Jeff Speck's Walkable City

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In Jeff Speck’s “Walkable City,” he lists ten key things a city needs in order to create a walkable city. These ten things all can be feasible in Binghamton if there is a stable plan and lots of work put into making Binghamton walkable. There has been a push to make Binghamton a safer, eco-friendly, and economically viable city. In the 2014 Blueprint Binghamton, initiatives for the future of Binghamton are outlined with the community’s contribution. The blueprint tackles economic development, housing, transportation, infrastructure, environment and open space, land use and zoning and community building. All of these combine and placed together in the right balance can make Binghamton a healthier, happier, and walkable city. Binghamton is not fully a walkable city. There are many areas that are under developed, polluted, and have businesses that are located far away from the households. However, walkability is possible. If we take Jeff’s Speck outlook on planting trees,…show more content…
In the blue print outline, it explains that Binghamton is inherently walkable but can be made better. There are physical barriers such as vacant land, infrastructure, and floodwalls that inhibit the connection of neighborhoods to each other, downtown, and to the riverfront (Berling, Martinez, Miller, 2014:20). However, if we look at Downtown Binghamton we can see a structure for a walkable city. There is now student housing in historical buildings, local business, and the quintessential things that a person would need all around them. There is coffee, laundry, bus station, and restaurants. This correlates to Speck’s 2nd thing that makes a city walkable, is mix uses (Speck, 2012:71). Having diversity of uses encourage people to walk more. Students do not need to drive to these places or rely on public transportation. Additionally, having student housing built near these small business will ultimately help them

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