Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
The 15-minute city is a popular topic these days. So here is a recent study that used GPS data from 40 million US mobile phones to estimate the percentage of consumption-related trips that actually adhere to this concept. The unsurprising result:
The overwhelming majority of Americans have never experienced anything resembling a 15-minute city. The median resident, we found, makes only 14% of their consumption trips within a 15-minute walking radius.
There is, of course, regional variation. For New York City, the data suggests that 42% of consumption-related trips occur within a 15-minute walking radius. Whereas in more sprawling cities like Atlanta, it’s only 10% of trips. Again, this is not surprising. But it begs the question: What should we do?
The challenge is that 15-minute cities generally require built environments that are dense, conducive to walking, and filled with a concentration of different amenities. And this is more or less the opposite of the prototypical suburban model, where the car and single-use zoning tends to spread everything out.
The good news is that zoning is relatively easy to change. For instance, if we want to allow corner stores in our residential neighborhoods, that is a decision we can make. The greater hurdle will be transforming car-oriented communities into places where people might actually want to walk. This is much more difficult.
On most days, I walk to the office. That is going to be changing later this summer, but what I’m about to say will still apply.
Because I walk more often than I drive, whenever I have to go somewhere that necessitates a car and that obligates me to leave during the evening rush, the first thing I usually think to myself is “shit, it’s going to really suck getting out of downtown.”
I have very little patience when it comes to sitting in traffic. So when I’m faced with this kind of situation, my mind immediately goes to: “okay Brandon, what are your other options here?”
And this is exactly what happened this past Friday. I had a dinner up in Vaughan after work and I opted to take the subway to VMC station (the northern terminus of one of Toronto’s lines).
It was actually my first time riding this new line extension and it was cool to see the area around the station. It’s not yet a 15-minute community, but I believe it can get there with some narrow streets and the right kind of ground floors.
The entire trip took about 45 minutes, and I can tell you that on more than one occasion I thought to myself, “this is way better than sitting in traffic.”
In 2018, the Utah State Legislature passed a bill creating a new land authority to guide the future development of 600 acres of state-owned land in Draper, Utah (just south of Salt Lake City). It’s near an area called The Point of the Mountain and so that’s what’s this project is now being called — The Point. Here’s a map to help you get situated:
In addition to this being a big and meaningful development opportunity with an estimated 7,400 new households being contemplated, the land authority also wants this to become an innovation hub and a model “15-minute city.”
There has been a lot of talk about 15-minute cities over the course of this pandemic, but the idea is simply to have all/most of your daily needs within walking distance of where you live and to not have to always rely on a car. This is a difficult thing to achieve in many cities, but I think it’s one the greatest urban amenities out there.
A big part of this is creating the right street network and planning for enough density, which is why this can be so challenging to do after the fact. Street grids, in particular, tend to be extremely sticky and mostly immutable. In this case, the plan is to create car free zones (or limited vehicle zones) across the various centers of the development.
Developing walkable communities from scratch is a lot harder than slotting into existing urban fabrics, particularly when you have a contrasting context all around it. You have to get a bunch of different things right for it to be successful. But we continue to see lot more of these urban-focused masterplanning efforts and I think the trend will only continue.
The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) is a non-profit group that works all around the world — everywhere from Jakarta to Rio de Janeiro — to design and implement both transport solutions and policies that help to make our cities more livable, equitable, and sustainable. If you’re interested in learning more about the kind of work that they do, you can download a copy of their latest annual report, here.
Most recently, the group published a report called, “The Compact City Scenario – Electrified.” In it they argue that two things need to happen together if we are to move humanity toward net-zero carbon emissions and reduce global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. One, we need to fully electrify our transport (which I think is fairly obvious at this point). And two, we need a modal shift.
To be even clearer, ITDP argues that both of these things need to happen at the same time in order to successfully hit our targets. Full electrification of our transport without any sort of modal shift isn’t going to cut it, and the same is true for a modal shift without electrification.
Why all of this is important is because electrification is in many ways just a technical problem. We need electric vehicles, we need batteries, and we need the infrastructure in place to charge these vehicles. Among other things, this has meant building new charging stations, retrofitting existing buildings, and encouraging/requiring new buildings to make provisions for a future with predominantly electric vehicles.
But for the most part, EVs allow us to continue living the way that we have already been living. Just instead of pumping gas, we now plug in our cars at the end of the day. On the other hand, encouraging a modal shift is a fairly significant behavioral change. Though we know that one of the most effective ways to encourage less driving is to build more compact cities.
This means changing the way we live. Changing the way we get around. And accepting more intense forms of development in our own backyards. It is fundamentally linked to land use planning and so it is going to be much harder to achieve. But if you agree with the above report, we won’t be able to meet our sustainability goals without it.
This is an excellent article by Alex Bozikovic, Joe Castaldo and Danielle Webb about the 15-minute city. In it, they do a block-by-block analysis of how many Canadians actually live in what they are calling an “amenity dense” neighborhood.
Their definition of amenity dense:
Grocery store, pharmacy, and public transit stop within one kilometer
Childcare facility, primary school, and a library within 1.5 kilometers
Healthcare facility within three kilometers
Place of employment within 10 kilometers
Once you apply this filter to Canadian cities, it turns out that only about 23.3% of city dwellers live in this kind of amenity dense neighborhood. It’s really only our three largest cities. For the most part, we have built environments that want you to have a car.
When it comes Toronto, and also Montreal, it is a tale of two almost equally divided cities. If you live in a central neighborhood, you’re probably dense with amenities. But in the inner suburbs, it becomes pretty spotty. And though it can be done, this is not an easy change.
The full article has many more of these city maps and so I would encourage you to check it out. It’s a great piece of journalism.
These days, everybody seems to be talking about the 15-minute city — Bloomberg, Treehugger, the Financial Times, as well as countless others. While not a new concept, it is a moniker that is easier for most people to digest. COVID-19 has also created the right backdrop for the moment that it is currently enjoying.
The 15-minute city is a polycentric and somewhat decentralized approach to urbanism. It is about encouraging and creating multiple centers of urban activity near where people live. The idea being that everybody should have most of their essential services within a 15-minute walk of their home. Put even more simply, it’s about creating an urban environment where people can live locally.
The benefits to this are numerous. It encourages more compact forms of development, which in turn encourages people to rely more heavily on active modes of transportation such as walking and cycling. The result is less commuting, less carbon emissions, more time, and likely better health outcomes given the reliance on active mobility.
Indeed, living in a walkable urban community is something that I personally put a huge value on. If I can’t walk out of my home to go grab a coffee and something to eat, it’s probably not the neighborhood for me. But at the same time, I don’t think we can ignore the fact that there are powerful centralizing forces present within our cities.
As Natalie Whittle points out in this FT article from the summer, new technologies — from the telegraph to the internet — have always elicited predictions that humans would now flee cities and move to the countryside. While it is true that there are other technologies — everything from the streetcar to the automobile — that have allowed us to decentralize to a greater extent, most of us are all still bound to cities.
In fact, you could argue that the opposite of decentralization has played out. As we have transitioned to a knowledge and information economy, the returns to being embedded within cities and within a particular place have only become greater.
Take for example the phenomenon of “collab houses” that has been playing out in Los Angeles for some time now, including during this pandemic. Collab houses are typically LA mansions where clusters of young people come and live together in order to create content for platforms like YouTube and TikTok. It’s like a big dorm for creators. And supposedly the biggest one is Hype House.
What’s fascinating to me about this phenomenon is that it reinforces two things. One, if you want to be rich and famous (emphasis on famous), Los Angeles is seemingly still an important place to be. And two, if you really want to be at the top of your game, it’s apparently not enough to be in the same city as other likeminded individuals; you also need to be under the same roof, bouncing ideas around and pushing one another.
So what does this all mean? Well, maybe this time is different and we are all currently living through a reorganization of how we will live, work and play. Or, maybe this time isn’t all that different. And the 15-minute city, while an important goal, won’t be the be-all and end-all of modern city building.
