Jeff Speck

Jeff Speck is an American planner and urban designer, trained at Harvard, who worked for ten years in the office of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the founders of New Urbanism, and co-authored with them Suburban Nation (2000), the most widely read critique of sprawl. Between 2003 and 2007 he directed the design programme of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mayors' Institute on City Design, where he advised hundreds of mayors.

Walkable City (2012) is his main book and one of the best sellers of contemporary urbanism. Its thesis, the general theory of walkability, says people walk when the walk is useful, because there is somewhere to go; safe, because traffic is calmed; comfortable, because the street has defined edges and shade; and interesting, because there are lively façades rather than blank walls and parking lots. And it argues that walkability is not an aesthetic question but one of wealth, health and sustainability: walkable cities attract talent and spend less.

Walkable City Rules (2018) turns that theory into 101 practical rules, from lane widths to the abolition of parking minimums, and Speck applies them as a consultant in dozens of American cities, with walkability plans for downtowns such as Oklahoma City or Lancaster. His critics reproach him for a downtown, middle-class urbanism; he answers that starting with the centre is starting where the city already exists.