Jeff Speck

Meet Jeff Speck

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 Dempsey, 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 century. 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.

Mr. Speck is a co-founding partner at Speck Dempsey, an international design firm created with the single-minded goal of making walkable places. Over thirty years of practice, he has led the planning and urban design fields in advancing the discussion around walkability: why it is needed, how it can be achieved, and what it looks like on the ground. The resulting projects have continuously moved the needle in terms of the quality of urbanism that communities have aspired to and gotten built.

Jeff Speck’s carefully honed and locally customized talks are renowned for their wisdom and humor, and even more so for the ways in which they inspire communities to imagine and embrace positive change.