Business

It’s finally time for the 15-minute neighbourhood

The pandemic has finally made the concept of living, shopping and working within walking distance not just realistic, but a good idea
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Getty Images / Kiran Ridley

When smart city expert Carlos Moreno proposed the idea of a 15-minute neighbourhood at the COP21 conference in 2015, he was told it was an unrealistic utopia. Back then, it didn’t seem possible for people to live, shop and work within a 15-minute radius. Now, thanks to Covid, the notion isn’t so fantastical.

Moreno now works advising Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo on her 15-minute city initiative. They envisage a Paris where everything essential to life, from culture and entertainment to great restaurants and a place to work, is a 15-minute walk, cycle or public transport ride away. And they’re getting there. 

Before the pandemic, Hidalgo said a big obstacle to achieving her “la ville du quart d’heure” was convincing employers that jobs could be done remotely. Covid did that for her, and the program has been progressing at pace. Hidalgo has built cycle highways, added social housing to richer neighbourhoods, transformed school grounds into gardens the public can access outside school hours – she has even appointed a Commissioner for the 15-Minute City – but there is much more to be done.

“The pandemic has made people realise what their local neighbourhoods have to offer,” says urban planner and consultant Roz Hansen. “But they’ve also noticed what’s not there.” For some that meant discovering a favourite restaurant down the block, for others it meant picking up and leaving town to find something better.

According to research by advisory firm Theta Global Advisors, ten per cent of Brits have moved away from a city or urban area since Covid arrived, and 24 per cent say they will no longer commute back into the city for their job. In the US, according to office space company IWG, one quarter of workers have moved away from the city centre, and eight in ten will permanently stay in these non-city locations.

This pull away from long, daily commutes is so strong that developers are now looking at previously undesirable, out-of-the-way locations. Christopher Gray, associate director at planning and design firm OPEN, describes areas near the ends of regional train lines, a full hour or two away from a big city, places where the commute would have been hellish — if you had to do it every day. “They've become much more attractive to people who are just popping in once a month, twice a month, or once a week even,” says Gray. “And the local businesses there don't lose all that spend to people going into work every day.”

A 15-minute neighbourhood, doesn’t mean everyone is permanently working from home. Workers will be able to stroll down the street to their local co-working hub instead. This is already happening in Paris, where neighbourhood co-working spaces are already being set up. But flexible workspaces are now popping up across the UK, from a converted hotel in Ealing to a community centre in Oxfordshire, and there’s a clear demand for them. According to IWG, 77 per cent of employees say a place to work closer to home is a must-have for their next job move. Only one in five are now willing to commute for more than 30 minutes.

But it’s not just changing work patterns that are propelling 15-minute neighbourhoods into the mainstream – it’s our changing habits.

The concept of a complete community has been a hallmark of planning for years; they’re an environmentalist’s dream. In Portland, Oregon, ‘20-Minute Neighbourhoods’ were introduced in 2010. “The exact number of minutes doesn't really matter,” says Eric Engstrom, principal planner on the project. “It’s about making those neighbourhoods more complete and liveable.” In Portland, they’ve used the 20-minute concept as a way of ensuring the city can grow quickly without any problems. The city’s population has increased by more than 13 per cent over the past decade, so Engstrom is familiar with people who have gone through a recent life change – and knows how to harness the momentum. “Because they're moving into a new place, their routine is disrupted,” he says, “so we start them off on a new routine.”

For him that means posting bus vouchers and timetables to people who have recently moved into new apartment blocks, to gently nudge them away from depending on their car.

Any good marketer will tell you the best time to convince someone to try a new brand or product is when there’s a big change in their life: new job, new baby, global pandemic. As Charles Duhigg wrote in his book The Power of Habit: “Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping patterns have shifted. However, retailers notice, and they care quite a bit.”

The same is true now, but it’s not just shopping habits that are shifting. “We have this huge opportunity because everyone's had their commute disrupted and their routine disrupted,” says Engstrom. Cities across Europe have already taken that opportunity. In June 2020, Madrid announced its plans to divide the city up into self-sufficient “superblocks”; Milan is using the 15-minute city as a framework for post-Covid recovery; and Edinburgh has developed a strategy for 20-minute neighbourhoods in and around the capital city. In plans announced in June, the planners involved in changing Edinburgh explained “the global health crisis has highlighted even more strongly how important ‘liveable’ neighbourhoods are.”

Just as more provincial locations are turning high-street shop fronts into co-working spaces, big cities’ central business districts are going to have to become more residential. Another version of a 15-minute neighbourhood.

“We are seeing the death of an old central business district, but out of the ashes the creation of a new one,” urban studies theorist Richard Florida said in a virtual address to the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore. He believes there will be a 20 per cent reduction in the demand for central office space, opening up the possibility of a downtown that’s less about the daily grind and more about social interaction. Instead of having a city centre, where we work, and a spread of suburbs, where we sleep, these areas will merge, he says, becoming a collection of 15-minute neighbourhoods.

It all sounds like the utopia Moreno described, but if these 15-minute neighbourhoods aren’t planned properly and inclusively, there’s a big risk they will broaden inequity. “If there's no intentionality to it, people could just grab onto the trendy idea,” says Engstrom. He argues that it could result in gentrification or less affluent communities being left an hour’s car journey away. “The more thoughtful implementation of this has to be: ‘how can it be used to improve existing communities?’” The key here is affordable housing, or social housing schemes (Hidalgo intends to have 25 per cent of Paris’s housing be social by 2025). These 15-minute neighbourhoods won’t work unless everyone can afford to live there.

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK