Book Review Essay
- Discipline
- City and Regional Planning
- Semester
- Spring 2022
- designer
- Mitchell, Evan
- faculty
- McNair, Amber
- Description
- For the class CRPLAN 4110, Transportation and Land Use, each student was assigned a monograph related to the course’s core concepts and topics. My monograph was Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by city planner and urban designer Jeff Speck. Speck’s book provided a framework for what a walkable city should look like and the benefits they can bring. My essay critiqued the book, by examining the author’s writing approach and analyzing the book’s relation to the class. I was assigned to write an essay that analyzed and provided a suggestion for improving the transportation and/or land use of a Columbus neighborhood. My assigned neighborhood was the Italian Village, a former industrial and now mainly residential area just north of downtown Columbus. For my essay, I decided to focus on the neighborhood’s walkable connectivity to downtown Columbus, as its close proximity to downtown gives the area a distinct advantage. Currently, this promising proximity is largely disrupted by Interstate-670. In my essay, I provide a suggested redesign for a road that crosses I-670 into the Uptown District of downtown Columbus. Included in my essay are numerous statistics, sources, and images that support and highlight my suggestion.