Walkable City by Jeff Speck
Published 2012 · 75,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Arts & Culture, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is Walkable City to read?
Walkable City scores 16 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Planning terminology explained plainly. Very accessible.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Concrete policy recommendations grounded in specific streets and cities.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Packed with data, examples, and policy prescriptions.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Direct, prescriptive structure. Ten steps to walkability.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Practical rather than symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Dry humor about the absurdity of car-centric design.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Speck provides specific, actionable recommendations throughout.
- Structural complexity: 18 out of 100
- Ten clear steps. Simple, practical organization.
How Walkable City is regarded
Walkable City holds a literary regard score of 37 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.