all, not only have good memories,
they are also very bright.
Leaving your mark on the world So what?
Architects and planners who come up with huge ambitious
designs that, they predict, will change the very fabric of a city or
precinct never have to ‘go back to the drawing board’. Because
they’ve never left it. They sit in their ivory towers and design
beautiful, symmetrical structures and layouts with right angles,
broad boulevards and huge, ego-enhancing monumental
structures. These are the architects most beloved of dictators –
the Hitlers, the Romanovs and the Stalins. That worked pretty well in the 19th century, but there are very
few elephants left in the urban and peri-urban areas of South
Africa, so how can this possibly be of any relevance to modern-
day planners of residential estates and – even more importantly
– precincts?
Giving in to desire
And then there are the planners – and even engineers – who work
with nature, probably the most prolific and impressive examples
of whom are the brilliant father-and-son team of Andrew Geddes
and Thomas Bain. Between them they designed and oversaw
the construction of 57 of the more interesting mountain passes
in South Africa – many of which are still traversed daily, and are
virtually unchanged after well over a century. Other than being
archetypical Victorian ‘Renaissance men’ and brilliant engineers,
the Bains did one really smart thing. They paid attention the
elephants in the room road. Almost all of their passes followed
elephant paths*, which were also the routes taken by smaller
game, and people, since time immemorial. And they did that
not out of some bunny-hugging emotion, but out of technical
pragmatism – these natural routes followed the path of least
Long before breaking ground, developers do surveys, draw
up plans, revise the plans, get them passed (or not passed, in
which case they revise them again) and – ultimately – figure out
where everything should go: the roads, the water and sewerage
reticulation, the power lines, the fibre and, of course, the
communal spaces like gyms, retail centres, playgrounds, sports
facilities and ‘natural’ areas.
And then, once it’s all been built, and the development is
90% sold, cheeky teenagers, horrible little brats and antisocial
residents disregard the beautiful yellow brick pedestrian paths
and – in defiance of estate rules – walk on the grass! Or through
the wetland.
Desire paths
In his novel The Little White Bird, JM Barrie, who is best known
as the author of Peter Pan, describes the route to Round Pond in
London’s Kensington Gardens: