Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

From the Publisher

“Jeff Speck, AICP, is one of the few practitioners and writers in the field who can make a 312-page book on a basic planning concept seem too short . . . For getting planning ideas into the thinking and the daily life of U.S. cities, this is the book.” —Planning magazine

“Jeff Speck’s brilliant and entertaining book reminds us that, in America, the exception could easily become the rule. Mayors, planners, and citizens need look no further for a powerful and achievable vision of how to make our ordinary cities great again.” —Joseph P. Riley, mayor of Charleston, S.C.

“City planning and urban development are phrases almost guaranteed to bore and confuse regular people. Which is weird, given that cities are the least boring places on earth. Fortunately, Jeff Speck is a deeply knowledgeable, charming, and jargon-free visionary, a profoundly pragmatic person brimming with common sense everybody can use to improve their own lives as well as their towns and cities. If Jane Jacobs invented a new urbanism, Walkable City is its perfect complement, a commonsense twenty-first-century user’s manual.” —Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 and author of True Believers

“Cities are the future of the human race, and Jeff Speck knows how to make them work. In Walkable City, he persuasively explains how to create rational urban spaces and improve quality of life by containing the number one vector of global environmental catastrophe: the automobile.” —David Owen, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of Green Metropolis

“Companionable and disarmingly candid, Jeff Speck perches on your shoulder and gets you to see your community with fresh eyes. He gradually builds a compelling case for walkability as the essential distillation of a vast trove of knowledge about urbanism and placemaking. The case he makes has you both nodding at the intuitive and seemingly obvious wisdom presented, and shaking your head at why those basic principles of fixing our cities have eluded us for so long.” —Harriet Tregoning, founder of the National Smart Growth Network

“Jeff Speck understands a key fact about great cities, which is that their streets matter more than their buildings. And he understands a key fact about great streets, which is that the people who walk along them matter more than the cars that drive through them. Walkable City is an eloquent ode to the livable city and to the values behind it.” —Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic and author of Why Architecture Matters

“With Walkable City, Jeff Speck demonstrates why he is among the most relevant and engaging writers on urban design today.” —Ron Bogle, president and CEO of the American Architectural Foundation

“When I speak around the country, people ask me what is the first thing they should do to start their community on the path of smart growth. I will now say: Read Jeff Speck’s Walkable City.” —Parris Glendening, governor of Maryland (1995–2003) and president of Smart Growth America’s Leadership Institute

“Truly a book that is so very needed, Walkable City moves theory into action. We now know we need to build walkable urban places for all sorts of economic, social, and environmental reasons. Jeff Speck shows how to do it in the same clear style we came to love in the classic Suburban Nation.” —Christopher B. Leinberger, visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of The Option of Urbanism

Kirkus Reviews

A city planner offers a blueprint for making midsize American cities more pedestrian-friendly. What makes a city work? According to Washington, D.C.-based city planner Speck (co-author: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, 2000, etc.), there's one answer: Cities work best when people can safely and easily walk to most (if not all) aspects of their daily lives. However, the author is not interested in focusing on larger cities like New York or San Francisco, but rather, what "our other, more normal cities can learn." To that end, he lays out a comprehensive program for smaller cities (think Providence or Grand Rapids), which he calls "The Ten Steps of Walkability." Speck examines the specifics of each proposed step, with ideas such as fewer cars, more investment in public transit, protecting pedestrians and more. While the author claims that "this book is less a design treatise than an essential call to arms," it is unfortunately a call to arms weighed down with stodgy prose, excessive statistics and clunky writing. Additionally, while Speck admits to "an antisuburban snobbery," he gives short shrift to the accomplishments of larger cities, instead examining how their successes could be duplicated on smaller scales. Speck appears to have an especially contentious relationship with New York. For example, one chapter offers a section titled "Manhattan as Mecca," in which he praises the city's traffic-safety record, comprehensive public transit and more. But later in the book, he writes, "one can walk entire neighborhoods without a single tree sighting," a claim many New Yorkers would dispute. Some intriguing ideas amid a dry narrative.