One Step at a Time, How Downtown Can Save America

Fantastic book for those interested in urban management and just beginning to understand the basics of the field. Speck outlines beautifully while keeping details that prove beneficial to maintaing interest in the novel.

Thought-provoking and passionate - a great catalyst for a healthy and much-needed public debate on the topic. A must read for planners and traffic engineers and a should read for everyone else in urban and suburban America.

I wish more local elected officials would get on board with what Jeff Speck is saying in this book. But even more than that I hope that Mr.Specks next book will talk about how suburban areas can get dense and reverse the tide.

Jeff Speck, in 'Walkable City', incisively and holistically captures the essence of the key messages the doyens of the professions responsible for shaping our human habitats have have been disparately delivering for decades, viz: Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, Andres Duany, Chris Leinberger, Richard Jackson, Howard Frumkin, Alan Jacobs, Fred Kent, Donald Shoup, Dan Burden et al.
Walkable City succinctly articulates the social, aesthetic, health, economic and physical attributes of walkable places and thus provides a seminal text for those practicing the art of timeless town planning. A compelling read for enlightened practitioners striving to attain the mantle 'generalist'.

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time Walkable City provides inspiration and hope for reinventing our major cities as the walkable places they were in the 60's before we made our cities destinations that were not worth arriving at. Jeff Speck sets out the 10 characteristics of walkable cities -- steps that easy to understand yet full of nuance. This book should be required reading for every architecture and urban planning student -- and most importantly professional city planners.

I have read a lot about cities and find this the best explanation about what makes them walkable.I walk several times a week in my own city of San Francisco. I love to walk European cities when on vacation. The author's recommendations make good sense.

I think this is an important book for all North American urbanists to read. Jeff Speck has terrific sense of what makes a city tick. This organized but brief book is thought-provoking and well written, enjoyable to read.

I can't talk enough about how much this book has changed my view on the city. I was listening to NPR one morning and Jeff Speck was on, discussing his work and this book. I bought it immediately and I did not regret it once I started.

As a professional urban planner, I was relatively familiar with the concepts presented in the book. What Speck does so well, is to link the ideas in plain language while providing high-quality supporting evidence.

I'm no stranger to Jeff Speck's work (Suburban Nation, Smart Growth Manual). He and I sing the same hymns, and preach from the same editions of The Book of Great City Living and Pedestrian Life. I bought Speck's latest book because, as an urban designer and writer myself, I felt I should have this in my library. I figured I might find a couple of useful tidbits to make cities happier places to live, but no huge revelations. Nothing that I didn't know already.

Wrong. This book is packed with astute insights into what makes for livable, lovable communities. Speck's genius, I think, is finding connections between seemingly disparate urban phenomena. And offering solutions that are pragmatic, implementable, and so, so...SIMPLE that it is hard to believe we have gotten it so wrong for so long.

I wish this book came out when I was wrapping up my latest book Making Transit Fun!: How to Entice Motorists from Their Cars (and onto their feet, a bike, or bus). My book is pretty good ;-) But it would have been better had I had Speck's book before mine went to press.

Best of all, Speck's literary style is engaging. This book is an easy read, an inspiring read, and a compelling read. I thought I was just going to flip through a few pages, maybe read a chapter or two, and then place it on my shelf alongside the dozens of other planning books. Wrong again. I was surprised how quickly I became absorbed in this book. Most planning books are drier than butter-less popcorn. Speck's book glides down the gullet with flavor.

The book itself (meaning the actual words) is great. But the Kindle formatting sucks. The main text is smaller than the font size I have set for every other book on my Kindle. So I either have to endure small text for this one book or else adjust and readjust the Kindle's font size every time I open and close this particular book. And the footnotes are about 3 points, virtually impossible to read. I get it that the publisher might do this for a print book to save paper and thus print costs. But there's no reason to squash an ebook in the same manner.

I was drawn to this book by the intriguing topic and interesting points made in other reviews. Mr. Speck makes some interesting points in his book, but this becomes drowned by his zealotry and sometimes antagonistic prose. His tendency is to cherry-pick data that supports points he wants to make rather than conducting real analysis of what works and what doesn’t. This book puts people, places, and projects into binary buckets of good and bad rather than showing an understanding of the hard work, challenges, and trade-offs that come from real design. Mr. Speck is clearly more ideologue than professional, and one gets the impression from his writing that he has never designed anything that has actually been built. While I agree with the larger premise behind much of what he is trying to say, I found “Walkable City” to be a disappointing text that is ultimately of no use in the real world of planning and design.

At a recent book talk, I heard Jeff Speck discuss this book and his life's work, and was entirely compelled to read the rest myself. It turns out he really does have the life experience, numerous skills, wide exposure to various urban situations, and the concrete ideas to deliver the outcomes we want to create a walkable life.

I was particularly engaged by the three "E" features that were coming together: epidemiology, environment, and economics--that were clearly all in favor of urban density, mixed use, and transit oriented development (where it is appropriate). The book backs up these things with evidence on each count.

And then about a month later at a city meeting, here he was again. He's been working with my city planners in Somerville MA to turn our city into the top tier of walkable cities in the US. We are at the right place and right time: we are about to get several MBTA train stations, and currently have the chance to plan and strategize around them.

He acknowledges that we were born on 3rd base (and I don't dispute this). But he has evidence and methods that can help us be an incredibly walkable city. I think he has the goods. I hope we can act on it.

Certainly I have to admit that this book is delightful in part because it matches all of my cognitive bias (heh). I love cities (especially older ones), and I would love to live almost entirely without a car. Many of the examples he uses as both good and bad scenarios are places I've lived--so I know his facts are solid on those. But the text contains enough data and references that you can check the information with other sources, look at images on the web, and see that the story holds.

I wish it had contained more photographic evidence of some of the features he describes. Some of them he showed at our city meeting and they were very effective. But it is possible to seek them out in other ways with the internet, of course.

Certain hot-buttons (like traffic engineers and "starchitects") clearly earn some of Speck's ire. But obviously these stereotypes were for effect, and there are good actors on these things as well. And it will help me to recognize some of these things in the future at city planning meetings and have the ammunition to counter points or suggest alternatives that make more sense.

The breezy and engaging style (including citing The Onion and Monty Python, for example) allow you to quickly get the points, which are well made.

I will be recommending this book to my neighbors as we proceed through the next few years of getting our city enhancements. It will give them a sound basis to understand some decisions that might be hard to grasp at first. And I'm really looking forward to the future with more walkability, for everyone's benefit.

We're told by the author, who is heavily anti-car, that American cities are designed around cars and have requirements for large amounts of parking per built unit. He recommends making cities more pedestrian friendly, having a mix of uses in a neighbourhood and increasing housing density, especially as older empty nesters move back in from suburbs. Lots of good ideas here. He adds that young people are not getting driving licences, preferring to live and work in walking areas. Great, for those who have the choice.

I can understand why housing and parking are both expensive in geographically cramped locations. According to Walkable City, on page 117, "Parking spaces under Seattle's Pacific Place shopping center, built by the city, cost sixty thousand dollars each. .... The twelve hundred space Pacific Place garage cost $73 million." Such details abound, more than most of us would ever need. Some very interesting facts about cars in the US though, such as the car companies buying up trolley car firms in the past and scrapping them so there would be no public alternative to cars.

This book is heavily anti-cars in cities, but in rural areas (even in Ireland), cars are a necessity if you are ever to get anywhere or carry anything, especially after dark when cycling is suicidal. The author overlooks or doesn't know an awful lot of detail that seems obvious and important to me. In discussing promoting cycling, the author never mentions the biggest drawback about bikes, which is theft. He tells us that the Netherlands has a wonderfully high rate of cycling. Yes, but he never mentions that this land is all flat. I did not see one single mention of parking, walking or public transport provision for disabled persons. For instance, traffic lights are having to have a longer pedestrian crossing time here to cope with an ageing population using walking aids. The author even insisted on a street junction outside his home being kerbless, brick-tiled from one row of houses right across the street to the others. How does this help a blind person, a mother with toddlers and pram, a dog-walker, a person in a wheelchair? We're also told that Zipcars are helpful. I don't know what that is and we are not told. I can make an educated guess, but it seems like a glaring omission.

Also, the book recommends building housing without parking spaces and charging to park on the street outside these houses. This ensures that people like me, who drive a van to and from work (at your house) and need to remove all the tools every evening, and may tow a trailer, will never come to live in that neighbourhood. So your plumber, carpenter, gardener, sparks, painter, tree surgeon, kitchen fitter, dog groomer etc will not live where you live, which pushes up the price of services. And if your housing in the city centre is entirely pedestrianized with no parking spaces, how do they get to you in the first place? In one area where I work, the parking charges are so steep that I only go there on a Sunday and park around the corner in a space which is free on Sundays. This charge would otherwise force up the price I had to charge my client.

I'm pleased that the author is heavily in favour of trees. The urban heat island effect is by now well known, and trees create shade as well as absorbing rainfall. Since childhood in Dublin I've seen that wealthier areas tend to have mature trees in gardens and on roadsides, while poorer areas do not; why did it take this bright man until middle age to see this at the prompt of a friend? He never mentions that trees increase biodiversity and help migrating birds to cross a city or give resident birds nest sites and food. Also, it never seems to occur to him that trees create problems - aside from windows being too dark, the infrastructure can suffer as tree roots buckle paving, tilt walls, break pipes, and tree limbs tangle in wires or obscure street signs, lighting and traffic lights. They can also make it impossible to see for a driver coming out of a gate. So just dropping trees, or particular species, everywhere is not recommended.

The author also says that people using street cafes prefer to sit looking at parked cars than at traffic that might hit them. Actually, they don't; they just need to know they won't be hit. So in Dublin, there are cast iron decorative bollards to protect shop windows and seated café patrons. But pedestrianising can go too far. I used to go to Dun Laoghaire regularly, some years ago; then the planners introduced parking charges and spread them over an increasingly wider area. When the walk got to ten minutes each way I stopped visiting Dun Laoghaire. Now I never shop there and nobody else I know does either. Similarly, one major store after another has closed in Dublin city centre, because people can't get near them and don't like long walks carrying lots of goods. A shopping centre policy often seen here is that staff are to park at the end of the car park, as the cars are left all day, and that frees up spaces next to the shops for oft-changing cars and for mothers with toddlers and trollies. This kind of common sense could be mentioned in this book, but isn't because the author doesn't make provision for the fact that families actually need cars.

The data compiled is interesting if you are looking at this topic, and it's certainly educational about American city sprawl and the expense of providing for cars, a cost paid by everyone.

This book is about so much more than walking. It is about bringing life back to your city, back to your downtown. It is about bringing a sense of community back to your community, and thus improving the quality of life for all involved. The book also deals with what can be done to help increase the use of Bicycling and other forms of transportation making people less dependent on the car.
Jeff isn’t anti-car. But he is pro-walking. And he rightly sees that taking a critical look at traffic laws, and the construction of traffic routes can ultimately make life better for the automobilist as well as the walker and revive a downtown area, and even an entire city, burbs included.
It’s something so obvious it goes almost unnoticed. But if people don’t feel safe walking, they won’t walk. And when neighborhoods are designed with the car in mind, no one walks. So you can feasibly spend ten years and never meet another soul in your neighborhood. We just drive from home to work to a box store, to home. Not only is it bad for our health, it’s bad for business, it’s bad for community.
Anyone who is involved in city planning, anyone who is involved in community ought to read or listen to this book. If you are a compulsive walker like I am, take a listen on your next walk.

"Walkable City" is an impressively comprehensive book on how urban design should emphasize walkability by reducing the comforts of automobile travel. Speck's argues that catering to our automobile culture is inefficient, counterproductive, and never likely to succeed because each new lane brings only more cars. Speck, who runs his own design firm from his D.C. home, is no fan of the suburbs and disdains the engineers and developers that have made them possible.

My main criticism of the book is Speck's one-sided approach. He never seriously discusses why his ideas have not been adopted in more places. He does not get into details on cost, unintended consequences, impact on low income housing, or risks. It is possible that Speck has found a 100% effective magic formula for city planning, but that is unlikely, and I wish he would have presented a few other points of view. When he does mention opponents they are referred to as "soulless pundits funded by the automotive industry," engineers who "haven't cracked a textbook" in decades, or spineless local politicians who are unwilling to force tough choices on their constituents. This brusque dismissal of others forces me to trust Speck a bit less, which is a problem because he uses so much data from different sources to support his arguments that I worry he may be cherry-picking statistics.

By all means, this is an excellent book that provides a wealth of ideas and evidence. It will definitely change the way you think about a city as you walk around. Speck's forcefulness can be suspicious at times, but the strength of his arguments is hard to deny. For readers interested in the field, I also recommend Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Great Inversion."

This is a persuasive and eminently readable treatise for the layperson. Speck presents several arguments that seem counter-intuitive at first, but which make enormous sense in light of his explanations. For example, numerous cities have thought that creating car-free pedestrian malls would revive fading downtown business districts. In actuality, almost all of these pedestrian malls have failed, leaving blight in their wake and expensive bills when the street must be reconfigured again to allow cars a few years later. Instead of advocating against all car use, Speck wisely argues for complete streets that reflect the needs of pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists in the proper balance.

While this book is one of the best urbanist reads in recent years, it has two weaknesses that might benefit from attention if ever a follow-up is published. First, Speck's choices of examples are sometimes too predictable. He praises Portland and slams Dallas. That's not terribly original. Urbanists praise Portland so much that the city has become larger than life and subject to expectations no city can expect to fulfill. Dallas may be stereotyped as both a cow town and a car town, but it had made remarkable investments in transit over the past decade. It would have therefore been more interesting to hear how Portland still has work to do and to acknowledge the progress of a Sunbelt city like Dallas.

Second, Speck criticizes fire departments for insisting on excessively wide streets. He's right to to do so but offers no solution to this widespread problem. Can fire departments respond to the majority of their calls, which are medical in nature, with smaller apparatus? If so, would that result in smaller crews, and in that case, how would cities overcome the inevitable resistance from powerful firefighter unions? These issues deserve more exploration. Speck is to be praised for taking on traffic engineers, vehicular cyclists, and other groups that have done their share of damage to American cities. It would be interesting to see how he handles fire departments.

Architects, city planners, transportation planners along with anyone interested in improving our quality of American urban life ought to read this book.

Jeff Speck's "Walkable City" addresses a host of issues, environmental, health, transportation, construction, urban economics, schools, identity and community, you name it, Speck touches on it in "Walkable City."

Such chapters as "Welcome Bikes," "Plant Trees," and "Make Friendly and Unique Places" characterize some of the different dimensions that if considered, would make our urban places better, more efficient, cleaner and healthier. Adopting "mixed uses" which strict zoning controls have for years worked against is vital to improving urban life. When retail, residential, recreation, business and culture are spatially separated, community or neighborhood is essentially one-dimensional. Link them up and you get a synergy of dimensions that can make any neighborhood or community richer and more desirable.

Perhaps the most unexpected, original and thought-provoking chapter is "Get the Parking Right." Speck provides a number of tips and pointers on how to make a community less auto-dependent and at the same time, into more of a 'round the clock community. By figuring out how to rationally deal with parking, economic vitality can be renewed. If on-street and off-street parking are carefully considered in relation to one-another and as an attribute of neighborhood, the free market comes into play. Instead of a formulaic prescription of spaces, a market-based number of spaces evolves with cost and convenience determining a realistic and true value. The parking system as it exists now in most cities invisibly passes on the cost of parking to all of us, walkers, bicyclists and drivers alike, totally separated from reality.

Speck discusses alternatives of mass transit and how mass-transit linked to bicycles and walking generates incredible efficiency in terms of space and energy use. Among other details, he points out that in downtown Buffalo, New York, more than 50 percent of the entire spatial area is devoted to parking. All other space usage, commercial, residential, parks, public buildings, etc. combined are essentially equal to what has been chewed up soley by parking. This is in the downtown! Contrary to popular opinion, in our urban areas, density should be higher, not lower.

In another chapter, Sepck addresses bus travel as a mass-transit alternative. The lowly bus or "loser-cruiser" all too often lives up to its name as slow and not frequent enough, the last alternative. For the bus to have any real place in a mixed transit system, it "must be ruthlessly reconceptualized as a convenience."

Finally, Speck provides solid advice for prioritizing streets for their potential walkability and for making future improvements on this basis. He suggests a medical triage system by identifying "A," "B" and "C" streets where "A" streets have the highest walkability potential, "B" streets some walkability potential and "C" streets which should be written off.

These planning concepts are great, as long as the city has the political will to implement walkability into the zoning ordinances.
In most cities the special interest development industry rule the roost. They back city council members who are either connected to the development industry or easily swayed by them. Very important for people to understand: If good planning concepts, like some of those discussed in this book, are not written into the IZOs "implemented zoning ordinances" a community doesn't have a chance of getting developers to build projects which are geared toward walkable designs, especially the big corporate guys. I recommend Stacy Mitchell's book "Big Box Swindle" that'll shine some light on the underbelly of development.

When I started reading this short, easy-to-read book, I thought that I would mostly hear what I already knew- that wide streets are dangerous for pedestrians, highways gut central cities, and minimum parking requirements encourage driving and discourage walking. To be sure, all of this is in Speck's book. But I also learned plenty that I didn't already know.

For example, Speck attacks one of the common tools used to justify wide roads, the traffic study. He points that that traffic studies are only as good as their underlying assumptions - and that sometimes, those assumptions are wrong. For example, traffic studies don't always account for the possibility that a widened road will attracts cars, thus making that road more congested in the long run. Moreover, traffic studies tend to assume ever-growing traffic- an assumption that in recent years has not been true.

Similarly, Speck discusses block length, an issue often given short shrift compared to other walkability-related issues. I've been aware for years that small blocks provide more variety for pedestrians. But it hadn't occurred to me that (as Speck points out) large blocks also lead to wide streets, since large blocks mean fewer streets, which means each street has to be wider to carry the same amount of traffic. And because wider streets are more likely to attract high speeds and thus car crashes, long blocks are more dangerous than short ones.

Speck also makes interesting points about seemingly obscure issues. For example, he devotes an entire chapter to street trees. While it may seem obvious that streets with trees are more walkable, Speck adds that such trees reduce sewer overflow by absorbing rainwater.

Occasionally Speck fails to fully explain every point; for example, he writes that palm trees "don't begin to offer the same environmental benefits as decidious trees" but doesn't explain why.

I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway. The author of this book is probably preaching to the choir with me because I don't drive and firmly believe that cities should invest in public transportation and other things that make them friendly to pedestrians, so I didn't need much convincing. However, I think that even for someone who is skeptical about the necessity of prioritizing pedestrians in a city, Speck does a good job of illustrating how everything from economic success to human health can be effected by whether a city is walkable.
The aspect of this book that I really enjoyed was the specific steps that the author laid out to get to the functioning, walkable cities he envisions. He really makes this a manual that you can use to advocate to your local government the specific steps that need to be taken to ensure that the focus of city centers is on humans rather than cars.
The only downside of this book is that you can definitely tell it was written by an architectural designer rather than a writer. It could have used more finesse in some of its passages and is not at all the kind of non-fiction that could pass for a story. But I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning what their city might be doing wrong and what improvements can be made.

By Martin Langfield
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Many American cities, from Detroit to San Bernardino, are under financial pressure. Jeff Speck, an urban planner, has a suggestion: make them more pedestrian-friendly. His book "Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time" makes the case. Provide it, and they will come.

Creating more walkable neighborhoods brings in dollars, Speck says: home prices are higher in mixed-use areas that encourage pedestrians, and business revenue rises when downtown zones attract foot traffic. Street life fosters propinquity - frequent interaction with neighbors - which is good for innovation and serendipitous encounters. Research suggests this enhances the productivity, and hence taxable income, of both people and firms.

Speck thinks that pedestrian culture, scaled to people rather than cars, can rise in many cities as the old American model - suburban sprawl, dangerous roads and lifeless downtowns - declines. Two major demographic cohorts, in particular, need to be wooed by cities looking to prosper.

The first are the "millennials" born toward the end of the 20th century. The children and grandchildren of the post-World War Two baby boomers constitute a significant bubble of people, and they like the urban lifestyle. Speck cites research saying that 77 percent of them plan to live in America's urban cores, and that many are more car-averse than their parents. Since 64 percent of college-educated millennials "choose first where they want to live, and only then do they look for a job," investments in pedestrian living are likely to pay off.

The second group is the baby boomers themselves, who are now retiring en masse. Four times as many Americans as a decade ago are turning 65 every year, Speck says. As these empty-nesters downsize and lose the desire or ability to drive, they will be drawn to easily walkable living arrangements in small cities and towns - "naturally occurring retirement communities," as Speck terms them. "Those cities that can satisfy their unmet demand will thrive."

In line with his profession, Speck thinks that good planning can make the difference between urban success and failure. He has some suggestions, ranging in cost from expensive mass transit to cheap cycle lanes and free zoning decisions. Speck structures his book around a breezy 10-point checklist of how to do it, based on his own sometimes fraught experience of working with city mayors, bureaucrats and architects. Among them:

Don't ban cars, but do put them in their place. Narrower roads with congestion charges and expensive parking will keep down disruptive traffic. Technology can help: San Francisco's parking website provides an example of what is possible.

Invest in public transport, but not blindly - it will drive up real estate prices along its routes if done right, but fail if cars are required at both ends of the journey to get around. Also give cyclists bikepaths - they're cheap and effective, and a good way to connect walkable neighborhoods within cities.

Make zoning work. Mix housing in with businesses, make streets feel less exposed and look more interesting, and plant lots of trees.

Above all, Speck says, pick winners. Some neighborhoods aren't suitable for the walkability treatment. If walkability resources are deployed where they can make the most difference, all residents will benefit.

Speck's proposition is alluring: to solve financial woes in a way that makes residents and cities not only wealthier but healthier, greener and more integrated - the "save America" part of his title. Of course, Speck's measures are not a panacea for all urban problems. But anyone who has tried life without a car in many U.S. cities will agree that he is onto something.

via Breakingviews.com [...]

This is a great read... the author is funny and smart, and really knows the details of whats happening (and what should happen) in American cities. He really boils down the policy jargon and hot air into practical ideas, and also illuminates some of the history of how cities got the way they are (the 70s). I disagree with his seeming total anti-car bias (esp innovation in cars), but that comes with the territory; in any case, this book is one of the best I've read in the past few years (on a par with 'Fooled by Randomness' for example) ; and thats saying a lot for a public policy book... My advice - buy it!

Jeff Speck set out to write a "call to arms" for local officials (like mayors and traffic engineers) and wound up producing a fascinating read for all of us. "Walkable City" is perfect for history and architecture dabblers (folks like me who prefer Trivial Pursuit morsels and walking tours to fat tomes and academic lectures) as well as pretty much anyone with intellectual curiosity of the variety that makes shows like "Myth Busters" or "Unwrapped" appealing. As R.H. Thompson said in 1945, "A city is a growing thing . . . . What might satisfy today will be insufficient tomorrow." Speck explains how our cities became what they are today (mostly by accident) and what we need to do to meet the demands of tomorrow (purposefully encourage walkability) in a brisk read that combines city planning, environmentalism, and predictive psychology to wonderful effect.

Speck presents his general theory of walkability ("to be favored, a walk has to satisfy four main conditions: it must be useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting") and resulting ten steps of walkability ("put cars in their place, . . . mix the uses, . . . get the parking right, . . . let transit work, . . . protect the pedestrian, . . . welcome bikes, . . . shape the spaces, . . . plant trees, . . . make friendly and unique faces, [and] . . . pick your winners") in writing that is refreshingly frank ("Traffic studies are bulls***.") and accessibly simple and logical ("[P]eople who live in a city want to have access to everything that city has to offer. If the vast majority of those things cannot be reached conveniently via transit, then people of means buy cars and you end up with a driving city. As the city grows, it grows around the car. Its neighborhood structure dissolves and its streets widen. Walking becomes less useful or pleasant and, soon, less likely or even imaginable.").

I found the chapter on parking - yes, parking - entirely riveting. Speck also sent me to nerd heaven with his comparison of various pedestrian crossing methods. And who knew that provisions for bike urbanity have been a topic of heated debate, among cycling proponents? He provides oodles of interesting - and often counterintuitive - information (e.g., engineers often fight for widened streets, perfectly perpendicular intersections, and removal of street-side trees and parking in the name of safety when in fact the most dangerous looking streets actually end up being safest because drivers instinctively slow down and pay more attention) and opinions (e.g., pharmacies and egotistical "starchitects" are the pits for cities' walkability).

Speck also confirms numerous conclusions I've drawn and suppositions I've made over the last decade spent living in Manhattan, Washington D.C., Boston, and Seattle:

- "[S]maller blocks make for better cities . . . [in part because of] convenience: the more blocks per square mile, the more choices a pedestrian can make and the more opportunities there are to alter your path to visit a useful address such as a coffee shop or dry cleaner."

- "`Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow'" (quoting Jane Jacobs).

- "What used to be white flight to suburbs is turning into `bright flight' to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction."

- "[T]he most green home (with Prius) in sprawl still loses out to the least green home in a walkable neighborhood."

- "A lucky few, larger cities . . . have already attracted so many well-off people into their downtowns and close-in neighborhoods that these places are in danger . . . because sidewalks, like communities, thrive on diversity: different types of people [must] use the streets at different times of day, keeping them active around the clock."

- "Concentration, not dispersion, is the elixir of urbanity."

I'm sure that some will take issue with Speck's occasional snarkiness and that fans of suburbia will quickly prepare a list of its unmentioned virtues. Not I, said the fly. In my book, "Walkable City" is Speck-tacular!

Recently not only read the book, but had the author on our show to talk about it. A great view into what really makes cities work, and how YOUR city is doing it wrong. Speck takes tips from his experience as a city planner, and what progressive cities like San Fran, New York, Portland, and Boston are doing - and tries to impart that knowledge on anybody that will listen.

What's most interesting is: City Planners have known this information for 30+ years. Most of it is common knowledge, cities have to be walkable in order to function as cohesive and sustainable units. Yet so many city officials are still trying to pack in as many cars and roads as possible.

Speck is smart, and succinct, and gives you high-level city-infrastructure knowledge without losing the reader. He explains it in a way that make sense... because, well... it makes perfect sense.

Couldn't recommend this book enough.

First, let me say that Jeff Speck is a very, very entertaining writer. He's also righteously indignant, and I mean that in a good way, because he's brutally honest about the shortcomings of street and roadway design in this country; everything he says about highway engineering is unfortunately and laughably true. The great thing about the book is that it'll help to dispel myths and what you would think is elementray, but it isn't; that wider roads are more dangerous than narrow ones, that cheap parking makes cities less desirable, and so on. There's plenty here, and Speck weaves it extermely well. Highly recommended for both the layman and the professional.

This packs in a ton of info that I've been giving a lot of thought to. It's not so specific as to be unreadable to people outside of urban planning, but more importantly it's specific enough to really dig into its concepts and avoid bland broad overviews.

A quick read. Super informative. I wish Speck had a deeper appreciation for the landscape and plants contributions to the urban fabric. Typical for an architect, to Speck, the only good plants in the city seem to be monocultural grids of trees marching down the street at precise intervals. Surely some metric other than pedestrian deaths or retail sales volume must give Speck the "proof" he needs that planted space is valuable.

Jeff Speck is well known as one of our very best writers on urban design. His latest book, Walkable City, features delightfully clear writing, brilliant analysis that distills simplicity from complexity, and a firm grounding in common sense. At a time when the city is the typical human habitat, and when our species is increasingly plagued by epidemics of sedentary lifestyles, overweight and obesity, and the many ailments that flow from them, we need bold thinking about how to reinvent cities as healthy human habitats. You won't find a better source of insight and inspiration than this book.
Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH, Dean
University of Washington School of Public Health

Want to attract and retain new business, empty-nesters, and Millennials to your city? Invest to make your city more walkable, says city planner Jeff Speck. In his book, Speck outlines a strategy on just how to do this. Speck finds a way on to make a book on walking and city planning enjoyable and easy to read.

Speck manages to summarise the cause of much of what we now come to know as urban sprawl in this book. He not only points out the reasons why many cities are not able to create a 'walkable' lifestyle even though they might spend millions on infrastructure but he also suggest many simple, obvious yet overlooked remedies to these problems which is supported by multiple case studies. Moreover, one important thing which he manges to do is not to generalize on the remedies but instead design each one specific to the city and this is why this book is a jewel as it provides suggestions on how a city can aim to improve it's infrastructure in relation to its location, economics and culture.

