Community members to lead Jane’s Walks throughout the city

After her time meeting with the City of Winnipeg in the ’90s, the world’s most famous urban theorist Jane Jacobs was reportedly gifted a $10 watch with the city logo.

“It’s so funny because it came in this fancy little box,” laughs Caitlin Broms-Jacobs, Jane’s granddaughter, an oboist living and working in Winnipeg.

If this gift seems like a token of underappreciation, Winnipeg offers Jane something of a 21-gun salute this May.

That’s the number of Jane’s Walks hosted in Winnipeg this year between Friday and Sunday during the annual festival of free, community led-walking tours inspired by Jacobs. Started by friends and colleagues of hers shortly after her death in 2006, the concept quickly spread to cities around the world — more than 500 of them to date, according to the fest’s Toronto-based steering committee.

“It’s all very decentralized and self-organizing,” says Jim Jacobs, Jane’s son. He lives in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, where Caitlin grew up and Jane lived after emigrating to Canada from the United States in the late ’60s.

“Its focus and value are not in promoting her thoughts or ideas… but to provide a soapbox,” he goes on. “People will say whatever they want to say and if the audience likes it, they’ll stay. And if they don’t, they’ll beat their feet!”

This grassroots freedom is already in a certain Jacobian spirit.

Jane Jacobs’ complex ideas evolved considerably after her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities; the first book of many by a self-educated mother of three, which ultimately turned the urban-planning establishment on its head. (Although her son observes that that establishment absorbed her ideas in ways that today sometimes amount to little more than window dressing — big shows of “community consultation,” for instance, that do little to shape planners’ schemes.)

But certain throughlines tie this tapestry together.

Jacobs championed vibrant, walkable neighbourhoods built on diversity, density and mixed-use development. She famously opposed top-down planning and urban renewal projects that she believed devastated communities. Instead, she emphasized local knowledge and organic interactions between everyday people — “eyes on the street” — in shaping successful urban life.

If some of these ideas seem taken for granted today, it speaks to Jacobs’ towering influence — an influence resisted at first by an establishment more smitten with modernist visions that served “order and progress” at the expense of human-scale urbanism.

Jane Jacobs became famous not just for her theories, but for her David-and-Goliath battles, waged with wit and grit, against powerful planners in New York and Toronto.

It’s this plucky spirit from which local community organizer Michael Champagne and Jane’s Walk leader draws inspiration.

“I know that too many people just drive down Selkirk Avenue or Main Street to get from one part of the city to the other,” says Champagne, who also organizes North End History, committed to social activist and heritage enterprises in the neighbourhood.

He leads 100 Years of Main Street: Commerce and Community from 1 to 2 p.m. Saturday and Selkirk Avenue: Yesterday & Tomorrow from 1 to 2 p.m. Sunday.

“These walks invite Winnipeggers to get out of their vehicles to see the vibrant local organizations, businesses and people that are here because, like Jane Jacobs, we believe our community problems can be answered when we’re together.”

Other Jane’s Walks this year explore Old Saint Boniface, the Exchange District and the histories of its garment and grain industries, St Norbert’s forests and more.

“These walks are a nice, hyper-localized opportunity for us to listen to and learn about the solutions that are working,” says Champagne.

According to Broms-Jacobs, Jane left her tour of Winnipeg especially interested in the North End’s history and future — a locale that, for all the challenges it may face, has a strong neighbourhood identity encompassing a mosaic of social groups and uses.

What would she make of present-day Winnipeg?

“Jane observed from a political point of view that having a city’s government controlled by its suburbs is devastating to a city,” says Jim Jacobs.

Notwithstanding, he has an optimistic vision of the city.

“There are certain long-standing characteristics of Winnipeg that count in its favour, even if they’re under-exploited, like a lot of mixed-use neighborhoods,” says Jim Jacobs. “And there are these older buildings, some of which provide lower rent and more flexibility, more flexibility for entrepreneurs, community groups and artists.”

One of those artists is Broms-Jacobs, who performs with such organizations as the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Fierbois duo, often in the city’s older, more centrally located churches that now serve partially as music venues.

“It’s an open-minded, artistic, sensitive town … new ideas can flourish because it’s not so crushingly expensive,” she says.

“And in the (15 years) that I’ve been here, I’ve just noticed such an amazing increase in diversity in the way that Torontonians think of diversity — in the international sense.”

To see the full list of Winnipeg’s 2025 Jane’s Walk and to register visit winnipegarts.ca/janes-walk. The events are all free.

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com

Conrad Sweatman
Reporter

Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.

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