Jane's Walk

In car dominated cities, walking can be a radical act. The guided tours of Jane’s Walk reconnect pedestrians with their neighbours and neighbourhoods.

Walking is a basic requirement of social interaction. Take away sidewalks, and people’s sense of social belonging will begin to fray. Sidewalks are the space for encounters. They are the glue that holds city life together.

Only by walking through a city’s neighbourhoods can people develop meaningful attachments to space. The fraying of such attachments, on the other hand, threatens to reduce the living environment to a parking lot or a dumping ground.

These types of ideas owe a great deal to the work of writer and urban visionary Jane Jacobs, who passed away in Toronto in 2006 at the age of 88. Jacobs had lived in Toronto since 1968, and wrote most of her half-dozen books here.

But it was in her first and arguably most important book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) that Jacobs extensively discussed the importance of sidewalks and walking.

To continue the tradition of Jacobs, a group of her friends and disciples launched “Jane’s Walk” in Toronto in 2007, the year after her passing. It is a program that has already inspired and enabled hundreds of guided neighbourhood group walks in dozens of places in North America, covering urban and suburban, well-to-do and struggling settings alike. And it is just getting started.

It was in March 2007 that Chris Winter, executive director of the Conservation Council of Ontario and chair of the Ontario Smart Growth Network, first posed the idea of Jane’s Walk to Mary Rowe and Margie Zeilder, two of Toronto’s urban innovators, and long-term friends of Jane Jacobs. Rowe and Zeilder’s work had come to Winter’s attention through their affiliation with Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation.

“Jane's Walk is an example of open source thinking in action,” says Tonya Surman, founding executive director of the Centre for Social Innovation. “It creates the conditions for people who are most interested to take action (leading a walk) to engage another self-selecting group (those attending the walk) to engage in a conversation that is determined by the participants. Jane's Walk is a an example of how organic connections are made and actions are taken.”

Jane’s Walk really got going in 2008, after Jane Farrow, a host on CBC radio, joined as its executive director in the fall of 2007. Since then, Jane’s Walk has held dozens of guided neighbourhood walks both in the Greater Toronto Area, and in collaboration with local organizers across Canada and the U.S.

At its core, Jane’s Walk was designed to be accessible and open to anyone who cared about their neighbours and neighbourhoods. When the first simultaneous walks were held in May 2007, it became apparent that a responsive chord had been struck.

“The ‘aha’ moment occurred the first time it happened, in the sense that it was immediately successful, 27 walks were offered the first year (with just seven weeks to organize the events) and hundreds of people attended,” says Farrow. “There was a big appetite for this type of thing – people were hungry to explore their cities, meet neighbours, and discuss common points of interest and concern.”

The practice of guided neighbourhood walks is not new per se, but Jane’s Walk is a good example of social innovation as it has become a self-sustaining, open, and organic practice that draws many thousands of people to guided group walks every year.

Some of the most interesting walks in Toronto have been led by people deeply involved in urban planning and design in the city: urban restoration guru Margie Zeidler, internationally active urban designer Ken Greenberg, and city councillor Adam Vaughan, who have led walks on architecture and preservation, waterfront design, and zoning and policy issues respectively.

“Jane's Walk exemplifies self-organization in that a very small organization has created a container that enables communities around the world to self-organize,” says Surman. “The web infrastructure has enabled thousands of people to participate in many dozens of tours across the continent. This is an amazing feat – achieved in part, because the founders were motivated to get it into the commons and not to try and contain or control it.”

Jane’s Walk works to bring people together (dozens at a time) and deepen their bonds to their environment, raising awareness about neighbourhood and city issues, while encouraging walking as a lifestyle. It has succeeded in doing this in places ranging from Toronto’s downtown to the satellite city of Newmarket, as well in the edge-city realities of much of Scarborough, where big-box stores and strip malls have imposed an anti-interaction urban form.

“For me, the most striking thing about Jane’s Walk is how adaptable it is. This community led walking tour format works brilliantly in many different contexts and with radically different content.” says Farrow. “Who would have believed that these tours led by passionate locals, informed by the contrarian and exhilarating principles of Jane Jacobs, would be such a hit in such far flung places as the inner suburbs, exurbs, downtown sex worker strolls, graffiti alleyways, mixed use boulevards and derelict industrial lands.”

As the walks in Toronto’s under-served neighbourhoods show, one of the most innovative aspects of Jane’s Walk is how it is changing perceptions of “edgy” neighbourhoods: public housing projects in Scarborough, Jane and Finch, and Regent Park are opened up to people from other neighbourhoods who have a stake in improving living conditions in such distraught places.

“People who walk through these distressed neighbourhoods are eager to make their own decisions about these places, despite what they might have heard,” says Farrow. “Likewise, the folks who live in these neighbourhoods are thrilled that there’s so many people willing to listen, to see for themselves and not believe the hype. It’s a brilliant pairing of supply and demand, urban literacy style.”

In a previous era, walking may have been seen as the most basic and inexpensive right of a city-dweller. But given the extent to which the suburban, car-dependent reality has restricted human contact, walking, especially in groups, resembles a constructively radical act that aims to take back some control over the future of our environment.