How To Tell Your Neighbourhood Story

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How To Tell Your Neighbourhood Story

Buskers wow the crowd in Thornhill, 2009 (Credit: Martin Smith)

Telling a story about a place…

Leading a tour simply involves planning a route, thinking through the stories, places and people you want to get people thinking and talking about, then walking participants through it – you decide what’s important.

Use our Social Mapping Exercises available on out website to brainstorm potential tour stops. Take a walk around your neighbourhood, and think about what stories you want to tell about the places that you live and play in. The stories do not have to be limited to history, architecture or urban planning. But the stories do have to be entertaining… So how do you tell a good story about where your neighbourhood?

Jane’s Walk is about how YOU see your neighbourhood. Anyone can research the history or architecture of a neighbourhood. What Jane’s Walk offers is a chance to hear YOUR point of view.

The first to think about when you’ve found a stop on your tour is why you want to tell this particular story right now. What is it about the story that matters to you, and you think will matter to your audience?

One way to keep an audience interested is to create dramatic tension. You might try “hooking” your audience with a great moment or provocative question. You can make your story mysterious or curious, and then surprise your audience with an ending that’s different from what they might be expecting.

Compelling stories reproduce the insight and experience of the tour guide while encouraging the audience to ask questions about their own experiences. Compelling tour guides show how things have changed, how they dealt with it, what they were like before the change, and what they are like after.

Who’s coming to your Jane’s Walk?

Jane’s Walk is a walking conversation – so don’t feel like you have to perform or be an expert. Think of the audience as part of your story, and invite them to participate in the story. You might ask questions of the audience about their own experiences and memories of the place, or if they have any information to add. Engaging your walkers and inviting dialogue into your tour will make the whole experience richer for everyone.
While you are designing your tour, think about who might attend your tour… Are they local insiders, or outsider visitors? Depending on which group you are inviting, you will want to design your tour thinking about the different interests of different audiences:

Locals:
- May have heard some of the historical and architectural details
- Appreciate an opportunity to go deeper into the history and culture
- Will have things to add to the tour – invite them to participate
- Will want to know more about you and your personal stories of living and playing in the neighbourhood

Visitors:
- Probably need more background
- Will need more context, including history and culture
- Will be interested in your point of view
- Will have plenty of questions
- Will have their own experiences and comments to contribute

What do you want your audience to get out of your tour? Think about what do you want your audience to walk away with… Maybe it’s a new piece of information. Maybe it’s a feeling about a place they’ve never been to before. Or maybe it’s awareness about getting people to act. For visitors, a Jane’s Walk can reveal differences and similarities between neighbourhoods, and can make them feel less isolated. A Jane’s Walk can invite people in to a place they’ve never been before, and encourage them to come back. For the people who already live in the neighbourhood, Jane’s Walk can reveal things that are missing, or need to change in a neighbourhood, and can be a call to action. An ideal outcome is to develop a dialogue that keeps going beyond the first weekend in May.

One more thing to think about is the accessibility of your tour. Is your walk accessible to people who have trouble walking long distances? Are there lots of stairs, or difficult routes? This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any stairs or bumpy routes – it will just change who might come on your tour. Another thing is to think about language - will your tour be in English? Or another language? There have been successful tours in the past in different languages, and making a tour in a language other that English will get different people out – so design your tour with that in mind.

How many people do you want on your tour? As more people find out about Jane’s Walk, the tours have gotten bigger and bigger. Smaller tours are more intimate and encourage conversation, while bigger tours are exciting and can offer a real sense of accomplishment. What kind of tour do you want to have? If you do want to limit the size of your tour, consider registering people; don’t advertise the starting location before the tour, and pre-register people who you can contact the day before the tour to let them know the starting location.

Once you have a sense of who you want to come to your tour, think about how you will promote your tour. How you promote your tour will make a difference in who will come.

To attract locals:
- Put up posters in your neighbourhood (grocery stores, laundry mats, schools, coffee shops, libraries and community centres often have a community notice board or community calendar)
- Put an ad in a community newspaper (call the community media)
- Contact your local government (city councilor) and ask them to help you advertize your tour
- Talk to community groups in your area and ask them to promote your tour
- Send emails to your friends, ask them to forward it to their friends

To attract visitors:
- Send out a press release to city-wide media
- Put your posters in gathering places outside of your neighbourhood
- Jane’s Walk can help your promote your tour outside of your neighbourhood
- Social media, websites, email newsletters and personal notes to friends. Add a picture too!

