Himy Syed 2013-05-20T01:55:07-04:00 Himy Syed http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=himy-syed Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Himy Syed Good old fashioned elbow grease. Jane's Walks... Dark Age Delayed? tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3197308 2013-05-02T11:32:23-04:00 2013-05-02T11:32:33-04:00 Himy Syed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/himy-syed/

Dark Age Delayed ?



This was a puzzling realization which haunted me after I completed leading the final of several Jane's Walks last year: Dark Age Ahead -- The Wizard of Ossington Jane's Walk.

It was the fourth year leading this walk around the Christie Pits neighbourhood just west of downtown Toronto. The walk uses local examples found in area houses, streets, laneways and parks to discuss the dire warnings in Dark Age Ahead.

Among its admonitions, one stood out for me upon returning home and facing a netbook screen left open and online all weekend.

The Friday before Jane's Walk weekend 2012, I carefully set up several search parameters using the Twitter website. I had keyed in many keyword combination and hashtags related to Jane's Walk or Jane Jacobs Walk into several browser windows. The intention was to capture everything that was tweeted, providing a global view of all the walks mentioned online.

Pretty much everything went as planned twitter-wise. One search term alone had captured over 3,600 walk related tweets. The euphoria of scrolling and seeing so many tweets quickly gave way to a sinking hypocritical sensation...

Dark Age Ahead warned about the Internet giving a false sense of permanence to our culture.

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Further, I had just lead a walk arguing Jane Jacobs' observation about reconstructing an alleged authentic history based only on the found fragments of a culture discovered in a few pictures, a number of books, and rearranging any limited number of surviving pieces of art.

Aren't 140 characters micro-blog posts plus one or two photos per one to two hour walk, and perhaps the odd few minutes of video tweeted simply "Fragments" as well ?

If I saved and storified those thousands of Jane's Walks tweets, it could be interpreted that those collected fragments were giving a definitive snapshot and complete record of Jane's Walk Weekend 2012.

I would be re-enforcing exactly the practice Dark Age Ahead identifies and warns us about.

But Jane Jacobs also prescribed a remedy to such Institutional and Cultural Amnesia:

"...Cultures are not primarily passed down by pictures and books, but by word of mouth and by example."


She also warned about Credentialing. The practice of placing faith in Degrees one has earned from Educational Institutions rather than the practical knowledge one may in fact possess. How we look upon a lawyer who graduates last in his class compared to a master welder for example.

Consequently every single Jane's Walk, being lead by someone with or without a college degree but with a high degree of understanding in their own neighbourhood is part of the remedy.

Every single Jane Jacobs Walk is a combination of word of mouth, personal example found in the Walk Leader, possible family time as children and seniors attend, and sharing of knowledge not found in books.

Taken altogether, Jane's Walk is a collective act in Preserving Culture.

Preserving Culture can maybe, just maybe help delay if not derail any Dark Age Ahead.

Rather than a feeble attempt at Containing Culture, I closed the browser windows without saving. I had deleted the tweets.

Jane's Walk 2013








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One year later I now find myself visiting the San Francisco Bay Area.

I am leading three Jane's Walks this weekend, one in Oakland followed by two walks in San Francisco.

For the fifth year in a row I am leading a Jane's Walk based on Jane Jacobs' final book using neighbourhood examples, but this time it will be in downtown San Francisco:

Dark Age Ahead - The Wizard of O'Farrell Jane's Walk





The walk is happening on Sunday May 5, 2013.

If you can make it out, we're meeting at 5 p.m. in front of Twitter's Head Office Building at 1355 Market Street.]]> How Social Media Affects the Eaton Centre Shooting tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1565909 2012-06-03T10:13:21-04:00 2012-06-03T16:03:03-04:00 Himy Syed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/himy-syed/
On Saturday evening, that usual peacefulness was shattered as gunshots replaced the usual sounds in the Toronto Eaton Centre food court. One person died at the scene with seven others injured including a 13-year-old boy who suffered gunshot wounds. He is currently improving.

News of the incident instantly broke.

But it broke not on broadcast nor through traditional mainstream media reporting. One of the first to report it was a professional baseball player tweeting live from the scene:





Lawrie's subsequent tweets that included photos from outside the mall were widely retweeted and accompanied initial media reports.



Six minutes later:



Lawrie (@blawrie13) had a Twitter following of about 124,000 before the tragic event. It has since jumped by several thousand.

The way social media has changed how the public hears about events is evident when looking back seven years ago. .

On Boxing Day 2005, 15-year-old Jane Creba was an innocent bystander who died from gunshot wounds as violence erupted on Yonge Street just north of the Eaton Centre.

Then, as now, a feeling of the need for a community vigil has organically taken root.

What the city is also now experiencing is the speed at which vigils can come together.

Unlike December 2005, when it took a week for me to organize such a vigil, today's social media tools have allowed that organizing to coalesce within hours.

