The Guadalajara walk explored the Atemajac neighborhood, situated to the north of the metropolitan area in the municipality of Zapopan.
Led by historians Eduardo Ruvalcaba and Sebastián Mata, participants toured the Virgen del Rosario church, the former French cemetery and an old tram station that operated at the turn of the 20th century.
The walks are held annually in cities across North America during the first weekend in May to coincide with Jacobs’ birthday. More than 100 cities took part in the 2013 event held last weekend.
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.
Wrote Jacobs in the treatise ‘Downtown is for People’ in 1957: “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.”
Jacobs is well known for organizing grass roots efforts to protect neighborhoods from “slum clearance” and particularly for her opposition to the overhaul of New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 60s.
For more information visit www.janeswalk.net.