Urban Planners Accommodate Desire Lines Progression Meme

This is a 12-panel (4 rows, 3 columns) progressive comic that satirizes inefficient urban planning practices. The first panel shows an empty grass plot at a street corner with a single paved diagonal sidewalk. In the next panels, an informal dirt 'desire line' (the path people actually walk instead of using the pre-built sidewalk) appears across the grass. Planners repeatedly add obstacles to try to force people to use the official sidewalk: first a bench, then a trash can, then a long hedge, which they cut and rearrange multiple times to block the informal path. In the final panel, the city finally rebuilds the paved sidewalk to exactly match the original desire line that people walked from the start, rendering all the previous obstacle installation work completely useless. The joke critiques how many urban planning projects waste resources trying to force public behavior, instead of designing infrastructure around how people actually use public space.

This comic was originally created by artist @instachaaz, as indicated by the signature watermark at the bottom right of the full image. It was widely circulated as a meme on platforms including X (Twitter, per the given source attribution) and Joyreactor, which is also marked as a host site via the joyreactor.cc watermark on the image. It became popular for its relatable, sarcastic take on common public infrastructure failures.