Summary
In his book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2012), Jeff Speck offers ten planning steps for creating American downtowns that are useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting. While the ten steps emphasize walkability, they include improvements to land use, public transit, bicycle use, and traffic flow. In this presentation, I demonstrate how to use Speck’s “Ten Steps” to design a downtown field exercise for university geography students. After reading and discussing the ten steps, my students participated in a guided walk of downtown Edwardsville, Illinois, to collect notes and photos of their observations. They were instructed to answer two questions as they wrote up their results: (1) What does the city do well to promote walkability? and (2) How could walkability in downtown be improved? The assignment concluded with a short paper and an in-class discussion of their results. The surprising outcome of this discussion was students’ desire to learn more about the planning decisions behind what they saw in the field. Applying Speck’s “Ten Steps” gives students the structure to make sense of their field observations and draw meaningful conclusions.
Session Focus
Higher Education | Human and Cultural Geography | Curriculum and Instruction
Conference Room
Byrd
Meet the Presenters
Dr. Susan Hume is a professor in the Department of Geography & GIS at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She believes in the power of field study in geographic education and has made field-based assignments an integral part of her urban geography and sustainable transportation courses. Susan is a lifetime member and past president of NCGE.
