Example Projects

Called “one of the most ambitious downtown transformations in the country,” the plan’s construction is largely complete. As discussed in OKC Mayor Cornett’s recent book:

“Jeff’s job in our city and many others is to ask really big questions and get us to set higher standards for ourselves. He pushed exactly the buttons I wanted him to push. . . We launched into what felt like the most ambitious work we’d ever done in Oklahoma City. . . By changing what we thought was possible in our streets and blocks, we opened the door to much bigger actions.”

Completed with The Office of James Burnett and Murase Associates.

Download the full project sheet here: Downtown OKC

After being inspired by the book Walkable City, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik hired Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) to lead the creation of a master plan for the underutilized “parking crater” surrounding the team’s popular venue. Containing an arena, history museum, and struggling “festival marketplace,” and surrounded by the city’s convention center and aquarium, the site completely lacked the mixed-use fabric necessary for community life. Jeff Speck teamed up with Stantec Urban Places to create a living blueprint for a redevelopment that includes 3500 apartments, two hotels, two million square feet of offices, and a million square feet of retail and cultural space.

Download the full project sheet here: Water Street, Tampa

The award-winning Implementation Plan for the River District, completed with Stantec Urban Places, provides an object lesson in how to turn planning into reality. Importantly, the client was a public-private partnership collectively bent on change and committed to focusing its resources on one largely uninhabited district adjacent to a downtown core. The goal was to consolidate, and apply best-practices urban design to, a collection of disparate efforts that lacked a unified vision. The plan creates a neighborhood anchored by a new aquatic center, a supermarket, hundreds of units of housing, and a civic square all linked by a beautified main street.

Download the full project sheet here: River District, Elkhart

In what will be the largest Transit-Oriented Development in Utah, this plan, completed with DPZ Co-Design, places a new downtown on the 294-acre brownfield formerly occupied by the Geneva Steel Mill, soon to be the location of a stop on the FrontRunner commuter rail that connects Salt Lake City to Provo, and eventual TRAX light rail as well. The site conveniently lies between a growing Utah Valley University Campus, just across the railbed to the east, and the coast of picturesque Utah Lake to the west. Vineyard is one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S., but thus far has not developed any of the mixed-use walkable urbanism that can be found in the state’s older communities. This plan re-centers Vineyard on its rail stop, and shapes roughly 9.5 million square feet of new growth into a complete community of places to live, work, shop, worship, and recreate.

Download the full project sheet here: Vineyard Station, Utah

Carmel, Indiana has made great strides in introducing walkable urbanism to a largely auto-dependent region, with a renovated Main Street and a new Civic Center that are both mixed-use and scaled to attract pedestrian activity. Unfortunately, these two areas were unable to coalesce into a greater whole, because they were separated by a half mile of empty and light-industrial parcels. With the goal of creating a unified city center, Mayor Brainard commissioned Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) to create a plan for these one-hundred acres.

Download the full project sheet here: Monon Corridor, Carmel

Despite many proposals over several decades, the peninsula just west of the heart of downtown had failed to attract much investment beyond its waterfront park and minor-league baseball stadium. The relocation of a large water-treatment facility on land to its north yielded a 30-acre parcel that could be planned collectively into a single district, sponsored by a public-private partnership between the city and a local philanthropist.

Directed by a thorough market study, the plan, completed with DPZ Co-Design, includes a hotel, about 1800 apartments and condominiums, and approximately 80,000 square feet of retail space. One central challenge is that the majority of the site—and the entirety of the northern parcel—sits well below the resilient first-floor elevation of 16 feet. Two key strategies of the plan are to focus retail activity on the higher-elevation Maritime Parcel, where shopfronts can sit at grade and, elsewhere, to place residential uses above a ground floor of parking, carefully shielding that parking behind lobbies, stoops, and other pedestrian-friendly edges.

Download the full project sheet here: West Main, Pensacola

In the summer of 2012, the Cedar Rapids Department of Public Works retained Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) to consider the redesign of all of the streets in its 25-block downtown core. Understanding that funding was limited, the resulting proposal focused exclusively on the areas between curbs, avoiding any reconstruction beyond repaving, restriping, and the modification of traffic signals.

The typical street in downtown Cedar Rapids consisted of four travel lanes and two parallel parking lanes. Remarkably, only one of these streets routinely carried more than 6000 car trips per day. Since a two-lane street can typically carry more than 10,000 trips per day without undue congestion, it was evident that most of these four-lane streets could be converted to two-lane streets, freeing up a tremendous amount of excess pavement for alternative uses. These uses included turning parallel parking lanes into angle parking lanes and introducing a robust cycling network into the downtown grid.  Additionally, almost half of the downtown streets were one-ways, notoriously harmful to retail activity. This plan reverted all one-ways back to two-way travel. 

Download the full project sheet here: Cedar Rapids Streets

The expansion of the MBTA’s Green Line into Somerville is anticipated to create four new stations within historic city neighborhoods. Each of these stations will result in these neighborhoods changing, and the City of Somerville wisely decided to get in front of that change by creating specific plans for growth. The City retained Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) to complete three of these plans: Ball Square, Gilman Square, and Magoun Square.

Taking advantage of the City’s intensive Somerville by Design public process, Jeff Speck led several design charrettes attracting hundreds of residents. Understanding that each transit ride begins and ends as a walk, the plans modify car-oriented street networks with delicate pedestrian-friendly interventions that welcome people to the stations on foot.

