You will walk all over Toronto this weekend like it’s some kind of Jane Jacobs welcome mat

The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly — a reminder that this is Jane’s Walk weekend.

Exploring Toronto on your own is fine and good and often the preferred way of seeing the city. When you’re with somebody else, the great agility of being alone in the city is gone. A street, alley or shop that looks inviting must be weighed against the needs and wants of companions who might insist on stopping at stores you don’t want to stop at or, worse, wasting time eating. City-exploring is sometimes best done selfishly.

On occasion, though, it’s nice to be led around the city by somebody else. When following, the sense of getting lost — of getting deeper into the city — is sometimes greater because you’re not always paying attention to how you got to where you are. It’s like how the passenger of a car can take their eye off the road and fiddle with the radio knob or look at a book or watch the horizon. The decisions of navigation are taken care of and other details can be focused on.

The best-led walks are intimate affairs: being taken around a neighbourhood by somebody who cares about it and who gives you their personal tour, who is not an expert but who’s passionate about the place. These kinds of walks often happen by chance, but on the first weekend of May there is an opportunity to take in two days’ worth of tours during the fourth annual Jane’s Walk here in Toronto.

Over 100 individual walks are happening across the city. What’s most impressive is that the walks are not all downtown and covering the usual territory, but extend to the city’s borders. You should go on as many walks as you can, picking some in areas you know (to see what other people think about it) and some in places you’ve either never been to or don’t know much about. There are neighbourhood walks in places you’ve probably never even heard of, like South Armour Heights, Thistletown, Victoria Village, Rougeville and Parkway Forest.

The event is named after Jane Jacobs. We hear a lot about her in Toronto and it’s a point of civic pride (for most) that she chose to come here from New York in the 1960s and stay for the rest of her life, using the city as her public intellectual home base. Though she talked about ideas that were bigger than Toronto, she was always interested in what was going on just beyond her front porch (she lived at 69 Albany in the Annex — the house needs a statue out front) and was involved in local matters until she died. What the Jane’s Walks do is get people out on the street to look at the details of city life that, especially in this election year, are important. The details help us know if election rhetoric is real or getting out of hand.

I’m leading a walk on the Saturday beginning at Yonge and St. Clair called “Super Modernism and Super Ravines.” If you regularly read this column you shouldn’t come because I’m going to talk about some of the things I do here — mostly that having high concrete things next to old, low Victorian things works well in Toronto (we’ll walk by some examples). We’ll also go into the ravine below Rosedale’s mansions where Swiss Family Robinson–style trails will be traversed and views will be had. Maybe if you’ve never been north of Bloor and have weird thoughts about uptown Toronto you can come, but otherwise there are lots of other walks to choose from.

The Alexandra Park housing complex just adjacent to Queen West/Chinatown and Kensington Market is a part of town often avoided, but on the Saturday, local residents will be taking people through their neighbourhood in and around the Sonny Atkinson housing co-op. By the end of the walk, this place that nobody hears about will be filled with stories, and the donut-hole in many mental maps of Toronto will be filled in and made human.

Further out on well-travelled Queen West, funeral director Kory McGrath is taking people on a walk around the neighbourhood and discussing the disappearance of funeral homes and rites from the urban landscape, and what that means to our understanding of death. As I wrote in this space last year, we walk through and by death all the time in the city, but often don’t know we are so close to it. Queen West will start to look different after a walk like this.

To get a real sense of the size of the city and how many people live here, make your way out to some of the walks far from the core, like the walk led by the Bathurst-Finch Neighbourhood Action Group. Twenty-five thousand people live up here (outside of big cities, this many people would constitute a metropolis), far from anything that might be considered cool. And despite being deep in the inner suburbs, many people go about their days without cars. This is when a walk becomes political. When candidates in this year’s election start evoking the idea of suburban rage over too much focus on transit and bikes, this walk will show there are vast suburban populations of Toronto that don’t use cars in parts of the city designed specifically for four wheels. There is no us-and-them, there is only us: Torontonians who use all transportation modes.

Some walks are from heretofore hidden perspectives. When I tweeted a couple of weeks ago about how I was excited about this year’s walk roster, and that it covers so much of Toronto, another tweeter wondered if a walk led by No One is Illegal changed the idea of Jane’s Walk, making it political (they’re walking through St. James Town and looking at it from a migrant worker’s perspective). Perhaps it does, though everybody knows there are migrant workers in Toronto, both documented and not, so hearing and walking through their Toronto doesn’t seem terribly radical. It’s also no more political than the number of council candidates taking people on walks this year, or even me going on about why Toronto needs more super-tall glass, steel and concrete skyscrapers. There’s room for it all, so go take a bunch of walks on May 1 and 2.

Photo by Loozrboy.