Before the Walk…

Do a dry run of your walk: Bring along a few friends and colleagues, so there are some ‘fresh ears’ to respond to the content. This rehearsal of the walking tour will give you a sense of how much time the walk takes, what stories are working and whether or not you have to trim some content to fit into the recommended hour and a half time frame.

Send a description of your tour: Posting your Jane’s Walk on our website can help to promote your tour, and lets us know it’s happening. Send us a short description (200 words maximum) via our walk posting form. Your walk description should be interesting and clear, and get people excited about your walk.

Here’s a few examples and descriptions of Jane’s Walks given in different cities:

Calgary: City Centre
City Centre is a neighbourhood of hidden gems and special places, including the Alberta Hotel, the “Trees” and Art Central. This walk will visit 15 sites and discuss the design stages and future plans for the heart of Calgary’s downtown. This walk includes a free trip up the Calgary Tower to gain a visual overview of the neighbourhood.

Ottawa: Places of Significance to Homeless Persons
View the city though the eyes of the unjustly invisible. Several homeless and formerly homeless persons who are still street-involved will point out places of significance: shelters, drop-in centres, and places to congregate and or sleep outside.

Toronto: The Inside Scoop on Jane & Finch
Join a group of youthful Jane Finch residents for the inside scoop on the neighbourhood they love calling home. Learn about the library that makes kids ‘really want to go to the library’, the apartment tower that houses a recording studio, the little league soccer fields where champions are made, the high school that is warm and welcoming and the green spaces where people can just hang out, take a walk and chill. The tour will end at The Spot, an amazing neighbourhood drop in centre for youth at the Yorkgate Mall.

Winnipeg: St Norbert Dike Hike
Join us as we walk on top of St. Norbert’s primary dike, the community’s main line of flood defense. Marvel at the engineering wonders of the Red River Floodway – a National Historic site. Long recognized as Louis Riel’s historic battleground for Métis rights, St. Norbert continues to retain its ‘battleground’ title each spring as it fends off the approaching floodwaters of the mighty Red River. We will see examples of area resident’s adaptability living alongside the powerful Red River and will learn about the history of diking, flooding and the impact it has made on this picturesque residential suburb. With three Provincial Parks in a two km radius, linked by the meandering LaSalle River, St. Norbert is a naturalist’s paradise. We will also follow the Trans Canada Trail and pass by ancient fishing grounds, the resting place of early pioneers and noteworthy historic sites.

Salt Lake City: Artists as City-Builders
Salt Lake’s Historic Warehouse District has been a focal point of change since 1980, when a group of artists in need of affordable housing and work space set in motion the area’s transformation from an industrial district to a mixed-use residential mecca. The district’s exponential changes during the past 25 years illustrate fundamental Jacobsian concepts such as mixed-use, eyes on the street, the importance of short blocks and narrow streets, and how local businesses contribute to a community’s authenticity and vibrancy.

Toronto: Yonge Street is Flaming
A 90-minute stroll through the history of the bars, beverage rooms and clubs frequented by gays and lesbians on the Yonge Street strip from King to Charles Streets. A lively gay demimonde has flourished in Toronto since the ’50s complete with drag shows, Queen Bee Beauty Contests, lesbian bank robbers, and same-sex slow dancing — doormen would flick the lights to tip off the clientele to the arrival of the morality squad, and the lesbians would quickly switch partners with their gay male friends. In 1964, Maclean’s magazine noted the increasing popularity of bars that catered to, or tacitly accepted, a queer clientele: “Homosexuals have no family, spend a lot of time in bars, drink steadily, tip generously and seldom smash the furniture.” As time passed, the bars moved up Yonge Street. Gays and lesbians transitioned from being simply tolerated in private spaces to claiming public space in their own clubs, like The Music Room and The Manatee, and demonstrations, like Gay Pride, International Women’s Day and the Dyke March.

After the Walk…

Don’t forget to take pictures, share them, post them, or send them to us here at Jane’s Walk and we’ll post some on the web. Let us know how your tour went so we can continue to refine and improve Jane’s Walk for everyone.