Speck manages to do all of this why not making the book too dry or without overloading the reader with stats and that is why this book is not only for the architects and planners out there.

As a reader who has lived both in cities (in the US & Paris, France) and suburbs (and enjoy aspects of each), I found this book to be a spot-on, excellent analysis of what makes a good city walkable. The author has thoroughly detailed the aspects of walkability, and provides lots of specifics as well as interesting supporting footnotes. By the end of the book I was ready to pack up and relocate to any of several cities that were cited as walkable!

I would highly recommend this book to anyone, even if they are not interested in city development, etc. I learned a lot from this and I can't help but think of this book when I visit any new city or even spend time in mine. I am more observant of things now and have been using this book as a guide on figuring out where my husband and I will end up moving to. It's a must-read and even a "read more than once".

If you are looking for a book that reads like a breeze, yet is enormously informative, then Walkable City is it. Mr. Speck is an expert on his topic. This book is exactly what city councils need to remake their downtowns. By following the simple, forthright ideas presented therein, any city, however far gone, can re-energize and recharge its urban core and surrounding areas to serve as a magnet to populations that would never consider visiting, let alone living, in these character-less canyons of '60s and '70s urban renewal gone wild.

Wonderful book for anyone interested in making their city a more socially, economically just for all it's citizens. Incredibly practical and approachable for lay people outside of the urban planning field. Civic associations, nonprofits, developers, and citizens all will benefit from the knowledge that Mr. Speck.

Purchased this book and had it completed a short time later. Great read and lots of informative statistics and background on Walkability and New Urbanism concepts. This should be read by anyone interested in/and or working in any form of city planning or government.

If this is your first venture into urban livability concepts, it would be useful, excluding a couple of defects.
However,
- Extensive discussion on cars and traffic, relatively trivial mention that the solution is public transportation, when the truth of the matter is, it has to be effective public transportation. In Boston and NYC, it is _significantly_ less time to take your car than subways or trains, while Chicago and Paris, the opposite is true, public transport is faster. The US is littered with dead "solutions", car parks at rail terminals that are full by 6am, dead until 6pm, yet the trains still run all day long. Commuter vans should be running through local neighborhoods to the train stations, instead of filling the parking garages.
- A blind eye about ratio of residences to business, citing many examples of successful Euro ped cities, most of which are height restricted. It seems perfectly obvious, the higher the buildings, the less suitable for the humans in it or around it.
- Contradicts himself at points, that trees are highly useful in absorbing carbon when lined along street edges, but as parks/woods highly ineffective. ??? Also completely missing the point that submerging in green space is a soul refresher, greenery usually scant to non-existent in urban life.
- Compact walkable urban, he still promotes 1 centric high density urban, which brings crushing traffic, under the weight of centralization. Walkable neighborhoods, with an "s". Vast canyon streets of skyscrapers that are 100% business are devoid of inhabitants at night promote crime, such as Detroit and Chicago's loop district.
- The killing of a neighborhood walkability. Mega corporate stores dropped into walkable thriving neighborhoods, Brooklyn's shiny new GAP complex, Queen's Sears/Century 21 complex, etc. displacing neighborhood character.

This short book deals with the importance of walkability and presents various ways of improving it in cities. Sadly, even to those who share the author’s point of view, it may prove aggravating:

• The main thesis that walkable cities would « save America » is barely developed, most of the book discussing rehashed themes such as parking and street trees;

• As if the author had been short of time, major sections are poorly written with huge footnotes that at times take up one third of the page;

• Though they would greatly add to the clarity of the work, absolutely no maps or photos are included;

• An abundance of data and statistics are provided, more often than not in hodgepodge fashion; the validity of the underlying research, however, is undermined by the fact that Wikipedia is at times quoted as a source!

Clearly, this eminently forgettable work may not seriously be recommended to anyone.

An understandable way to understand most of the components of urbanism and how they work and relate to each other while mentioning examples telling personal experiences with politicians and city planers