the deer path and the road
A friend of mine once described an organizational project that was “building the road while ignoring the deer path.” She was describing a colleague's attempt to share a set of resources by creating a complex, systematized model, after many similar organizational models had been unsuccessful. Time after time, the small group of people sharing the resources took what they needed when they needed it. Sometimes it worked fine, sometimes it was a mess. Despite hours of labor dedicated to a series of streamlined systems, the formalized option never took hold.
Sharing a set of resources is more or less what human settlement amounts to. There are endless theories, solutions, and failures in the art of figuring out how many people use what they need while respecting the needs of other lives around them (human and otherwise) -- or don’t.
In Tunis, one of the most common laments of city dwellers is that rules are not obeyed here, and thus city life is stressful and exhausting. Something about the framework of how the public should share resources is unsuccessful, and word of mouth and the number of times “cars” come up in the conversation suggest that it’s a contemporary malady.
You know, life just isn’t sweet anymore, someone told me in a suburb of Tunis.
And yes, many rules are a murky concept here, at least to my outside eyes. Traffic lanes are mere suggestions, as are stop lights and signage, for example. But I propose that the issue isn’t that people can’t follow rules (mmmm perhaps because this idea is rooted in a history of racism and colonialism) -- it’s more like the rules don’t follow the people, the context, the practices, history, habits, desires, whatever, shaped by life on this little patch of land. Tunis, like many cities, often seems designed by imagining the road before looking for the deer path.
First, let me expand on the road/deer path thing:
The road is the most structured, labor intensive, formal approach to problem-solving. It is thorough. It is paved. It is efficient. Often it is replicated in different contexts, whether or not it is the approach that serves the community or context.
The imposition of structure, order, and timeliness are central to the capitalist and colonial city. Troubling models for ‘revitalization’ or ‘growth’ often suggest that adding some kind of structure, literal or otherwise, is an answer. Add a bike lane. Build a café. Plant a tree on top of it. Paint it green.
While I can be disturbed by this approach, particularly as someone invested in living in an ecologically sound way that respects our 4 billion year old mother, I also have always lived in places with roads, easily accessible food and water, electricity, etc. I might be disturbed by the ecological impact of resource extraction for infrastructure, or the social impact of infrastructure that disrupts communities or ecosystems (environmental injustice and racism), BUT development also creates security and health for many bodies. For example, a wheelchair can easily traverse a paved road, and this is important.
And then there’s the deer path. The instinctive approach, the way through the woods that everyone uses, regardless of whether it is paved or not. It is the shortest distance between two points, trading with your neighbor, parking on the sidewalk, making do with what’s available.
(There are well trafficked, unmarked walking paths all around Tunis, often edging along or across highways and autoroutes, around fences, or near paved paths that are either incomplete or ignored by pedestrians.)
The deer path is often a little sideways of rules and regulations. Or there’s an internal logic and set of rules, but it’s inscrutable to those outside of it. In many ways, it’s the ethic that rules in Tunis, and I can’t deny that I’m proud of it.
While I have a soft spot for informality and improvisation in the daily life of a city, it’s dangerous to valorize it. This is particularly true from the position of a designer raised and educated in a western context, commenting on an eastern one.
A city dominated by deer paths might be anti-capitalist, systems-oriented, ecologically sound, human-centric utopia, but more often than not it means an absence of security, adequate infrastructure, or standards for health and safety.
In cities shaped by capitalism -- or a globalized world shaped by the destructive effects of capitalism -- the rift between the formal and informal sector grows ever wider as wealth or mobility or resources become restricted to formal networks. For example, transport restricted to cars and autoroutes, or information accessible to people with internet access and computer and language literacy.
The informal is often valorized in incredibly dangerous ways by designers, who confuse some notion of cultural appreciation with an inability to see non-white or working-class bodies as vulnerable.
A “they can do that over here” or “they’re so resourceful” kind of attitude.
One of many examples of flawed valorization of the informal I’ve observed outside of the US: A white American architecture student visiting Istanbul spoke glowingly of how much she loved the ad hoc building process in which workers often didn’t use protection when they worked with dangerous tools or in precarious positions. Clearly, as a Turkish designer sharply pointed out to her, she did not understand that a lack of structure and standards in building practices also threatened the health and well-being of Turkish workers.
But operating in an informal context, learning to make do, repair, reconfigure, or accomplish tasks with the support of community and human connections rather than depending on knowledge and power being accessible on an individual level -- these are pretty powerful benefits of being in a place ruled by the deer path. And there are so many more.
My ideal city contains elements of both the deer path and the road – design that closely observes human patterns and instincts, with enough structure to maintain safety and convenience, particularly for the most vulnerable bodies in an urban setting.
Tunis has a lot of formal infrastructure – large autoroutes, metro and tram systems, building codes and authorization through municipalities. But there are a lot of missing links, and strong indicators that there’s a lack of collaboration between communities, urban planners, architects, engineers, and all the other folks who are stakeholders in the city’s daily workings.
An example of the formal model gone awry in Tunis are billboards around the city that show plan renderings of new highways:
These images are confusing (and infuriating) to me for a few reasons. There are a thousand little cars in these images, but not a single person. A large public park takes up a large swath of the drawing, but no indication of how it is accessible by foot or its utility as a public good beyond a box checked on what a city imagined through dated urban planning practices should look like. Images like this have power, and the violent exclusion of life on the street and pedestrians shows development that is oriented to the car rather than the human scale. Parks exist as a formal element but have little relationship to public life if they are not accessible on foot, and surrounded by highways. The elements of a developed city are visible, and the existence of some slick renderings from a planning or civil engineering office suggest an expert hand involved in the creation of the city. But these drawings are maps for sprawl disguised as traffic alleviation.
On the informal end, there’s a lot of making do with the absence or incomplete presence of formal infrastructure. And sometimes we (I include myself in this one) have minimal concern for rules and sometimes that’s just fine. Just means they’re not the right ones.
I’m currently on the hunt for many missing links to understand what might make infrastructure convenient and desirable for a large number of city-dwellers. A lot of the conversation, I suspect, requires a deeper interrogation into who the most vulnerable bodies here are, and what they are lacking. I can write from the experience of a young female-identified woman moving around the city and occasionally getting solicited by dirty old men at the bus stop (I hate you!), but there’s a lot more to be uncovered about class, race, sexual identity and presentation, immigration status. I’m in no place to comment or recommend yet, so this is an incomplete beginning...
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