UNA Pressroom

Walkable Cities Expert Jeff Speck Featured at Sunseri Speaker Series

Oct. 12, 2021



Michelle Eubanks, UNA, at media@una.edu, 256.765.4392 or 256.606.2033

FLORENCE, AL - City planner and urban designer Jeff Speck will be the guest speaker for the Sunseri Speaker Series, hosted by the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of North Alabama. The event will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 19 in Norton Auditorium on the UNA campus.

“The Sunseri Speaker Series seeks to engage speakers who provide discourse on topics that provide interconnectedness with arts/humanities and STEM fields,” said Dr. Sara Lynn Baird, Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering. “The Sunseri Speaker Series is made possible through a generous donation from UNA alumnus David Sunseri, who sponsored the series at UNA in order to honor his late sister, Jennifer Leigh Sunseri.”

Speck is the co-author of Suburban Nation, which has been called “the urbanist bible by The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of Walkable City, which was the bestselling city- planning title of the last decade. Speck served as Director of Design at the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 until 2007. It was there that he presided over Mayor’s Institute on City Design and created the Governor’s Institute on Community Design.

“Conversations about effective city planning and combining residential and commercial properties with walkable places impact city economies, social engagement, sustainable communities, and environmental issues,” Baird said.

More on Jeff Speck, his books and articles as well as selected projects, is available here. The event is free; no registration is required. The doors at Norton will open at 5 p.m.

In addition to CASE, this event is also sponsored by the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs.

About The University of North Alabama

The University of North Alabama is an accredited, comprehensive regional state university offering credential, certificate, baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral programs in the colleges of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering; Business and Technology; Education and Human Sciences; and the Anderson College of Nursing and Health Professions. The first-choice University for more than 10,000 on-campus and online students, UNA is on a bucolic campus in Florence, Alabama, part of the historic and vibrant Shoals region. Lions Athletics, a renowned collegiate athletics program with seven (7) Division II National Championships, is now a proud member of the NCAA Division I’s ASUN Conference. The University of North Alabama is an equal opportunity institution and does not discriminate in the admission policy on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, disability, age, or national origin. For more: www.una.edu and www.una.edu/unaworks/