Jane’s Walk is Back!
Downtown, Chinatown, Lost Bookstores, Molave and Pasil will be featured in this year’s celebration of Jane’s Walk Cebu organized by the Cebu Literary Festival and happening this weekend, May 5-7, 2023. No registration is required for these walks, lasting approximately 1 hour and a half. Just show up at the meeting point and join walk leaders Cris Evert Lato, John Hanlon, Hendri Go and James Derodar share stories about their neighbourhoods, discover unseen aspects of their communities, and use walking conversations as a way to connect with their neighbours.
The first walk on May 5 is The Lost Bookstores and Cinemas of Cebu and will meet up at 4:00 pm at Halad Museum on Manalili Street, behind Gaisano Main. This walk will explore the themes: Where have all the bookstores gone and whatever happened to the movie houses in Colon?
Next is Is There a Chinatown in Cebu? on May 6 at 9:00 am in front of the old Cebu Eastern College on D Jakosalem Street corner Legaspi Street. This walk explores the migrant Chinese community in Downtown Cebu – temples, food places, apothecaries, family associations, businesses, groceries and schools.
Also on May 6 at 4:00 pm is the Molave Tojong Acacia Walk exploring the sights and sounds of the Molave, Tojong and Acacia area and the people who run the small businesses there. The Molave Community Market will be the final stop of our tour. Meet up will be at Journeys Book Shop, outside Misfits Coffee on Tojong Street.
Finally, on May 7, Sunday at 9:00 am, there will be a Pasil Food Walk starting at at the 7-Eleven on GF Antigua Bldg, B. Aranas corner T Abella Streets.
Jane’s Walk is an annual festival of free, citizen-led walking conversations inspired by Jane Jacobs. Our mission is to help people walk, observe, and connect with their community and environment. Walks inspire people to make a difference because they enable members of a community to discover and respond to the complexities of their city and environment through personal and shared observation.
Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail, that now seem like common sense to generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists. A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work, and play.
Walks take place in hundreds of cities around the world. Contact Cebu Literary Festival on Facebook or email cebuliteraryfestival@gmail.com or contact 0917-815-5794 for more information.
