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Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City, guest speaker at MAPA's summer summit next week

At the Omaha-Council Bluffs Metropolitan Area Planning Agency’s Heartland 2050 Summer Summit next Tuesday, featured speaker Jeff Speck will talk about how making cities more walkable is important to keeping them vital and viable. 

Speck is a highly sought-after Washington, D.C.-based city planner and urban designer specializing in sustainability and walkability.

He has helped many cities redesign their downtown areas and is the author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. Speck says removing barriers to smaller-sized, lower-cost downtown housing is often a necessary step toward making cities more walkable.

"They could be fire and safety rules, they could be minimum unit-size rules; there is probably an on-site parking requirement that, some people who would live in your downtown actually wouldn’t choose to have a car and there is no reason why developers should be required to provide for that. So there are any number of impediments that you find in cities like Omaha. I am not sure which ones you have, but it is important to find them and root them out of your code.”

Speck says he’ll talk about why making Omaha more walkable is important for its success and some ways other cities have accomplished this.

He’ll also share ways to build in the four elements he believes walks need to include: usefulness, safety, comfort and interest.

MAPA’s Heartland 2050 Summer Summit takes place next Tuesday, August 2nd from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. at Creighton University’s Harper Center.  For more information, the website is Mapacog.org.