Walk This Way Urban planner Jeff Speck is on a mission to promote the value of vibrant, walkable cities. Understand- ing and enumerating the conditions that create walkability, he writes, has been his life’s work.

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n Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, published in 2000, urban planners Jeff Speck, Andrés Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk depicted America’s post–World War II, car-centered suburban communities as afflicted with a soul-bruising malaise. The rise of the automobile, zoning regulations, and federal policy had led, they wrote, to widespread environmental damage and people who were increasingly isolated from one another.

The book was a bestseller, but for much of his career,

Speck said, he and other planners felt like they were “shout- ing into the wilderness” when they talked about the wasteful- ness of suburban sprawl. That’s changing, the planner told Convene in a recent interview, as walkable downtowns have become linked to economic development and public heath. “The conventional wisdom,” Speck writes in his 2012 book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, “used to be that creating a strong economy came first, and that increased population and a higher quality of life would follow. The converse now seems more likely: creat- ing a higher quality of life is the first step to attracting new residents and jobs.” And walkability, or the lack of it, has become part of the

debate over the nation’s declining health. In 2004 — on what Speck calls “the best day for being a city planner in America” — a trio of physicians released a book called Urban Sprawl and Public Health, which linked the nation’s epidemic

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of obesity and other health problems to, among other things, the demise of walking. They were documenting, Speck writes,

“how our built environment was killing us.” A walkable city is not just a “nice idealistic notion,” Speck

writes. “Rather, it is a simple, practical-minded solution to a host of complex problems that we face as a society, problems that daily undermine our nation’s economic competitiveness, public welfare, and environmental sustainability.” Meetings have a part to play, said Speck, who once served as director of design for National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw the Mayors’ Institute on City Design.

“Attendees are natural walkers,” he said, “and convention cen- ters can serve to connect visitors with the fabric of a city.” But as a consultant to city governments, Speck frequently encounters convention centers that throw up barriers to walking, such as long, featureless exterior walls or loading docks and roadways that cut off pedestrian traffic. Speck also experiences convention centers in a more

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