Touring the City With Fresh Eyes

JANE STREET in the West Village is just a few blocks from where the author and urban critic Jane Jacobs lived, but it’s named for the farmer who grew tobacco around there more than two centuries ago. Though Jacobs deserves her own namesake street, she will be getting the next best thing this weekend when the Municipal Art Society hosts nearly 70 free walking tours conducted by neighborhood residents in all five boroughs.

The Jane’s Walk tours, which began in 2007 in Toronto, her adopted city, and spread to New York last year, will be conducted around the world on Saturday and Sunday to honor the legacy and life of the woman who personified urbanism.

Maybe it takes a village to accomplish things in some places; in others, a neighborhood. In New York it typically takes only a single block to characterize its occupants and to mobilize them to a common cause. Jacobs, who died in 2006, celebrated that block-by-block ballet in her 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” which became a bible for civic boosters everywhere.