17 ms·

20-Minute Neighborhoods

202 points by simonebrunozzi 6y ago

swader999 6y ago
The viking guy that 'stormed' the capital created quite a presentation on this very idea. https://rumble.com/vcc263-the-new-heaven-on-earth.html https://rumble.com/vcc263-the-new-heaven-on-earth.html
- circumvent123 6y ago
  I think his idea is a little bit different
  - swader999 6y ago
    Yes. He's a dreamer.
  - BBC-vs-neolibs 6y ago
    Sacred dimensional energies and Tesla coils.
awillen 6y ago
The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area. More attractive for businesses, more people to share the costs of parks and other public facilities, etc. But then the type of people who want these sorts of neighborhoods often picture them as purely single-family homes. The two things are completely at odds.
- wffurr 6y ago
  "25-30 dwellings per hectare" (12/acre) is considered "medium density", and as you say, not compatible with an entire neighborhood of single-family homes, which are 10-12 dwellings per hectare (4-5/acre) https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl... It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake development" which is 36/acre.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    25-30 dwellings per hectare is 3-4 ares per dwelling. That's easily big enough for single family dwellings. Hell, you can fit a 8x12m home on a 10x20m plot with a 6x10m backyard and a 2m wide front garden, and you will have 40 ares left for roads, sidewalks and curbside parking. Make the houses semi-detached and the place will even look good.
  - awillen 6y ago
    Sure, it's definitely doable without a ton of density. The problem is neighborhoods like the one I currently live in (suburbs of San Diego), where everyone has signs up in their yards declaring their total opposition to changing the zoning to allow 2-4 unit properties. That would destroy the "character" of the neighborhood, you see.
    - olyjohn 6y ago
      And when you don't change zoning, the existing houses still get demolished, and replaced with ultra modern McMansions built out to the setbacks, which totally ruin the character of the neighborhood anyways. Then you have this terrible mix of tiny little old houses with yards and great big 3 story Borg cubes scattered throughout.
  - choeger 6y ago
    I would argue that mixing is a good idea. 300sqm per household is not a great upper limit for families nor affordable for people with smaller incomes. But houses with 4 apartments of various sizes on 600sqm lots can be quite nice. Add to that single-family-homes with 2.5 stories on similarly sized lots in a 1:2 ratio and you got a nice quarter. If you make the roads broad enough, that is. Feeling cramped in can really destroy the appearance (and take away space for public trees).
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area. I don't understand why people think this. I live in a town of 13k people in the UK, low density - 11 people per hecate - mostly single-family homes with large gardens. We have a little town centre with good restaurants, bars, theatres, churches, shops, tea-shops, coffee-shops, book-shops, specialists like a delicatessen, a dedicated butcher, flower shops, sports equipment shops, and so on. Everything you need day-to-day or really week-to-week. It doesn't need density. I'm not entirely sure what it does need apart from just getting on and doing it... but I don't think it's density blocking it.
  - asdff 6y ago
    It's not density, it's walmart and places like it. Walmart is now the coffee shop, book shop, delicatessen, butcher, flower shop, sports equipment shop, optometrist, etc, in these similar sized American towns, which once had all of these things as well
    - munificent 6y ago
      Yeah, Wal-Mart and other super groceries like this are the seed of the problem. It goes like this: 1. You have a handful of nice small towns each with their own little commercial center with a small grocery store and a collection of other shops and restaurants. 2. Wal-Mart wants to move into the area. Their efficiency is driven by logistics and scale. They don't want to open a small Wal-Mart in each town that they have to drive trucks to. So they pick one of those towns and put a mega-Wal-Mart there. 3. People in the neighboring towns start going to that Wal-Mart occasionally because it has a few things the smaller local grocery store doesn't have. 4. Business dries up at the local grocery stores. They already operate on razor-thin margins so it doesn't take much to put them in the red. They close. 5. Now even the people who don't want to go to Wal-Mart have no choice. 6. People tend to visit the other shops and restaurants as an additional errand tacked on to their necessary grocery run. Without a local grocery store anchoring those trips, people no longer stop at the restaurants or other shops. Those satellite businesses close down. Ta-da, now you've got a bunch of dead towns with no functioning city center and one bigger town with a Wal-Mart. Traffic gets worse for everyone. Wal-Mart rakes in the cash because instead of them having to pay for last mile product shipping, customers do it for them by driving thirty minutes from their food desert dying town to the nearest Wal-Mart. Did I mention that all the people who used to work at these small stores and restaurants now have shitty jobs at Wal-Mart and awful commutes?
- sparrc 6y ago
  density is not really a challenge, it's just a question of city laws and zoning. if you allow 5-6 story apartment buildings and eliminate onerous process and requirements (like parking minimums, setbacks, design reviews, "environmental" reviews, etc etc.) then you will see these neighborhoods being built.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  There's a point at which it's pointless to build single family homes. This [0] for example. All the space between the houses is basically wasted. Much better to build townhouses and start putting the garages underground/on the side of the houses. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=/0x0:7952x3106/1200x800/filters:focal(4498x1214:5770x2486)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55406995/suburbs.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=...
  - bluGill 6y ago
    The problem with townhouses is there is always someone who won't let you do something you want to do.
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      That's more of a problem with HOAs than with townhouses. You don't have to have an HOA to have townhouses and detached houses sometimes have HOAs. I have a non-HOA townhouse, and there's basically nothing I can't do with it that I could do with a detached house short of knocking down one of the side walls.
jefurii 6y ago
This was the thing that I loved most about living in a semi-rural town in Japan. Everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was 20 minutes away by bike or train. I could be in the center of a major city in an hour if I hit the trains right, but 30 minutes in the opposite direction took me to landscape that looked almost exactly My Neighbor Totoro. It was awesome.
- bmd3991 6y ago
  This is my favorite thing about Japan. The layout and transportation perfectly matches my ideal, I’d love to live there for some amount of time.
- 01100011 6y ago
  Japan is a paradise as far as I'm concerned. I generally hate US cities but would be happy to spend the rest of my life in any Japanese city I've visited, large or small. I don't think we will ever see that level of efficiency, cleanliness and safety in established US cities. The culture is different. More importantly, I think, is that US cities have a skeleton which is generally not conducive to the transportation network seen in Japan. I think that the current push in the US to add ADUs('granny flats') in suburban neighborhoods will show us the limitations of our current layouts. Cramming more density into an infrastructure limited area will likely result in lower quality of life. The solution, IMHO, is to undertake larger projects where entire neighborhoods are bought out at fair price(at huge public expense) and redeveloped according to modern urban design patterns. That will likely never happen due to the obsession with the past and unwillingness to allow change.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    ADUs help though because they are a step to more density in areas that don't have enough. Most suburbs have enough population to support good transit - but there is a big chicken-egg problem: without good transit nobody will ride, and without a lot of riders you can get enough money to support good transit. You can't prove this on small scale though, good transit is about the places you can get to: the jobs, stores, churches, restaurants, friends, and whatever else you might want to do in your city. A fast bus (not to be confused with the typical slow meandering buses most people are used to) every 5 minutes that doesn't connect to any other buses is useless. A bus every 10 minutes that via affordable transfers to anywhere can get you anywhere can get good use. Plumbers and the like still need to drive, so private autos will still be 30% of all trips, but a good transit system can be useful in the suburbs if you can just get there. Did you note I stuck affordable in there? The ideal transit system should have the majority of the riders on a monthly unlimited rides family pass.
edu 6y ago
Living in the center of a big European city, this sounds like normal.
- awillen 6y ago
  I think it is normal in big cities - the problem is people want this in suburbs as well, which often lack the density to support the idea.
  - asdff 6y ago
    They don't lack the density, they just shifted how these needs are met. In Europe, you can have a teensy town of 2000 people and a cafe and bar and all your shops in walking distance still. In the U.S., this used to be the case until the 1950s or so, when automobiles made it possible to develop larger, regional stores that service a number of towns for all their needs and could dominate over the competition (Walmart today is what used to be a dozen separate services in one hulking brick and mortar).
rossdavidh 6y ago
So, I like this, and enjoy neighborhoods (usually in old inner cities) which approach this, but one thing I don't see often acknowledged, is the difficulties of homelessness for this concept. People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner. We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state. Not saying it cannot be done, I'm sure it can, but I haven't seen it. One of the principal obstacles to any pilot plan of this sort, is that it is a magnet to those people who don't get social interaction any other way (because few people wish to be around them), so it is at risk of being descended on. Plus, some people (the sort who otherwise are quite in favor of public transport in the abstract) don't want to be thick-skinned enough to deal with even one such person. Me, I'm kind of a jerk, so I don't mind; it's all part of the human experience. I have the ability to tell such a person that I'm not talking to them today (unless I am), without being wracked with guilt for the rest of the week. But a lot of people (who otherwise would be in favor of this idea) just cannot (or do not wish to) be thick-skinned enough to cope with this.
- graeme 6y ago
  I live in a neighbourhood that’s super walkable with a ton of commercial street mixed with residences. The homeless only congregate at one small area. It isn’t really an issue. There are tons of commercial streets and only so many homeless. But when you have fewer streets, you have more homeless per street. Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.
  - mycologos 6y ago
    > Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Very cold winters seem like an effective (and brutal) deterrent against long-term homelessness? Though, you say the homeless people in your area congregate in one place, do you have some idea why?
rel2thr 6y ago
20 minute walk is big difference than a 20 minute cycle. Almost every typical American neighborhood is 20 minute cycle-able. Very few do it though
- egypturnash 6y ago
  You are neglecting the part where major roads in the suburbs are aggressively unsafe if you are on foot or on a bicycle. There are places that are theoretically ten minutes away from me that require biking along the edge of a four-lane street with no side parking, no bike lanes, and no sidewalks, and a constant stream of cars to fight with. Biking or walking through that shit is super dangerous; I stay in the parts of the city that have roads that have some hope of the car-drivers acknowledging that the road belongs to cyclists, too.
thepangolino 6y ago
Why don't like about this concept is how it forces a certain "gettoisation" of the neighborhoods.
- graeme 6y ago
  It certainly doesn’t in Montreal. We have tons of neighbourhoods like this.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I can't really see that - what are you thinking?
- xsmasher 6y ago
  Do you mean that the neighborhood becomes isolated from other neighborhoods, or that poor people move in, or what?
fasteddie31003 6y ago
It sounds like all this needs is faster transportation. I remember when I first got a motorcycle in SF I could get everywhere so much faster and I enjoyed the city so much more. My commute went from 45 minutes to 20 minutes. I know motorcycles are not for everyone, but I think low powered electric scooters could be a better solution over buses. Maybe I'm just bitter from the 38 in SF.
- BeniBoy 6y ago
  I think faster is not the answer, as Ivan Illich theorised it, speed is part of the issue. "Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few."
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Speed should be on an automated train of some sort. Humans are not capable of controlling a vehicle going faster than they can run. We fake it all the time, but if you are honest you will realize they are mostly get lucky and are not safe.
    - fasteddie31003 6y ago
      Go to South East Asia. They are scooter masters. The roads there are so efficient at moving people. American roads are congested with unnecessarily large vehicles in cities. Personal scooters are a decentralized transportation solution that works very well in Asia.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        I've been there, (India), there are cars everywhere too, though scooters are common. Scooters are not safe. They are everywhere, just like cars are everywhere in the US. That doesn't make either safe. They allow for more crowding than we get in the US, but they are not great transit in general.
- 6y ago
ttul 6y ago
I have always been mystified by the logic of disallowing a mixture of commercial and residential zoning through a city. What is the advantage of having tracts of single family homes that are miles away from a central shopping area, vs. mixing smaller stores throughout the residential area? It just makes no sense. Was this sensible in the 1940s?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  As a British person when I played Sim City growing up I used to think 'this isn't very realistic - huge squares of a single type of land-use and a grid of roads at right angles' - then I visited the US for the first time and actually yeah it is realistic for there!
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Well, if you go West it is. The East is much like any European city - a warren of too-narrow roads. Which makes sense, as they were founded (by Europeans) when that sort of thing was common all over the world. Here in Iowa, which became a State in 1846, we have a nominal 1-mile grid of secondary roads covering the entire state. To make easy access to land for agriculture. It was planned and executed by surveyors, business people and pragmatic colonists.
    - secabeen 6y ago
      It's common in the mid-west. In much of the far west, it stops because lots of land has insufficient water and can be too rugged to be developed with roads at the road-every-mile level.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      The survey lines in Ohio are a particularly interesting mishmash of proto-PLSS grid and colonial style metes-and-bounds.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  The car made it sensible. Seemed like a good idea post-war.
graeme 6y ago
I live in Montreal. It’s like this. The key is the zoning doesn’t require a ton of setbacks, parking spaces, single use neighborhoods, etc My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I’d check if there was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different directions. Pick any service and it’s like that. The area is dense, quiet, leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that. The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north america.
- udev 6y ago
  I love Montreal, but it seems you are describing the Plateau/Mile-End rather than Montreal as a whole. But I agree, from the North American cities I visited, Montreal has the nicest, livable higher-density housing areas.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Fair though it’s more than the plateau. Mile end, rosemont, little Italy, mcgill ghetto, outremont are all like this. And then while other areas don’t have quite as many criss crossing streets, they are still very walkable and mixed. (Cote des neiges, st henri, ndg, westmount etc) I’m sure I’m forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly describing those I personally walked around a lot. The mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list, whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of similar neighbourhoods in all directions.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    High taxes, but surprisingly low cost of living. "hard to be a consumer but easier to be a human" was what I've heard about the city.
    - UncleOxidant 6y ago
      I'd take that tradeoff.
Causality1 6y ago
The author and I must have wildly different definitions of "outer suburb" if thirty dwellings per hectare seems like a reasonable density. Most areas that I'd consider a suburb have a density about one tenth of that. They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  > They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car. The '20 minute city' was always about 20 minutes by walking, not car. The whole thing is exactly about not needing cars
cletus 6y ago
This one is easy: people like the idea of this but still want a 4x3 300 square meter house on a quarter acre block. Or in the US is often an acre lot within a city, which is crazy to me. And this just doesn’t scale. This is why communities are completely car dependent. Singapore is mentioned in this article but guess what? Living is much denser in Singapore. Obviously they’re constrained by geography. But it get a lot of benefit from this. Where space isn’t an issue people in the US and Australia at least have consistently chosen space and car dependence over convenience.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Be fair: people don't get a fair choice to anything else. Every try to rent in a dense neighborhood? Biggest you can get is a 3 bedroom apartment, which is enough for the poor, but not for anyone with a bit more money. If you are never home anyway, and don't have kids it works, but once you want a family you will want more space if you can afford it. In Europe larger apartments are available (and at a reasonable cost). Every try to get around in the US? With higher speed roads everywhere, and strict zoning ensuring nothing is in walking distance you have to drive everywhere, so you need space for your car. Everybody wants it all: 100 acres, and walk to everything. That isn't possible for many people (a super rich person could perhaps pull it off, but only one per city as a second trying would make even the most dense downtown too sparse). When the above factors eliminate the city as a reasonable compromise, then it is no wonder people go the other way. If I have to drive everywhere I may as well drive a bit father and get more land. NYC is the only place in the US that can honestly claim any sort of exception to the above, and they are not doing much to expand the part of the city with this claim (at their costs to build transit it would be stupid of them). Other cities try and have some small areas, but overall the city doesn't really leave anyone a serious alternative for those who aren't trying to make a statement.
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    While expensive, though cheaper than NYC, Seattle and Portland can claim walkability too. Portland has the better public transit in the city and from suburbs in, Seattle has much more going on though, between the two. But I also think, most people really just dont like living in a downtown. Yes, there are plenty that do. But not everyone. It's really weird to keep pushing this idea that if you dont want to live in a dense area, there's something wrong with you.
opportune 6y ago
Love the idea but people will never support it in the Bay Area besides maybe parts of San Francisco and Oakland
udev 6y ago
This is one of those things that the soviet cities did well. They called this microraion (microdistrict): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict An interesting side-effect is that house/appartment-hunting become much easier and less stressful because no matter which district you will choose there will be services (groceries, pharmacies, clinics, child-care, schools, parks, etc) withing walkable/very-short-ride distance, which allows population distribute and grow more-or-less evenly, without segregationist tendencies like in the West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.
- gowld 6y ago
  > West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc. How to microdistricts prevent class or racial clustering?
  - ngngngng 6y ago
    I feel like class and racial diversity wasn't really something the USSR had to work with.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  That's all well and good if you work in the subset of industries that can exist in such cities. Is there a meat packing plant within 20 minutes? Is there a farm? Is there a harbor? Is there an airport? Is there a powerplant? Is there a military base? Not everyone is lucky enough to work in office-based industries. Some jobs need huge structures that cannot be integrated within a 20-minute walking distance. Such jobs are equally important. Any city planning must address everyone, not just office workers. I work on a military base. We make lots of noise. I like making that noise. I like getting paid to make noise. I don't want live beside it 24/7.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Ideally if you have some big geographic dependent job center, you would have transit to move workers from this city center to this job center. That transit could be anything from a sad bus that shows up once an hour, or a subway that shows up every 90 seconds, depending on local political climate most of all, depending on need. For example, the subways in NYC don't really help you out if you need to get across town. They are designed to funnel workers from where its cheap to live elsewhere in nyc, to where they can find jobs in midtown or lower manhattan, like a big toilet bowl. Los Angeles also built the green line to service people working for the defense industry around LAX. Planners recognize needs for movement and have this data, but I'd say the biggest barriers are locals not wanting to see a train and the working people it carries, and a lack of strong federal support in recent decades (in contrast to highway funding).
nilsseipel 6y ago
We recently built a tool for this trend: Our tool analyses travel times in cities from different points of interest like super markets, parks, doctors etc. For now our tool is only available in German but you can take a look at our translated front-page and explore our tool in one german city: Front page [google translated]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://15-minuten-stadt.de https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... Demo [don't use the translated front page for navigation]: https://15-minuten-stadt.de/cities/Frankfurt%20am%20Main/ https://15-minuten-stadt.de/cities/Frankfurt%20am%20Main/ If you would like to get in contact, shoot us an e-mail at nils.seipel@flux-impulse.de
- carschno 6y ago
  This is amazing, thanks! Not sure how exactly you calculate, but couldn't you extend this tool "automatically" (I know there are pitfalls) to all places in the world which are well covered by OpenStreetMap?
  - djdeutschebahn 6y ago
    The calculation is very easy apply on any city you can find in OSM data artifacts. Will do this in the near future!
    - Balgair 6y ago
      Any plans on doing this for non German cities? I'd love to see this for Dakar or New York or Mumbai
      - djdeutschebahn 6y ago
        yes! we will definitely do this in the future for cities worldwide.
      - habi 6y ago
        Not exactly this, but here’s a website which calculates isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time) based on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/ https://commutetimemap.com/
paulcole 6y ago
People love the idea like they love the idea of getting in shape or learning a new skill. The vast majority who love the idea hate the slightest inconvenience and effort required. You'll get excuses by the bucketload why it just won't work for them. People say one thing and do the opposite. It's just the way of the world.
- bluGill 6y ago
  I found that living where there is a non-car option increased my physical fitness. Instead of knowing I should exercise but making an excuse I just walked to the bus stop every day. This was just a couple blocks needed to get to the offices, but a lot more walking than I'd do before because it no longer was something special to do it. Too bad I've been transferred to a different office now, one with not transit and nothing in walking distances.
  - paulcole 6y ago
    From a very young age I made the decision to never drive. No clue why but I was just like “this seems dumb” and went with it. Now I’m nearly 40 and the positives have definitely outweighed the negatives. For example, I’ve never had a commute longer than 20 minutes by bicycle. Honestly one of the only good decisions I’ve ever made.
marshmallow_12 6y ago
i commented about this subject yesterday, i don't think it's a bad idea, but i personally can't imagine living without a car. It wasn't a popular opinion but i still stand by it. Maybe i'm just afraid of change, but i hate the thought of having to rely on public transport. tfl in my experience is a slow, noisy uncomfortable nightmare. Anecdotally, i remember seeing a prediction from the 1950's about mile high skyscrapers containing fully contained "cities". I'm not sure what happened to those..
- dublinben 6y ago
  The promise of a 20-minute neighborhood is not trading 20 minutes stuck in traffic in your car for 20 minutes stuck on a crowded train. The promise is that most everyday needs can be met within the radius of 20 minutes of "active transport" like walking, cycling, or scootering. Frequent public transport service just further extends that radius.
  - marshmallow_12 6y ago
    How such an arrangement would work in London, for example, is beyond my comprehension.
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean? London is one of the places I can readily imagine this existing. Where I live in Seattle, an area that isn't even in the downtown or Capitol Hill core, I am a maximum of 15-minute walk from two parks, a library, three shopping areas, two grocery stores, health care offices, and a major transit center. At the transit center, two bus routes that go to different parts of the city (an important thing, since two bus routes going to roughly the same place are basically the same bus) arrive every 12-15 minutes virtually the entire calendar day. Does that not sound like something that many parts of London already have?
      - marshmallow_12 6y ago
        Not that i'm aware. Many shops i need are in large, industrial areas, far away by foot. And 20 minute walks everywhere simply eats up my day. I hate using the buses, driving is far, far easier and faster.
carschno 6y ago
I wonder how this relates to the "15 minute city" concept discussed in (at least) many European cities like Paris: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201214-how-15-minute-cities-will-change-the-way-we-socialise https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201214-how-15-minute-... The concepts seem _very_ close, yet there is no reference in the article. Shouldn't these agents align globally, or am I missing some significant differences?
- Kaibeezy 6y ago
  They are generally the same thing, with flexibility for local conditions and preferences. In my opinion, the most compelling expression of the idea is found in the work of New Urbanist architect and planner Leon Krier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Krier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Krier Merely scrolling through the Google image search results for Krier will provide an excellent introduction, as the concepts are so user-friendly. These are the neighborhoods I’ve always looked for, and there are some.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
We expect a much stronger focus at the neighbourhood level will deliver very high social, environmental and economic returns from small outlays. But, for this to be achieved, much greater urgency is needed. This strikes me as a "pushing a boulder uphill" approach and that tends to do poorly. A "water runs downhill, so let's try to be downhill" approach is vastly better. Instead of arguing that "We need more bus service and it's a pittance compared to trains" make a stronger case. A budgetary argument of that sort is a pretty weak argument. It's not compelling. It's essentially manipulative and it tends to not work. Instead of decrying the urgency of the case, give people easy steps to take in the here and now. Tell individuals what they can do as individuals to participate in the growth of 20-minute neighborhoods. Tell businesses what they can do. The article indicates that the suburbs in question are already densifying and then follows up with a defeatist attitude along the lines of "...but we are still so very, very far away from what needs to happen, boo hoo hoo!" instead of saying "This is already happening to some degree and here are some easy steps to take to help reach the critical tipping point and make this happen!" The writing is not that compelling. The approach to the problem space is not that compelling. The arguments aren't that strong. A better approach would be to profile cities and neighborhoods that have achieved this, even if it was a long time ago. What were the ingredients? How can you add just a little something to existing infrastructure to make this pop? This isn't hard. You just need to give people the answers they already mostly want. You need a recipe for how to make this happen and then a lot of people will be all over it like gang busters. If people are failing to make it happen, it's because they don't have the information or mental models or solutions they need. If you give them that, a lot of people will run with this.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq ft homes on an acre of land on a quiet street and to drive to their shopping and to drive to their walmart, and no bus service can service a neighborhood like this because either the stops are so far apart it's a 5 minute walk to each one, or it stops so frequently that it takes an hour to get across town, or a compromise of both, leading situations where driving is nicer than taking the bus. And even then, a bus service is not going to reach everywhere you want to go, because house-to-house travel is the absolute longest possible. Even on a decent feeder system, going from the suburbs to a normal part of the city takes forty-five minutes to get into the metro because of all the parking lots, for all the cars, that people own, because the bus service takes too long to get anywhere. The only way to start is to build a dense neighborhood where people can live and work within it, as a new neighborhood, with collective parking and minimal concessions to car traffic. It has to work as a system, or it doesn't work at all.
dcchambers 6y ago
I think college campuses are great examples of 20-minute neighborhoods.
jocho12 6y ago
Super interesting read. Think that a fair amount of inspiration can be taken from dense university and college campuses that essentially can be dubbed as sub-30 minute neighborhoods. Looking at UBC in Vancouver, B.C. is a solid example, it is outside of the heart of Vancouver on the Western shore, yet has created a neighborhood that could be considered a 15-minute neighborhood.
Dig1t 6y ago
This is awesome, I love the idea of a 20 minute max commute time for anything important. >This means ensuring minimum density levels of around 25-30 dwellings per hectare But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? I want a yard and some space between me and my neighbors, I really don't want a shared wall or tiny spaces like in Europe or Asia.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? No, it doesn't. It means you need some apartments or similar in the mix, but it's really not that high a density level. These links might help you get a better idea of what we are talking about: https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl... https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vanviegen 6y ago
  30 dwellings per hectare comes down to 3230 ft2 (333 m2) per dwelling. That's certainly enough for a free standing house with a yard. Your neighbors wouldn't be far though, but that's basically the point. Edit: I forgot to consider public spaces: sidewalks, roads, greens. So no, it probably can't be all free standing houses.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    It can be, because you don't have to limit yourself to one story. If you are willing to go to 5 floors you can get a lot of space, and it is only slightly more expressive than the same usable space all on one level (stairways don't count as usable space). Though if you can go up to 5 floors that allows a lot more space than most people have. I used 5 floors as the limit because I've been told above that you need more expensive construction to support the building - consult a real engineer to verify.
telesilla 6y ago
I'm presently in a 20 min neighborhood in Europe. You know how long people have been here? Since before the Romans. How long have cities* been in Australia? Couple of hundred years? Maybe that's really what this is all about. The train lines run into the cities on centuries-old routes, lifestyles have been built up for eons. The 'New world' has understandably got growing pains. * my first edit said 'people', not cool. Now I'm curious about what kind of cities the Aborigines had.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  Over 50,000 years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians
  - telesilla 6y ago
    Ah I can't believe I said that. Apologies, thanks for calling me out
can16358p 6y ago
Just reading the title, I thought of a new social app where people create neighborhood groups with random people/friends of friends with similar interests that expire after 20 minutes. Might be a cool idea.
rmason 6y ago
Detroit's mayor has embraced the idea of 20 minute neighborhoods. One of the advantages Detroit has is that so much must be built back why not do it intelligently? Since 2016 Detroit has created several twenty minute neighborhoods. Some of it has involved walkways that connected smaller neighborhoods into a single cohesive neighborhood. One of the biggest problems is finding people to open supermarkets. There's a single Whole Foods for all of Detroit. So they provided financial incentives, the big chains swooped in and built markets on eight mile which is at the city's edge. Those supermarkets serve the suburbs more than residents of Detroit. That doesn't help people in the majority of the city. https://detroit.curbed.com/2016/6/15/11946166/mayor-detroit-neighborhoods-walk-bike https://detroit.curbed.com/2016/6/15/11946166/mayor-detroit-...
dabreegster 6y ago
A WIP tool, browser or offline, to evaluate what amenities are within a 15m walk or bike ride: https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/side_projects/fifteen_min.html https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/side_projects/fifteen_min.... And a whimsical arcade game based on the concept of Santa delivering presents, but having to stop by a (hopefully nearby) cafe to fuel up once in a while: santa.abstreet.org
loughnane 6y ago
Boston has some neighborhoods like this. They are very expensive.
pyinstallwoes 6y ago
What towns like this exist in U.S? I desire something like this.
flemhans 6y ago
20-min? Forget about it. Five minutes is the maximum. If you have to travel twenty minutes, you might as well order it. Edit: I'd only want to walk 3 mins I think, not 5.

The viking guy that 'stormed' the capital created quite a presentation on this very idea. https://rumble.com/vcc263-the-new-heaven-on-earth.html https://rumble.com/vcc263-the-new-heaven-on-earth.html

circumvent123 6y ago
I think his idea is a little bit different
- swader999 6y ago
  Yes. He's a dreamer.
- BBC-vs-neolibs 6y ago
  Sacred dimensional energies and Tesla coils.

awillen 6y ago

The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area. More attractive for businesses, more people to share the costs of parks and other public facilities, etc. But then the type of people who want these sorts of neighborhoods often picture them as purely single-family homes. The two things are completely at odds.

wffurr 6y ago
"25-30 dwellings per hectare" (12/acre) is considered "medium density", and as you say, not compatible with an entire neighborhood of single-family homes, which are 10-12 dwellings per hectare (4-5/acre) https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl... It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake development" which is 36/acre.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  25-30 dwellings per hectare is 3-4 ares per dwelling. That's easily big enough for single family dwellings. Hell, you can fit a 8x12m home on a 10x20m plot with a 6x10m backyard and a 2m wide front garden, and you will have 40 ares left for roads, sidewalks and curbside parking. Make the houses semi-detached and the place will even look good.
- awillen 6y ago
  Sure, it's definitely doable without a ton of density. The problem is neighborhoods like the one I currently live in (suburbs of San Diego), where everyone has signs up in their yards declaring their total opposition to changing the zoning to allow 2-4 unit properties. That would destroy the "character" of the neighborhood, you see.
  - olyjohn 6y ago
    And when you don't change zoning, the existing houses still get demolished, and replaced with ultra modern McMansions built out to the setbacks, which totally ruin the character of the neighborhood anyways. Then you have this terrible mix of tiny little old houses with yards and great big 3 story Borg cubes scattered throughout.
- choeger 6y ago
  I would argue that mixing is a good idea. 300sqm per household is not a great upper limit for families nor affordable for people with smaller incomes. But houses with 4 apartments of various sizes on 600sqm lots can be quite nice. Add to that single-family-homes with 2.5 stories on similarly sized lots in a 1:2 ratio and you got a nice quarter. If you make the roads broad enough, that is. Feeling cramped in can really destroy the appearance (and take away space for public trees).
chrisseaton 6y ago
> The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area. I don't understand why people think this. I live in a town of 13k people in the UK, low density - 11 people per hecate - mostly single-family homes with large gardens. We have a little town centre with good restaurants, bars, theatres, churches, shops, tea-shops, coffee-shops, book-shops, specialists like a delicatessen, a dedicated butcher, flower shops, sports equipment shops, and so on. Everything you need day-to-day or really week-to-week. It doesn't need density. I'm not entirely sure what it does need apart from just getting on and doing it... but I don't think it's density blocking it.
- asdff 6y ago
  It's not density, it's walmart and places like it. Walmart is now the coffee shop, book shop, delicatessen, butcher, flower shop, sports equipment shop, optometrist, etc, in these similar sized American towns, which once had all of these things as well
  - munificent 6y ago
    Yeah, Wal-Mart and other super groceries like this are the seed of the problem. It goes like this: 1. You have a handful of nice small towns each with their own little commercial center with a small grocery store and a collection of other shops and restaurants. 2. Wal-Mart wants to move into the area. Their efficiency is driven by logistics and scale. They don't want to open a small Wal-Mart in each town that they have to drive trucks to. So they pick one of those towns and put a mega-Wal-Mart there. 3. People in the neighboring towns start going to that Wal-Mart occasionally because it has a few things the smaller local grocery store doesn't have. 4. Business dries up at the local grocery stores. They already operate on razor-thin margins so it doesn't take much to put them in the red. They close. 5. Now even the people who don't want to go to Wal-Mart have no choice. 6. People tend to visit the other shops and restaurants as an additional errand tacked on to their necessary grocery run. Without a local grocery store anchoring those trips, people no longer stop at the restaurants or other shops. Those satellite businesses close down. Ta-da, now you've got a bunch of dead towns with no functioning city center and one bigger town with a Wal-Mart. Traffic gets worse for everyone. Wal-Mart rakes in the cash because instead of them having to pay for last mile product shipping, customers do it for them by driving thirty minutes from their food desert dying town to the nearest Wal-Mart. Did I mention that all the people who used to work at these small stores and restaurants now have shitty jobs at Wal-Mart and awful commutes?
sparrc 6y ago
density is not really a challenge, it's just a question of city laws and zoning. if you allow 5-6 story apartment buildings and eliminate onerous process and requirements (like parking minimums, setbacks, design reviews, "environmental" reviews, etc etc.) then you will see these neighborhoods being built.
908B64B197 6y ago
There's a point at which it's pointless to build single family homes. This [0] for example. All the space between the houses is basically wasted. Much better to build townhouses and start putting the garages underground/on the side of the houses. https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=/0x0:7952x3106/1200x800/filters:focal(4498x1214:5770x2486)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55406995/suburbs.0.jpg https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=...
- bluGill 6y ago
  The problem with townhouses is there is always someone who won't let you do something you want to do.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    That's more of a problem with HOAs than with townhouses. You don't have to have an HOA to have townhouses and detached houses sometimes have HOAs. I have a non-HOA townhouse, and there's basically nothing I can't do with it that I could do with a detached house short of knocking down one of the side walls.

jefurii 6y ago

This was the thing that I loved most about living in a semi-rural town in Japan. Everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was 20 minutes away by bike or train. I could be in the center of a major city in an hour if I hit the trains right, but 30 minutes in the opposite direction took me to landscape that looked almost exactly My Neighbor Totoro. It was awesome.

bmd3991 6y ago
This is my favorite thing about Japan. The layout and transportation perfectly matches my ideal, I’d love to live there for some amount of time.
01100011 6y ago
Japan is a paradise as far as I'm concerned. I generally hate US cities but would be happy to spend the rest of my life in any Japanese city I've visited, large or small. I don't think we will ever see that level of efficiency, cleanliness and safety in established US cities. The culture is different. More importantly, I think, is that US cities have a skeleton which is generally not conducive to the transportation network seen in Japan. I think that the current push in the US to add ADUs('granny flats') in suburban neighborhoods will show us the limitations of our current layouts. Cramming more density into an infrastructure limited area will likely result in lower quality of life. The solution, IMHO, is to undertake larger projects where entire neighborhoods are bought out at fair price(at huge public expense) and redeveloped according to modern urban design patterns. That will likely never happen due to the obsession with the past and unwillingness to allow change.
- bluGill 6y ago
  ADUs help though because they are a step to more density in areas that don't have enough. Most suburbs have enough population to support good transit - but there is a big chicken-egg problem: without good transit nobody will ride, and without a lot of riders you can get enough money to support good transit. You can't prove this on small scale though, good transit is about the places you can get to: the jobs, stores, churches, restaurants, friends, and whatever else you might want to do in your city. A fast bus (not to be confused with the typical slow meandering buses most people are used to) every 5 minutes that doesn't connect to any other buses is useless. A bus every 10 minutes that via affordable transfers to anywhere can get you anywhere can get good use. Plumbers and the like still need to drive, so private autos will still be 30% of all trips, but a good transit system can be useful in the suburbs if you can just get there. Did you note I stuck affordable in there? The ideal transit system should have the majority of the riders on a monthly unlimited rides family pass.

edu 6y ago

Living in the center of a big European city, this sounds like normal.

awillen 6y ago
I think it is normal in big cities - the problem is people want this in suburbs as well, which often lack the density to support the idea.
- asdff 6y ago
  They don't lack the density, they just shifted how these needs are met. In Europe, you can have a teensy town of 2000 people and a cafe and bar and all your shops in walking distance still. In the U.S., this used to be the case until the 1950s or so, when automobiles made it possible to develop larger, regional stores that service a number of towns for all their needs and could dominate over the competition (Walmart today is what used to be a dozen separate services in one hulking brick and mortar).

rossdavidh 6y ago

So, I like this, and enjoy neighborhoods (usually in old inner cities) which approach this, but one thing I don't see often acknowledged, is the difficulties of homelessness for this concept. People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner. We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state. Not saying it cannot be done, I'm sure it can, but I haven't seen it. One of the principal obstacles to any pilot plan of this sort, is that it is a magnet to those people who don't get social interaction any other way (because few people wish to be around them), so it is at risk of being descended on. Plus, some people (the sort who otherwise are quite in favor of public transport in the abstract) don't want to be thick-skinned enough to deal with even one such person. Me, I'm kind of a jerk, so I don't mind; it's all part of the human experience. I have the ability to tell such a person that I'm not talking to them today (unless I am), without being wracked with guilt for the rest of the week. But a lot of people (who otherwise would be in favor of this idea) just cannot (or do not wish to) be thick-skinned enough to cope with this.

graeme 6y ago
I live in a neighbourhood that’s super walkable with a ton of commercial street mixed with residences. The homeless only congregate at one small area. It isn’t really an issue. There are tons of commercial streets and only so many homeless. But when you have fewer streets, you have more homeless per street. Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.
- mycologos 6y ago
  > Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Very cold winters seem like an effective (and brutal) deterrent against long-term homelessness? Though, you say the homeless people in your area congregate in one place, do you have some idea why?

rel2thr 6y ago

20 minute walk is big difference than a 20 minute cycle. Almost every typical American neighborhood is 20 minute cycle-able. Very few do it though

egypturnash 6y ago
You are neglecting the part where major roads in the suburbs are aggressively unsafe if you are on foot or on a bicycle. There are places that are theoretically ten minutes away from me that require biking along the edge of a four-lane street with no side parking, no bike lanes, and no sidewalks, and a constant stream of cars to fight with. Biking or walking through that shit is super dangerous; I stay in the parts of the city that have roads that have some hope of the car-drivers acknowledging that the road belongs to cyclists, too.

thepangolino 6y ago

Why don't like about this concept is how it forces a certain "gettoisation" of the neighborhoods.

graeme 6y ago
It certainly doesn’t in Montreal. We have tons of neighbourhoods like this.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I can't really see that - what are you thinking?
xsmasher 6y ago
Do you mean that the neighborhood becomes isolated from other neighborhoods, or that poor people move in, or what?

fasteddie31003 6y ago

It sounds like all this needs is faster transportation. I remember when I first got a motorcycle in SF I could get everywhere so much faster and I enjoyed the city so much more. My commute went from 45 minutes to 20 minutes. I know motorcycles are not for everyone, but I think low powered electric scooters could be a better solution over buses. Maybe I'm just bitter from the 38 in SF.

BeniBoy 6y ago
I think faster is not the answer, as Ivan Illich theorised it, speed is part of the issue. "Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few."
- bluGill 6y ago
  Speed should be on an automated train of some sort. Humans are not capable of controlling a vehicle going faster than they can run. We fake it all the time, but if you are honest you will realize they are mostly get lucky and are not safe.
  - fasteddie31003 6y ago
    Go to South East Asia. They are scooter masters. The roads there are so efficient at moving people. American roads are congested with unnecessarily large vehicles in cities. Personal scooters are a decentralized transportation solution that works very well in Asia.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      I've been there, (India), there are cars everywhere too, though scooters are common. Scooters are not safe. They are everywhere, just like cars are everywhere in the US. That doesn't make either safe. They allow for more crowding than we get in the US, but they are not great transit in general.
6y ago

ttul 6y ago

I have always been mystified by the logic of disallowing a mixture of commercial and residential zoning through a city. What is the advantage of having tracts of single family homes that are miles away from a central shopping area, vs. mixing smaller stores throughout the residential area? It just makes no sense. Was this sensible in the 1940s?

chrisseaton 6y ago
As a British person when I played Sim City growing up I used to think 'this isn't very realistic - huge squares of a single type of land-use and a grid of roads at right angles' - then I visited the US for the first time and actually yeah it is realistic for there!
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Well, if you go West it is. The East is much like any European city - a warren of too-narrow roads. Which makes sense, as they were founded (by Europeans) when that sort of thing was common all over the world. Here in Iowa, which became a State in 1846, we have a nominal 1-mile grid of secondary roads covering the entire state. To make easy access to land for agriculture. It was planned and executed by surveyors, business people and pragmatic colonists.
  - secabeen 6y ago
    It's common in the mid-west. In much of the far west, it stops because lots of land has insufficient water and can be too rugged to be developed with roads at the road-every-mile level.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    The survey lines in Ohio are a particularly interesting mishmash of proto-PLSS grid and colonial style metes-and-bounds.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
The car made it sensible. Seemed like a good idea post-war.

graeme 6y ago

I live in Montreal. It’s like this. The key is the zoning doesn’t require a ton of setbacks, parking spaces, single use neighborhoods, etc My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I’d check if there was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different directions. Pick any service and it’s like that. The area is dense, quiet, leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that. The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north america.

udev 6y ago
I love Montreal, but it seems you are describing the Plateau/Mile-End rather than Montreal as a whole. But I agree, from the North American cities I visited, Montreal has the nicest, livable higher-density housing areas.
- graeme 6y ago
  Fair though it’s more than the plateau. Mile end, rosemont, little Italy, mcgill ghetto, outremont are all like this. And then while other areas don’t have quite as many criss crossing streets, they are still very walkable and mixed. (Cote des neiges, st henri, ndg, westmount etc) I’m sure I’m forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly describing those I personally walked around a lot. The mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list, whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of similar neighbourhoods in all directions.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  High taxes, but surprisingly low cost of living. "hard to be a consumer but easier to be a human" was what I've heard about the city.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    I'd take that tradeoff.

Causality1 6y ago

The author and I must have wildly different definitions of "outer suburb" if thirty dwellings per hectare seems like a reasonable density. Most areas that I'd consider a suburb have a density about one tenth of that. They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car.

FalconSensei 6y ago
> They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car. The '20 minute city' was always about 20 minutes by walking, not car. The whole thing is exactly about not needing cars

cletus 6y ago

This one is easy: people like the idea of this but still want a 4x3 300 square meter house on a quarter acre block. Or in the US is often an acre lot within a city, which is crazy to me. And this just doesn’t scale. This is why communities are completely car dependent. Singapore is mentioned in this article but guess what? Living is much denser in Singapore. Obviously they’re constrained by geography. But it get a lot of benefit from this. Where space isn’t an issue people in the US and Australia at least have consistently chosen space and car dependence over convenience.

bluGill 6y ago
Be fair: people don't get a fair choice to anything else. Every try to rent in a dense neighborhood? Biggest you can get is a 3 bedroom apartment, which is enough for the poor, but not for anyone with a bit more money. If you are never home anyway, and don't have kids it works, but once you want a family you will want more space if you can afford it. In Europe larger apartments are available (and at a reasonable cost). Every try to get around in the US? With higher speed roads everywhere, and strict zoning ensuring nothing is in walking distance you have to drive everywhere, so you need space for your car. Everybody wants it all: 100 acres, and walk to everything. That isn't possible for many people (a super rich person could perhaps pull it off, but only one per city as a second trying would make even the most dense downtown too sparse). When the above factors eliminate the city as a reasonable compromise, then it is no wonder people go the other way. If I have to drive everywhere I may as well drive a bit father and get more land. NYC is the only place in the US that can honestly claim any sort of exception to the above, and they are not doing much to expand the part of the city with this claim (at their costs to build transit it would be stupid of them). Other cities try and have some small areas, but overall the city doesn't really leave anyone a serious alternative for those who aren't trying to make a statement.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  While expensive, though cheaper than NYC, Seattle and Portland can claim walkability too. Portland has the better public transit in the city and from suburbs in, Seattle has much more going on though, between the two. But I also think, most people really just dont like living in a downtown. Yes, there are plenty that do. But not everyone. It's really weird to keep pushing this idea that if you dont want to live in a dense area, there's something wrong with you.

opportune 6y ago

Love the idea but people will never support it in the Bay Area besides maybe parts of San Francisco and Oakland

udev 6y ago

This is one of those things that the soviet cities did well. They called this microraion (microdistrict): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict An interesting side-effect is that house/appartment-hunting become much easier and less stressful because no matter which district you will choose there will be services (groceries, pharmacies, clinics, child-care, schools, parks, etc) withing walkable/very-short-ride distance, which allows population distribute and grow more-or-less evenly, without segregationist tendencies like in the West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.

gowld 6y ago
> West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc. How to microdistricts prevent class or racial clustering?
- ngngngng 6y ago
  I feel like class and racial diversity wasn't really something the USSR had to work with.
sandworm101 6y ago
That's all well and good if you work in the subset of industries that can exist in such cities. Is there a meat packing plant within 20 minutes? Is there a farm? Is there a harbor? Is there an airport? Is there a powerplant? Is there a military base? Not everyone is lucky enough to work in office-based industries. Some jobs need huge structures that cannot be integrated within a 20-minute walking distance. Such jobs are equally important. Any city planning must address everyone, not just office workers. I work on a military base. We make lots of noise. I like making that noise. I like getting paid to make noise. I don't want live beside it 24/7.
- asdff 6y ago
  Ideally if you have some big geographic dependent job center, you would have transit to move workers from this city center to this job center. That transit could be anything from a sad bus that shows up once an hour, or a subway that shows up every 90 seconds, depending on local political climate most of all, depending on need. For example, the subways in NYC don't really help you out if you need to get across town. They are designed to funnel workers from where its cheap to live elsewhere in nyc, to where they can find jobs in midtown or lower manhattan, like a big toilet bowl. Los Angeles also built the green line to service people working for the defense industry around LAX. Planners recognize needs for movement and have this data, but I'd say the biggest barriers are locals not wanting to see a train and the working people it carries, and a lack of strong federal support in recent decades (in contrast to highway funding).

nilsseipel 6y ago

We recently built a tool for this trend: Our tool analyses travel times in cities from different points of interest like super markets, parks, doctors etc. For now our tool is only available in German but you can take a look at our translated front-page and explore our tool in one german city: Front page [google translated]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://15-minuten-stadt.de https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https... Demo [don't use the translated front page for navigation]: https://15-minuten-stadt.de/cities/Frankfurt%20am%20Main/ https://15-minuten-stadt.de/cities/Frankfurt%20am%20Main/ If you would like to get in contact, shoot us an e-mail at nils.seipel@flux-impulse.de

carschno 6y ago
This is amazing, thanks! Not sure how exactly you calculate, but couldn't you extend this tool "automatically" (I know there are pitfalls) to all places in the world which are well covered by OpenStreetMap?
- djdeutschebahn 6y ago
  The calculation is very easy apply on any city you can find in OSM data artifacts. Will do this in the near future!
  - Balgair 6y ago
    Any plans on doing this for non German cities? I'd love to see this for Dakar or New York or Mumbai
    - djdeutschebahn 6y ago
      yes! we will definitely do this in the future for cities worldwide.
    - habi 6y ago
      Not exactly this, but here’s a website which calculates isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time) based on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/ https://commutetimemap.com/

paulcole 6y ago

People love the idea like they love the idea of getting in shape or learning a new skill. The vast majority who love the idea hate the slightest inconvenience and effort required. You'll get excuses by the bucketload why it just won't work for them. People say one thing and do the opposite. It's just the way of the world.

bluGill 6y ago
I found that living where there is a non-car option increased my physical fitness. Instead of knowing I should exercise but making an excuse I just walked to the bus stop every day. This was just a couple blocks needed to get to the offices, but a lot more walking than I'd do before because it no longer was something special to do it. Too bad I've been transferred to a different office now, one with not transit and nothing in walking distances.
- paulcole 6y ago
  From a very young age I made the decision to never drive. No clue why but I was just like “this seems dumb” and went with it. Now I’m nearly 40 and the positives have definitely outweighed the negatives. For example, I’ve never had a commute longer than 20 minutes by bicycle. Honestly one of the only good decisions I’ve ever made.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

i commented about this subject yesterday, i don't think it's a bad idea, but i personally can't imagine living without a car. It wasn't a popular opinion but i still stand by it. Maybe i'm just afraid of change, but i hate the thought of having to rely on public transport. tfl in my experience is a slow, noisy uncomfortable nightmare. Anecdotally, i remember seeing a prediction from the 1950's about mile high skyscrapers containing fully contained "cities". I'm not sure what happened to those..

dublinben 6y ago
The promise of a 20-minute neighborhood is not trading 20 minutes stuck in traffic in your car for 20 minutes stuck on a crowded train. The promise is that most everyday needs can be met within the radius of 20 minutes of "active transport" like walking, cycling, or scootering. Frequent public transport service just further extends that radius.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  How such an arrangement would work in London, for example, is beyond my comprehension.
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean? London is one of the places I can readily imagine this existing. Where I live in Seattle, an area that isn't even in the downtown or Capitol Hill core, I am a maximum of 15-minute walk from two parks, a library, three shopping areas, two grocery stores, health care offices, and a major transit center. At the transit center, two bus routes that go to different parts of the city (an important thing, since two bus routes going to roughly the same place are basically the same bus) arrive every 12-15 minutes virtually the entire calendar day. Does that not sound like something that many parts of London already have?
    - marshmallow_12 6y ago
      Not that i'm aware. Many shops i need are in large, industrial areas, far away by foot. And 20 minute walks everywhere simply eats up my day. I hate using the buses, driving is far, far easier and faster.

carschno 6y ago

I wonder how this relates to the "15 minute city" concept discussed in (at least) many European cities like Paris: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201214-how-15-minute-cities-will-change-the-way-we-socialise https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201214-how-15-minute-... The concepts seem _very_ close, yet there is no reference in the article. Shouldn't these agents align globally, or am I missing some significant differences?

Kaibeezy 6y ago
They are generally the same thing, with flexibility for local conditions and preferences. In my opinion, the most compelling expression of the idea is found in the work of New Urbanist architect and planner Leon Krier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Krier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Krier Merely scrolling through the Google image search results for Krier will provide an excellent introduction, as the concepts are so user-friendly. These are the neighborhoods I’ve always looked for, and there are some.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

We expect a much stronger focus at the neighbourhood level will deliver very high social, environmental and economic returns from small outlays. But, for this to be achieved, much greater urgency is needed. This strikes me as a "pushing a boulder uphill" approach and that tends to do poorly. A "water runs downhill, so let's try to be downhill" approach is vastly better. Instead of arguing that "We need more bus service and it's a pittance compared to trains" make a stronger case. A budgetary argument of that sort is a pretty weak argument. It's not compelling. It's essentially manipulative and it tends to not work. Instead of decrying the urgency of the case, give people easy steps to take in the here and now. Tell individuals what they can do as individuals to participate in the growth of 20-minute neighborhoods. Tell businesses what they can do. The article indicates that the suburbs in question are already densifying and then follows up with a defeatist attitude along the lines of "...but we are still so very, very far away from what needs to happen, boo hoo hoo!" instead of saying "This is already happening to some degree and here are some easy steps to take to help reach the critical tipping point and make this happen!" The writing is not that compelling. The approach to the problem space is not that compelling. The arguments aren't that strong. A better approach would be to profile cities and neighborhoods that have achieved this, even if it was a long time ago. What were the ingredients? How can you add just a little something to existing infrastructure to make this pop? This isn't hard. You just need to give people the answers they already mostly want. You need a recipe for how to make this happen and then a lot of people will be all over it like gang busters. If people are failing to make it happen, it's because they don't have the information or mental models or solutions they need. If you give them that, a lot of people will run with this.

freeone3000 6y ago
You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq ft homes on an acre of land on a quiet street and to drive to their shopping and to drive to their walmart, and no bus service can service a neighborhood like this because either the stops are so far apart it's a 5 minute walk to each one, or it stops so frequently that it takes an hour to get across town, or a compromise of both, leading situations where driving is nicer than taking the bus. And even then, a bus service is not going to reach everywhere you want to go, because house-to-house travel is the absolute longest possible. Even on a decent feeder system, going from the suburbs to a normal part of the city takes forty-five minutes to get into the metro because of all the parking lots, for all the cars, that people own, because the bus service takes too long to get anywhere. The only way to start is to build a dense neighborhood where people can live and work within it, as a new neighborhood, with collective parking and minimal concessions to car traffic. It has to work as a system, or it doesn't work at all.

dcchambers 6y ago

I think college campuses are great examples of 20-minute neighborhoods.

jocho12 6y ago

Super interesting read. Think that a fair amount of inspiration can be taken from dense university and college campuses that essentially can be dubbed as sub-30 minute neighborhoods. Looking at UBC in Vancouver, B.C. is a solid example, it is outside of the heart of Vancouver on the Western shore, yet has created a neighborhood that could be considered a 15-minute neighborhood.

Dig1t 6y ago

This is awesome, I love the idea of a 20 minute max commute time for anything important. >This means ensuring minimum density levels of around 25-30 dwellings per hectare But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? I want a yard and some space between me and my neighbors, I really don't want a shared wall or tiny spaces like in Europe or Asia.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? No, it doesn't. It means you need some apartments or similar in the mix, but it's really not that high a density level. These links might help you get a better idea of what we are talking about: https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatible-density/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl... https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
vanviegen 6y ago
30 dwellings per hectare comes down to 3230 ft2 (333 m2) per dwelling. That's certainly enough for a free standing house with a yard. Your neighbors wouldn't be far though, but that's basically the point. Edit: I forgot to consider public spaces: sidewalks, roads, greens. So no, it probably can't be all free standing houses.
- bluGill 6y ago
  It can be, because you don't have to limit yourself to one story. If you are willing to go to 5 floors you can get a lot of space, and it is only slightly more expressive than the same usable space all on one level (stairways don't count as usable space). Though if you can go up to 5 floors that allows a lot more space than most people have. I used 5 floors as the limit because I've been told above that you need more expensive construction to support the building - consult a real engineer to verify.

telesilla 6y ago

I'm presently in a 20 min neighborhood in Europe. You know how long people have been here? Since before the Romans. How long have cities* been in Australia? Couple of hundred years? Maybe that's really what this is all about. The train lines run into the cities on centuries-old routes, lifestyles have been built up for eons. The 'New world' has understandably got growing pains. * my first edit said 'people', not cool. Now I'm curious about what kind of cities the Aborigines had.

CalRobert 6y ago
Over 50,000 years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians
- telesilla 6y ago
  Ah I can't believe I said that. Apologies, thanks for calling me out

can16358p 6y ago

Just reading the title, I thought of a new social app where people create neighborhood groups with random people/friends of friends with similar interests that expire after 20 minutes. Might be a cool idea.

rmason 6y ago

Detroit's mayor has embraced the idea of 20 minute neighborhoods. One of the advantages Detroit has is that so much must be built back why not do it intelligently? Since 2016 Detroit has created several twenty minute neighborhoods. Some of it has involved walkways that connected smaller neighborhoods into a single cohesive neighborhood. One of the biggest problems is finding people to open supermarkets. There's a single Whole Foods for all of Detroit. So they provided financial incentives, the big chains swooped in and built markets on eight mile which is at the city's edge. Those supermarkets serve the suburbs more than residents of Detroit. That doesn't help people in the majority of the city. https://detroit.curbed.com/2016/6/15/11946166/mayor-detroit-neighborhoods-walk-bike https://detroit.curbed.com/2016/6/15/11946166/mayor-detroit-...

dabreegster 6y ago

A WIP tool, browser or offline, to evaluate what amenities are within a 15m walk or bike ride: https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/side_projects/fifteen_min.html https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/side_projects/fifteen_min.... And a whimsical arcade game based on the concept of Santa delivering presents, but having to stop by a (hopefully nearby) cafe to fuel up once in a while: santa.abstreet.org

loughnane 6y ago

Boston has some neighborhoods like this. They are very expensive.

pyinstallwoes 6y ago

What towns like this exist in U.S? I desire something like this.

flemhans 6y ago

20-min? Forget about it. Five minutes is the maximum. If you have to travel twenty minutes, you might as well order it. Edit: I'd only want to walk 3 mins I think, not 5.