Walkability Expert, Jeff Speck: How City Planning Concepts Spread, Creating 'Design Mayors'

Click here for the full episode with Jeff Speck |    • Walk This Way: Redesigning Cities wit...  

Mayors frequently determine how walkable a city will become. The more they learn to think as designers, the better their decision-making and leadership will be. So, how does this essential knowledge get transferred to Mayors?

Jeff Speck is one of the world's leading experts on creating walkable cities. His book, Walkable City, is the best-selling city-planning book of the 21st century.

Jeff's work is so utterly grounded in reality. When he talks about what it takes to get people out of their cars and moving on their feet, it just makes practical sense. And it's born of his experience doing the work in places like Oklahoma City, Tampa Bay, Cedar Rapids, and all across the U.S.

Walkability is a critical climate solution. It's a key quality of life consideration. It's also vital to our economic prosperity; America's most walkable urban neighborhoods account for 20% of the U.S. GDP.

What some don't know about Jeff's career is that he spent four years at the National Endowment for the Arts as Director of Design, overseeing the Mayors' Institute on City Design (this is probably one of the top 100 coolest jobs we've ever heard of).

Every two months for four years, Jeff would convene eight different mayors and eight different urban designers/leaders somewhere in America for intense, two-day sprints to solve each mayor's most challenging urban planning problems.

Those sessions turned Mayors into design thinkers, which made their leadership more effective and made their cities greater places to live, work, walk, and thrive.

Shared learning networks are akin to neural pathways for accelerating the low carbon future. So we track them.

Check out the full episode linked above.