5 minute read
Last Call
Sarah Connell Sanders
Advertisement
Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
Jane Jacobs was an urban design pioneer, widely celebrated for her 1961 landmark text, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” In Worcester, we honor Jacobs each year with Jane Week, an opportunity to examine the design and function of our city. Eleanor Gilmore and Joyce Mandell are Jane Week's organizers.
Joyce, can you tell us how Jane Week got started in Worcester?
JM: Our first Jane Week was in 2017 and it was the culmination of a year of celebrating Jane Jacobs’ hundredth birthday. There are actually Jane Celebrations all over the world, which is very exciting. There were about 200 Jane Walks that year in New York alone. We didn't have Jane Week last year because of the pandemic and I actually held on to the Jane Award; it's been on my shelf for a year. Every year, we give out a Jane Award to a project that emulates the best design or revitalization of the city. The first year, it was Crompton Place. The second year, it was The Printer's Building. And the year after that, it was the Kelley Square redesign. Last year, it was supposed to go to Stearns Tavern. The award actually seems even more important this year for so many reasons, but the main reason is we've all been isolated and quarantining, and we're going to have to resocialize ourselves to start thinking about going back to public spaces and being in community with one another. We can start creating that community again, even online. There's so much fear out there and we've had so much divisiveness, hate, and anger on the national level. Even on the local level, a lot of us have different ideas about what makes a livable Worcester. Jane Week is a positive way to bring people into dialogue. We can listen to people who have different levels of power and influence. We are approaching the master planning process and I think Jean Week really just gives us a chance to start raising consciousness about the elements that we want to see in our city and how we are going to plan for them.
Ellie, lately I feel like you have a way of making urban
Eleanor Gilmore of Worcester Common Ground located at 5 Piedmont St. in Worcester. DYLAN AZARI
design critiques online that a wide audience can be receptive to. How do you go about facilitating constructive criticism?
EG: It's tough because I think that the world of planning is incredibly inaccessible and requires a lot of processes at the government level. It's jargon-y. It's bureaucratic. It's very much rooted in racist structures. So, trying to have these conversations with folks who are not used to engaging on the topic of planning or folks who might be distrustful of the existing processes because they've been systematically excluded can be challenging. How do you turn it around and say, "I hear you." And also acknowledge that planning can actually be really fun for everyone. We don't generally value the expertise of individual community members. In planning, you focus on the legal requirements, the engineering requirements, the architectural requirements, but there is so much lived experience that people have and can share. We all live somewhere.
We all have a relationship to what our neighborhood looks like and how we define our neighborhood — who we see and who we don't see — how we travel to the grocery store or to our jobs. The factors that influence whether these things are easy or not to achieve, or how that makes us feel, are really key pieces of these conversations. Making planning more palatable and more personal is one of the reasons I love Jane Week so much. It takes all of the elements of city planning and really dials them back to the local level in order to give folks an opportunity to explore their own neighborhoods free of technical language. I think that's incredible.
I teach a STEM class focused on urban planning. What sort of activities could I use with young people during Jane Week?
EG: My personal journey to city planning was brought on by curiosity. I read a lot in my role as a community organizer and I found this program called Streetmix. It's a street design program where you can drag and drop different elements of what makes up a street from building to building. At the most basic level, you can add sidewalks and then widen or narrow the road. It's evolved over the years to include transportation planning. When electric scooters became popular, they added a little icon for electric scooters. I'd encourage folks to spark their own curiosity by picking a street they are familiar with. They can do one of two things. They can redesign this street with the dimensions of the actual street. There's an opportunity for them to research right-of-way and public access points between buildings. Or, they can just design a street however they'd like and get creative. If you want your street to be completely void of cars, you can do that. I like that it challenges people to think about their environment, because oftentimes as users of the public rights-ofway, some of us are walking, some of us are driving, and some of us are biking. I don't know that people often stop and think about the design of these spaces and who they benefit and who they don't. Streetmix is free and you can access it in multiple languages with your students.
What are some of the other Jane Week programs we should be on the lookout for?
JM: Tom Quinn from the Worcester Research Bureau designed a game called “Escape from City Hall.” I piloted it and it was so cool. You can also take a 15-minute walk to determine if Worcester is a “15-minute city.” Ask yourself, “Can you walk within 15 minutes to a grocery store, a community garden, a church, and a variety of other places?” People can check out our brochure for the full list of programming. Jane Jacobs never had a formal degree in planning, she simply used her powers of observation and we want our community to do the same.
