Small story: I worked at a large in-city University Campus with a lot of green field spaces surrounding, leading to the carparks and bus stops. People continually walked on the grass the way they wanted. The university did not like the grass being mud, so laid paths. They laid the paths in regular shapes, to achieve formalisms they liked. People did not want to walk on these directing lines, continued to walk and drove the grass into mud again the paths which led to the axes they wanted to get to, and radiate from.

Lesson: leave the paths to be set by the feet, sometimes. All they had to do was photograph the dominant trails and then make paths of them.