With the rise of suburban sprawl and city planning that has prioritized car travel above all else, modern American cities seriously lack comfortable walking and biking infrastructure. It’s a massive issue - but solutions do exist and importantly, those solutions are decidedly doable.

Today we are so thrilled to be speaking with Jeff Speck, a city planner, who is widely known for his work advocating for and creating more walkable cities. His book, Walkable City, first published in 2012, has been translated into seven languages and is the best selling city planning book of the 21st century. Walkable City is also a winner of the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature.

Jeff believes that a thriving city is a walkable city, where cars are instruments for freedom but aren’t necessary for the day-to-day basics of living. We would also add that walkable cities are fundamentally biophilic because livability and wellness are at the core of biophilia. In this episode, we chat with Jeff about making cities more walkable, the economic benefits of walkable cities, and demanding more of our environments.

Shownotes

• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time 10th Anniversary Edition by Jeff Speck
• The Smart Growth Manual by Jeff Speck
• Walkable City Rules by Jeff Speck
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Jeff Speck
• The walkable city (TED Talk)
• 4 ways to make a city more walkable (TED Talk)
• Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution by Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow
• Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles L. Marohn
• Killed by a Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall
• Andres Duany: Principles of New Urbanism (YouTube)

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