This weekend, everyone should be out walking. The annual Jane’s Walk takes place this Saturday and Sunday (May 2 and 3), and there are over 100 walks to choose from all over Toronto. They are given by all sorts of people — youth, community members, experts, city councillors, enthusiasts — and they will be about all sorts of things, but essentially about experience of living as part of different communities around Toronto. They are a great way to get to know parts of the city you don’t know and realize how deeply people get to know their communities over time.
The walks are inspired by Jane Jacob’s advice: “No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at … suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You’ve got to get out and walk.”
Jane’s Walk has made a particular effort to include walks from suburban areas all over Toronto, not just the well-walked downtown, and to include walks led by youth. I’ve had the privilege to talk to some of the organizers who have been helping to coordinate the youth walks, and they sound like they are going to be fascinating walks that reveal a way of looking at the city a lot of us have forgotten. Our society seems to spend a lot of time admonishing youth and telling them what to do; it’s good to take the time to ask them what they know.
The Jane’s Walk website has a complete list of walks in Toronto and a printable PDF schedule. There are also walks in many other cities across Canada.
One comment
I’d highly recommend the youth-run “Jane-Finch Neighbourhood Tour”, which I took last year. It was fascinating, both in terms of urban planning lessons and in getting to know a well-known (infamous?) Toronto neighbourhood I’d never spent any time in. I believe some people commented here before last year’s walk that they worried such a tour would exploit the local community — it was quite the opposite, with the warmest neighbourhood welcome I’ve gotten on any Jane’s Walk.