Name: Walkable City 1: Why Walkability?
Author: Jeff Speck

Course Info

7 video lessons (79 Mins)
Published
2025
Trending
4.47

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Browse Course Chapters

1.

Why Walkability?

3 mins
2.

My Path to Walkability

13 mins
3.

Economic Imperatives

7 mins
4.

Environmental Imperatives

16 mins
5.

Health Imperatives

10 mins
6.

Equity Imperatives

15 mins
7.

Social Imperatives

12 mins

What You Will Learn

Learn the economic reasons for making more walkable places.
Learn the environmental reasons for making more walkable places.
Learn the epidemiological reasons for making more walkable places.
Learn the pro-equity reasons for making more walkable places.
Learn the social cohesiveness reasons for making more walkable places.

Course Description

After describing his path toward focusing on walkability as the essence of good planning, Jeff Speck marches through his five principal reasons for making more walkable places in order to arm practitioners with the full range of arguments in favor of pro-walkability planning. These include the following:

Economics: the higher relative costs of transportation in car-centric places; the greater financial value of walkable places.
Environment: the larger carbon footprint and spatial wastefulness of car-centric places; the false promise of electric vehicles.
Public Health: the impact of sprawl on obesity rates, car-crash rates, and even COVID case numbers.
Equity: the inequity of who drives, who walks and bikes, and who is most often the victim of traffic violence; the racist legacy of urban renewal and zoning.
Social Cohesiveness: the greater social outcomes of walkable places; the ruthless income-based segregation of sprawl.

The course begins with an autobiographical segment describing Jeff’s discovery of the nascent New Urbanist movement in the 1980s, his subsequent decade as director of town planning at DPZ & Co, and his four years as design director at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw the Mayor’s Institute on City Design.

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