Download the full project sheet here: Somerville TOD

Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) was retained by the Town of Babylon to create a vision plan for a Transit-Oriented Redevelopment surrounding the Wyandanch stop of the Long Island Railroad.  This effort was completed simultaneously with the drafting of an RFP to select a larger design team to further develop the plan to an architectural scale.  This effort contributed to the receipt of a $1.5 million planning grant from New York State.  Speck Dempsey then assisted the Town in the selection of that design team and helped to lead the subsequent urban design charrette.

Subsequent to the completion of the above plan, Speck Dempsey assisted the Town in its bid to select a master developer and guide that developer’s work.  The first phase of construction is now complete, and includes a monumental stair tower designed by Jeff Speck. 

Download the full project sheet here: Wyandanch Station

Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) led a team including AECOM Transportation Planning and Rock Maple Studio to create a comprehensive plan for the continued development of downtown Lowell. To complete the work, Jeff Speck moved his family to the city for a month long “slow charrette,” in which he led many dozens of meetings and public sessions while receiving constant feedback from his client, the non-profit Lowell Plan.

In the decade since the plan’s completion, many of its recommendations have been implemented, including the controversial reversion of the downtown street network from principally one-way to principally two-way traffic—now a widely heralded decision. The plan is featured in Planning magazine and as a best practice in the international design textbook New Urbanism and Beyond, edited by Tigran Haas.

Download the full project sheet here: Downtown Lowell

Boston’s Kenmore Square, the gateway to Boston University, the Back Bay, and Fenway Park, has never been a good place for walking. Public space is tight—there’s no square in the square—and both pedestrians and cyclists face long wait times at some truly hairy crossings. Despite these circumstances, making change there has always been a challenge.

When neighborhood opposition to new hotel in the heart of the Square seemed insurmountable, the hotel developer asked Speck & Associates whether an urban design solution might exist. Could a revised layout offer public benefits that would more than compensate for the addition of a 300-foot tower at this historic crossroads?

Completed with Stantec Urban Places, Reed Hildebrand, Studio Gang, and others.

Download the full project sheet here: Kenmore Squared

In 2008, Prevention magazine named Oklahoma City the “least walkable city in America.” Mayor Mick Cornett reached out to Jeff Speck for help, and the concept of the Walkability Study was born. Seven years later, the majority of the streets in the City’s downtown core had been remade in line with that study’s recommendations.

Since that effort—the first “walkability study” on record—Speck Dempsey has completed similar projects for thirteen other cities: Grand Rapids, MI; Memphis, TN; Davenport, IA; Bethlehem, PA; Fort Lauderdale, FL; Norwalk, CT; Boise, ID, West Palm Beach, FL, Albuquerque, NM, Lancaster, PA; Tulsa, OK, Rogers, AR, and Mobile, AL. These efforts vary based on need, but all include detailed recommendations for the reconfiguration of streets, the development of key private and public properties, and the provision and management of transit and parking, all towards the stated goal of quickly increasing the amount of walking and biking downtown.

Download the full project sheet here: Walkability Studies

This recently-approved plan places about 600 apartments, 250,000 square feet of office space, 40,000 square feet of shops, and a hotel on a site amenitized with a full variety of public spaces. These include a transit plaza and square, a hillside amphitheater green, and a second large square with a central playground.

The principal site strategy was to replace the surface parking lot with a linear parking structure located to hide the adjacent railyard from view. This structure itself is then hidden behind “liner” apartments running the length of the main street. All cars are centralized in this one garage, at the aggressive ratio of one new parking stall per 1000 square feet of construction.

Download the full project sheet here: Riverside

Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) was hired by the City of New Albany to redesign its street network in the face of a new tolling regime that was going to induce large amounts of cut-through traffic to access the one free bridge across the Ohio River. The City’s current street network was well over capacity and mostly one-way, enticing speeding. The plan reverted all streets to two-way, reduced their capacity to equal current volumes, and introduced a comprehensive system of bike lanes to absorb additional pavement and attract cycling.

Download the full project sheet here: New Albany, IN

Formerly one of the largest, busiest downtowns in Indiana, the city of Hammond—the inspiration of the film A Christmas Story—has seen almost complete disinvestment in its core since the 1960s. Fortunately, many healthy pre-war buildings remain, and bold leadership recently secured for the city a new rail stop offering convenient commuter service to the Chicago loop.

To make the most of this opportunity, the City hired Speck Dempsey (then Speck & Associates) to create a downtown plan that would shape demonstrated regional housing demand into an urban framework to attract investment.

Download the full project sheet here: Hammond, IN

Just down the street from Robert Frost’s home, the oldest house in Derry sits nearby the west-running brook that was the subject of one of his longer poems. The original 1710 house is supplemented by another from 1820 and a small school building, once a barn. The remainder of the 9-acre site is open fields and areas for parking.

The planning effort included preliminary elevations for all new buildings and floor plans for some of the more innovative residential units. These include a variety of 25-foot-deep buildings, some of which park underneath from the rear while presenting friendly faces to the street.

Download the full project sheet here: Westbrook

Download the full project sheet here: Grand Rapids

Led by Jeff Speck and now largely implemented, the Envision Ada plan reorganized a village downtown that had been undermined by a large 1970s-era strip mall at one end. In addition to replacing local, walkable retail with auto-oriented businesses, this shopping center cut the main street off from its riverfront, hiding it behind parking and dumpsters.

Several large moves outlined in the plan and subsequent design efforts are bringing the village back to its roots.

Download the full project sheet here: Ada