Starting tomorrow, people around the world will celebrate their communities with free, citizen-led walking tours, inspired by the life and work of urban activist Jane Jacobs. Born in 1916, she had no formal training in urban planning, yet became an icon of the movement by introducing her community-based approach to planning in her widely–celebrated book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Basing the treatise on her personal experience living in the West Village, she contradicted the then-dominant “urban renewal” practices with common-sense suggestions for making cities more livable places, written in such a simplified, personal way as to be accessible to anyone.
The first Jane’s Walk was organized in 2007, a year after Jacobs’ death, by a group of Jacobs’s friends and colleagues in Toronto. Jacobs was insistent that members of a community should have input on how their community is developed—“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”—and felt that the best way to start that process was to “get out and walk.”
That walk has grown into an international festival, with walks held in more than 350 cities in 56 countries this year. There are more than 200 walks across New York City alone, covering topics ranging from the history of the Gilded Age to the MTA’s capital funding crisis to the future of public art to famous celebrity meltdowns. Buffalo and Ithaca, NY and Danbury, CT have walks planned too. Currently, there are no walks hosted in New Jersey for this year’s festival, but it’s not too late to organize your own!
