This TED Talk features urban planner Jeff Spack, recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic 2013.

So I'm here to talk to you about the walkable city. What is the walkable city? Well, for want

to have a better definition, it's a city in which the car is a optional instrument of freedom rather

than a prosthetic device. And I like to talk about why we need the walkable city, and I like to talk about how to do the

walkable city. Most of the talks I give these days are about why we need it, but you guys are

smart. And also, I gave that talk exactly a month ago, and you can see it at TED.com. So today I want to talk

about how to do it. In a lot of time thinking about this, I've come up with what I call the

general theory of walkability, a bit of a pretentious term. It's a little tongue-in-cheek,

but it's something I've thought about for a long time, and I like to share what I think I've figured out.

In the American city, the typical American city, the typical American city is not Washington, D.C.

or New York, or San Francisco, it's Grand Rapids, or Cedar Rapids, or Memphis.

But in the typical American city, in which most people own cars, and the temptation is to drive

them all the time,

if you're going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that's as good as a drive

or better. What does that mean? It means that you need to offer four things simultaneously. There

needs to be a proper reason to walk. The walk has to be safe and feel safe. The walk has to be

comfortable and the walk has to be interesting.

You need to do all four of these things simultaneously, and that is the structure of my talk today,

is to take you through each of those. The reason to walk is a story I learned from my mentors,

Andres Duane and Elizabeth Plater Zeiberg, the founders of the new urbanism movement. And I should

say half the slides and half of

my talk today, I learned from them. It's the story of planning, the story of the formation of the

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