This Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Jane’s Walk Toronto is holding its annual festival of free, community-led walking conversations inspired by Jane Jacobs — a Toronto urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building.
Jane’s Walk encourages anyone to lead a walk to share stories about their neighbourhoods, discover unseen aspects of their communities and use walking as a way to connect with their neighbours, according to Kate Fane, co-manager of the festival.
Although Jacobs (1916-2006) had no formal training in urban planning or administration, she wrote a 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail. The piece was inspired by her time living in New York City when the chief urban planner Robert Moses had implemented a variety of policies designed to exclude low-income, marginalized and racialized folks from access to the urban environment.
To push back against Moses’ top-down mentality, Jacobs organized her community in Greenwich Village to mobilize and declare that cities should be designed by the people who live in them.
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968 at a cultural turning point in the city, hoping her sons could avoid being drafted by the American government to fight in the Vietnam War, where she continued her work and writing on urbanism, economics and social issues throughout her life.
“She was instrumental in preventing the Spadina Expressway from being built which would have thoroughly divided downtown,” Fane said.
The Jane’s Walks Festival, which happens once a year around Jacobs’ birthday, was founded in Toronto in 2006 by a group of Jacobs’ friends and colleagues who were determined to celebrate her legacy. It has since inspired walks worldwide.
“It creates a platform for absolutely anyone to hold a walking conversation about what they love, are proud of, want to critique or are concerned about in their community, and to bring people together to talk about this issue.”
Kate Fane, co-manager of Jane’s Walk Festival.
While Toronto is the core hub of the festival, these walking conversations have been held in 81 Canadian cities and 104 cities across the world to make space for people to observe, reflect, share, question and re-imagine the places in which they live, work and play, according to Jane’s Walk Toronto’s website. The goal is to knit people together into strong and resourceful communities, instilling belonging and encouraging civic leadership.
“I think the really exciting thing, and what shows the impact of this idea, is that it’s resonating with cities all around the world — people are finding ways to take this concept and really personalize it and make it their own, which is pretty incredible,” Fane said.
Walk leaders facilitate walking conversations through storytelling about their neighbourhood and encourage participants to get involved and share their own opinions and observations. All walks are free and meant to champion and give agency to the voices of everyday people.
“There’s the political sensibility: people gathering to talk about how their communities can do better, but at the personal level — people have the space to be able to share aspects of their culture or their own personal narrative and their own relationship with the city,” Fane said.
And while many communities are already actively speaking up about issues they face, and have spaces to celebrate one another, Fane expressed that they may not be heard or shared widely. Jane’s Walk looks to what already exists in the community and asks how they can amplify the work already being done.
“I think it’s always important to engage first. Before asking anything we reach out to local community organizations that are grounded in those communities and ask for ways that we can help and support them,” Fane said.
The Jane’s Walk Festival this year runs from May 6 to 8 and has 84 walks lined up on the schedule. Walks stretch all the way from Etobicoke to Scarborough and North York to Toronto Island. In complement to the festival, panel discussions will be hosted by community leaders on topics of food insecurity, affordable housing and gentrification in our communities.
Fane says she’s really excited about the Buy Your Neighbourhood walk led by the directors of Kensington Market Community Land Trust — a group of neighbours in Kensington Market who bought a building that was slated to become an Airbnb ‘ghost hotel’ (smaller, sparsely furnished units rented out in perpetuity for profit) and would evict every long-term resident. Through storytelling on the gentrification and neighbourhood change in Kensington Market, the walk will invite discussion on how and why community land should be community-owned.
“It’s all about how they were able to purchase a building to convert into affordable housing, and the importance of public ownership of civic space, which is really near and dear to my heart and to Jane Jacobs’ as well.”
Kate Fane, co-manager of Jane’s Walk Festival.
Another festival walk Fane would like to highlight is How Place Holds Time, led by the High Park Nature Centre. Participants will examine the history of High Park’s Indigenous leadership in its natural environment and reflect on how that manifests today, through the lens of Indigenous land sovereignty, according to Fane.
“Sometimes among urbanists, we can get so wide-eyed and in awe of the built environment while neglecting to consider whose land we are on when we build these environments,” Fane said.
Through Lawrence Heights: A Community In Between, panelists from the Toronto Community Benefits Network, North York Community House and the Provocation Ideas Festival will come together to talk about how community benefits agreements can be solutions to offset challenging gentrification impacts and improve the well-being of their residents.
“When these big development projects come into a community, how can we negotiate to ensure that we have jobs that go to local residents with good wages and good working conditions?” Fane asked.
In Toronto: A Food City for Everyone, panelists from the food justice advocacy organization FoodShare Toronto, the local solutions-focused news outlet The Green Line, and independent food market and grocers Afro-Caribbean Farmer’s Market and Amerex Caribbean Grocers will show how “everyone has a role to play in our kitchens and a seat to fill at our tables,” according to the event description.
For the past two years, all of Jane’s Walks in Toronto have been online or self-guided due to the pandemic. This year’s festival will be mainly outdoors in small groups — a format that the organizers believe is vital to creating community dialogue that can enact real change in our city.
“People have this fantastic opportunity to come together with strangers, see the community with new eyes and get perspective — to think of our city as a place where we can have these kinds of spontaneous interactions,” Fane said.
If residents cannot attend the online events this weekend, Jane’s Walk will be making the info from the panel discussions available through their website and newsletter after the festival. And Fane stressed that while the festival happens from May 6 to 8, the organization runs year-round and anyone can hold a walk by contacting the festival organizers who will help promote it.
“I think another really beautiful aspect of a walk is that it can happen at any time, it can be personalized to anyone and you can have some really exciting, unexpected conversations and connections as a result,” Fane said.
