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Sketching the Map of the 'Walkable City9 Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time Jeff Speck Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012, 320 pages, $27
Jeff Speck's recent book, Walkable City, starts with a chilling quote as he laments the fate of the many American cities plagued by "fattened roads, emaciated sidewalks, deleted trees, fry-pit drive-thrus, and 10-acre parking lots."
Speck has seen a lot of urban disasters in his career advising cities on their development choices. But the thrust of his book is anything but downbeat. Rich rewards, he argues, await cities that move to tame traffic and put pedestrians first, create attractive streetscapes, mix uses, foster smart transit and create unique, quality places. In other words, truly walkable places.
Today only a handful of American cities are making all those moves correctly
- Speck mentions New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, with Denver and Minneapolis close runners-up.
But the formula of those top cities is precisely what today's "Millennials"
- born after 1981 - vastly favor: urban communities with active street life, entertainment and stimulation. As demographer William Frey puts it, "A new image of...