New urbanist designer and writer Jeff Speck has

New urbanist designer and writer Jeff Speck has been named director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), with responsibility for supervising the panel selection and grant making process in design and overseeing the Mayors Institute on City Design and the Your Town program. Speck departs as director of town planning at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., in Miami, which he joined as a project manager in 1993. A native of Belmont, MA, Speck graduated magna cum laude from Williams College and holds master’s degrees from Harvard College (architecture) and Syracuse University (art history). With Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, he is the co-author of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000, by North Point/Farrar Straus Giroux). Speck will assume his NEA post in mid-August.