jane_holtz_kay.jpg A spirited and iconoclastic writer and urbanist, Jane Holtz Kay is an author, journalist and architecture critic who brings her writing and speaking skills to bear on the built and natural environment, cities, suburbs and America’s countryside.Kay’s books — Asphalt Nation, Preserving New England and Lost Boston — have been widely praised. In the words of Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Jane Holtz Kay’s book has given us a profound way of seeing the automobile’s ruinous impact on American life. Asphalt Nation is terrific.” One of Kay’s most recent spirited writings was a chapter — “On Location: Place and Politics in a Changing City” — in The Good City, a choice of select perspectives published by the Boston Foundation shortly before the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Her next book will be Last Chance Landscape, on global warming.

Kay’s journalism ranges from the popular and general press of the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Christian Science Monitor, to professional and environmental magazines on cities, ecology and transportation. Her writings have spanned a diverse media constituency from Planning magazine to Sierra, with appearances on Living on Earth and Tompaine to Peter Jennings and Booknotes.

Kay is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists and has also written for such professional magazines as Architecture, Landscape Architecture, as well as carried her message on livable cities and landsaving transportation to a wide audience in speeches. She is currently writing Last Chance Landscape while continuing her regular commentary and speeches on urban and environmental issues surrounding land use, transportation, planning and preservation.

Speeches

Kay has addressed national audiences, universities, and urban, conservation and transportation organizations, from the Sierra Club to the AAA, scientific groups such as the Woods Hole Research Center and the Conservation Law Foundation, political and planning audiences including the Kennedy Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design, the American Planning Association and Columbia University and the National Building Museum, and various community and environmental groups including the Chicago Conservation Foundation and the National Association of Olmsted Parks, as well as chambers of commerce, university and activist community groups.

She animates her speeches with humor and enthusiasm, and incorporates slides of cartoons, advertisements and historic images that illustrate her points.

Topics

  • Asphalt Nation: The Paving and De-Paving of America — the automobile came, it saw, it conquered. This presentation examines how the car culture has impacted our lives and landscapes, from car-bound hours to sprawl to global warming emissions. It incorporates a slide show using photos of historic events, advertisements and cartoons satirizing our car-crazed culture to describe the resulting problems, the history that created them, and an alternative walkable, bikeable, and transit-oriented future where our lives, our landscapes and our communities are not designed around the automobile.
  • Sprawl and the Last Chance Landscape — first we build our cities and then our cities build us, to re-phrase Winston Churchill. So it is with “sprawl.” Sprawl has become the epithet of choice to describe our patterns of development for the last half century. But there is a better way, and environmentalists and ordinary citizens working to promote livable communities and smart growth know it. Kay traces the problems and offers solutions.
  • The Greening of America: Diet for a Sustainable Planet — with environmentalists and scientists warning that “every living system is under decline” and bemoaning the loss of open space it is time to go beyond the fractionalized methods of our day. If the only tool you have is a hammer, all solutions begin to look like nails. Kay offers new tools and tallies the creative approaches to save our Last Chance Landscape. Her holistic view of the intimacy of the city and the country expands the meaning of ecology to generate whole earth and modest measures to better our lives and landscape.
  • Preservation: Our Most Important Product — “The Devil Destroys, all else preserve.” Preservation serves many values, from saving architectural gems to conserving natural resources, Addressing everything from the Wal-Mart that mangles main street to the sprawl that shuts down schools and destroys old structures, Kay explains why preserving our historic legacy promotes more livable and attractive communities.

Last updated February 9, 2006