Jane’s Walk 2017: Putting feet first in city-building

img_0955

 

Jane’s Walk, an annual global festival celebrating urban communities, is happening May 5-7 .  From Tel Aviv to Teheran and from Boston to Buenos Aires, people are taking to the streets to ….take to the streets!

Citizen-led and organized tours of cities give people a chance to really see the strength and diversity of their urban settings as well as the little nooks and crannies of neighborhoods they might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Jane’s Walk is named for Jane Jacobs, the author of the iconic Death and Life of the Great American City. Back in the early 1960’s, Jane’s book was the first  widely read clarion call to reclaim city life from the bureaucratic planners and highway-centric transportation experts who were tying cities up in freeway knots and building endless isolating skyscrapers that were destroying neighborhoods and any sense of community.

When Jacobs died in 2006, her supporters began Jane’s Walk as a citizen-led, free event to bring people together to explore their city. Whether checking out outdoor murals or identifying needed improvements, walkers come together for fun, fellowship and a chance to experience the power of cities to create and nurture community.

To find out if there’s a Janes’ Walk in your town or to organize one, check out Janeswalk.org.

 

photo: Taking to the streets: Women’s Walk in San Francisco January 21, 2017

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: