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Bachelard Meme 8 April 2010

There’s been a dirty little meme bouncing around the net for a while and it’s beginning to bug me. A couple of sites (Wikipedia included) have attributed the term ‘desire line’ to Gaston Bachelard and in particular, his book ‘The Poetics of Space’. However, there is one small problem, a complete lack of evidence for this reference. After reading the English edition for a third time and contacting Matthew Tiessen (who wrote this), I have to conclude that desire lines, or similar concepts, do not originate in The Poetics of Space. So, if anyone knows different, please, please shout and put me out of my misery.