Every year during the first weekend of May, volunteers in cities across the world lead free "walking conversations" that encourage people to share stories about their neighborhoods, discover unseen aspects of those communities, and use walking as a way to connect with others.
Known as Jane's Walk, the global grassroots event is intended to celebrate and cultivate the ethos of its namesake, the writer, activist, and urbanologist Jane Jacobs (1916–2006).
Rising to prominence at a time when city planners such as Jacobs's nemesis, Robert Moses, were undertaking "urban renewal" projects that basically amounted to demolishing poor neighborhoods and replacing them with highways, Jacobs offered a humane alternative.
Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued against the Moses approach, and she played a heroic role in saving Greenwich Village and other parts of Lower Manhattan from becoming an expressway.
In 2007 the first Jane's Walk festival launched in Toronto, where Jacobs relocated from New York City and lived until her death in 2006.
Since then, Jane's Walks have spread to nearly 500 cities across six continents, according to the organizers of this year's Toronto installment. The event takes place during the first weekend of May to coincide with Jacobs's birthday, May 4.
For travelers and local residents alike, the walks offer a free opportunity to get to know cities and the people who live there through the lens of Jacobs's ideas and legacy.
As the Jane's Walk website explains, those ideas include the importance of hearing from a diverse range of voices and recognizing that cities are "living ecosystems with a past, present, and future."
How to find a free Jane's Walk to join
Toronto and New York City—the places where Jacobs did the majority of her work—have the most robust slates of walks planned for 2026.
You can take strolls focused on neighborhood histories, public art, sustainable development, Black leaders, parks, public transit, food, Chinese, Jewish, and Italian districts, architecture, political activism, cycling, skateboarding, literature, music, cemeteries, sex work, bridges, and pretty much anything else you can think of that has to do with urban life.
In New York, there's even a tour about Robert Moses.
Meanwhile, Jane's Walk events scheduled elsewhere in 2026 range from an amble around Portland, Maine, with the CEO of the state's public media organization to an exploration of downtown development in Gainesville, Florida.
To find a walk in the city where you'll be this weekend, you can search a list of locations at the Jane's Walk website for links to organizers' own websites so that you can see a list of available events. Joining a walk usually involves registering in advance.
The website for the Toronto chapter can be found at JanesWalkFestivalTO.com.
For New York's version, organized by the Municipal Arts Society, go to MAS.org.
Frommer's New York City 2026
Pauline Frommer's highly personal guide to her own home city has, in previous editions, twice been named "Best Guidebook of the Year" by the North American Travel Journalists Association. Her book has been New York City’s top-selling guide for the last decade. It's published in full color, with doze...
Get the bookFrommer's New York City 2026
Pauline Frommer's highly personal guide to her own home city has, in previous editions, twice been named "Best Guidebook of the Year" by the North American Travel Journalists Association. Her book has been New York City’s top-selling guide for the last decade. It's published in full color, with doze...