Every year, the Museum of Design Atlanta hosts Jane's Walk — a series of 16 free, guided walking tours led not by professional tour guides but by Atlanta residents who know specific neighborhoods, streets, and details with the intimacy that comes from years of paying attention.
The walks honor Jane Jacobs, the urbanist writer whose 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" argued that the people who live in a neighborhood understand it better than the planners who design it. Jane's Walk events happen in cities around the world. In Atlanta, they take participants through downtown, Sweet Auburn, the BeltLine, and the historic districts that surround them.
The Guides
Sue Youngblood, a graphic designer, has led what she calls "type walks" through downtown and Sweet Auburn for twelve years. Her tours focus on letterforms and signage — the fonts on building facades, the hand-painted signs above storefronts, the typography that most people walk past without registering. "I try to open eyes," she says, to the architectural elements that shape a street's character without ever being consciously noticed.
Robert Barsky, a Vanderbilt University professor, guides "An Epic Quest Along the Atlanta BeltLine" — a tour based on his 68-page epic poem, "The Beltline Chronicles." Other tour leaders come from engineering, literature, and design backgrounds, each bringing a lens that transforms a familiar walk into something unfamiliar.
What the Tours Reveal
Jane's Walk tours are not history lessons in the traditional sense. They are invitations to notice. The plaques embedded in sidewalks. The cornices on buildings that predate the city's modern skyline. The murals that tell stories about the neighborhoods they face. The design choices in public spaces that determine whether people linger or pass through.
MODA director Laura Flusche emphasizes that the guides possess "deep, personal connections to the city" rather than formal training — a deliberate choice that ensures the tours reflect authentic neighborhood perspectives rather than institutional narratives. The result is a walking experience that feels less like tourism and more like borrowing someone else's eyes for an hour.
Downtown Through New Eyes
For downtown Atlanta, where new construction and rapid development can make the landscape feel like it changes weekly, Jane's Walk serves as a reminder that the city has layers. Beneath the new towers and construction fencing, there are signs painted by hand in the 1940s, buildings that survived the 1864 fire, and sidewalks where history happened. The tours do not compete with the city's transformation — they add depth to it.
Original reporting by GPB News, Georgia Public Broadcasting, April 30, 2026.