2026 State of the Downtown

Our Guest Speaker

Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer who advocates internationally for more walkable cities. As Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 through 2007, he presided over the Mayors’ Institute on City Design and created the Governors’ Institute on Community Design. Prior to his federal appointment, Mr. Speck spent ten years as Director of Town Planning at DPZ & Co., the principal firm behind the New Urbanism movement. Since 2007, he has led Speck & Associates, an award-winning private design consultancy serving public officials and the real estate industry.

With Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Mr. Speck is the co-author of Suburban Nation, which the Wall Street Journal calls “the urbanist’s bible.” His book, Walkable City–which the Christian Science Monitor calls “timely and important, a delightful, insightful, irreverent work” – was the best selling city-planning book of the past decade. His books have been published in more than a dozen languages, and his TED talks and other online videos have been viewed more than six million times. Mr. Speck was the 2022 recipient of the Seaside Prize.