In 2005, we used photoblogs to convey images. Flickr was the social network with images and captions being the currency of choice. And links to online mainstream media reports lent authenticity to news reporting.

Today, people need not rely on dedicated photoblogs nor Flickr. There is Facebook, Twitter, retweets, and all the forwarding of those links to various other smaller yet niche prevalent social networks.

My first direct glimpse of this new reality was last July after the shootings in Norway.



From that one tweet and on such short notice, a small vigil was held in Little Norway Park in Toronto's Harbourfront neighbourhood. Aside from a number of blog mentions, only CBC Radio plus The Toronto Star covered my Norway Toronto Vigil with a brief item.

Yet in even under a year, the acceleration of vigil organizing using social media is now even more pronounced. For example, this from today:

I have the strange, sudden urge to organize a vigil for tomorrow at Yonge-Dundas Square at 6pm.

— Karen K. Ho (@karenkho) June 3, 2012


Karen quickly set up a Facebook Event Page.

Six years ago, using a blog and Flickr to organize a vigil was standard in the online world and still considered somewhat weird in the offline world.

Today, no one is surprised, least of all traditional mainstream media reporting with numerous outlets crediting Blue Jays player Lawrie's tweet with "breaking" the Eaton Centre shooting story.

The community vigil for victims of the Eaton Centre shooting begins Sunday at 6 p.m. in Yonge-Dundas Square, directly across the street from the Toronto Eaton Centre Food Court exits.

Everyone is welcome.

]]> Walking with Jane Jacobs tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1466467 2012-05-04T09:58:47-04:00 2012-07-04T05:12:04-04:00 Himy Syed http://www.huffingtonpost.com/himy-syed/ Jane's Walk weekend in cities the world over -- named for Jane Jacobs, the late author, activist and urban theorist who died in Toronto in 2006.

Jane was a neighbour of mine, living a few blocks over in The Annex neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. After she passed away, seeing the spontaneous outpouring of loss and remembrance, I wondered if anyone had created a book of condolence. No one had. I quickly bought a sketchbook. Made arrangements for it to be available for public signing in one her regular Annex restaurants. There, friends and strangers shared their memories and thoughts. I later forwarded the book to her family.

Initially, there was much discussion on how best to honour her life. The suggestions of naming a library or a park after her were too obvious. Organically, and quickly, a number of different people came up with the same idea...

"No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at ... suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You've got to get out and walk."

-- Jane Jacobs, Downtown is for People, 1957


A year later the first of Jane's Walks took place in Toronto. At first, only a handful were listed, lead mostly by people who knew Jane personally. It hadn't occured to organizers that others who never met Jane, but were influenced by her would also wish to lead a walk. Eventually 27 walks all over Toronto were held in May 2007.

Looking at that embryonic list of walks, it was surprising there wasn't a walk directly linked to her involvement in stopping the Spadina Expressway. "Spadina" was the proposed highway that would have cut through Toronto neighbourhoods in the 1970s. She and many local activists together fought tooth and nail to Stop Spadina. Ultimately they won.

I quickly drew up an outline of my proposal for a Jane's Walk, dubbed it Retracing Stop Spadina and lobbied for it to be included. The walk would be a three-hour walking tour of the path the Spadina Expressway would have taken had it been completed.

The walk began exactly on the three foot wide sidewalk where the Expressway was stopped. The walk ended in front of the house Jane Jacobs lived in on Albany Ave. in the Annex.

That first year I didn't know how many people would turn out. I was pleasantly surprised to see almost two dozen did. Almost everybody stayed right until the end of the walk.

I've continued leading the Retracing Stop Spadina Jane's Walk annually since then. And every year in-between the walks, more knowledge and history comes my way about the Stop Spadina movement and its pro-expressway nemesis, Go Spadina. This year with so much more learned, I've had to split the walk into two parts.

The first half focuses on the Expressway story, the latter half brings to light knowledge of the neighbourhood
.

Now, there are already over 500 different Jane's Walks in dozens of cities around the world. I've also increased the number of walks I personally lead from one to six. Three each on Saturday and Sunday.



I've been asked, why do I lead so many walks?

Some people in Toronto wait all year for the Toronto International Film Festival. When September comes around and it's TIFF time, many people book off work, see several films per day, schmooze and star gaze as Hollywood North becomes incarnate.

For me and many people interested in neighbourhoods, ideas, and cities, the first weekend in May has quickly become our walking equivalent of a film festival. And unlike hard to get film festival tickets, all Jane's Walks are free!

Jane Jacobs the author may best be known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, however her final book, Dark Age Ahead, is a warning of pending civilizational collapse. It's also the title of my final Jane's Walk of the weekend on Sunday Evening.

If you're in Toronto this weekend, please join me for a Jane's Walk or two.

Why?

Because as Jane would say, "You've got to get out and walk."



Follow Jane's Walk on Twitter via @JanesWalk & @JanesWalkTO plus the #JanesWalk hashtag.
Jane's Walk also has a public Flickr photo group.]]>