Believe it or not, this is not just something I made up. There is a fair old bit of academic thought and research about it[1] and how it can help meet the challenges of the modern world.

Three compelling events have occurred over recent decades that make this particularly relevant now:

1. A huge upsurge in awareness of global climate change and a ​sea change (literally) in acceptance that it is an increasingly pressing issue. 
2. Boiling along in the background, the Internet has become second nature to a huge proportion of our population, providing a very real opportunity for much of the workforce to work, at least some of the time, from home.
3. The Covid-19 pandemic, David Icke notwithstanding, has accelerated the awareness that it is not strictly necessary to commute for hours every day to get to work and that fewer gas guzzlers encroaching on our health and safety is not necessarily a bad thing.

There are many others but this triptych sheds a shining light on the opportunity to rethink town and city planning in 2021. Many of the old ways such as bisecting cities with dual carriageways and expediting polluting and expensive trunk road traffic through towns are no longer compelling. In fact, they have become antisocial and the community at large is rapidly gaining an awareness of this.

At the risk of misappropriating what has recently become a cliche, we are currently caught in a perfect storm that is propelling us to view our future differently from what has been seen as best practice in the past.

Re-enter the 15-minute neighbourhood

This is not a new concept, just a fresh encapsulation of what seemed like common sense in the past.

​Essentially, it is a neighbourhood in which the majority of the residents' needs are met within a 15-minute "bubble" without using a car or van. The needs would vary depending on the requirements of a specific community but are likely to include Employment, Healthcare, Education, Sport/Leisure, Groceries, Social Interaction and Entertainment.

It would be superb if interested readers would contribute their own views on essential needs. Comments on this blog would be amazing but a tweet to @mark4faringdon would be just as good.

I'll finish off this episode (wouldn't want readers to spend more than 15 minutes reading it, would I) with a plea:
Planners: Please consider Active Travel needs before approving development plans.

Coming soon: The conditions required for a 15-minute neighbourhood/community/town/suburb; how to improve a current neighbourhood; how did we drift so far from this?; devices, including funding, for making this happen; electronically-assisted self-propelled devices. 

[Endnotes]:

1. Follow the handy link in Additional reading below if you would like to explore further

Additional reading

• Various articles discussing this subject can be found via this index​​

Imagine that you live in a medium-sized market town. Perhaps there are 9,000-12,000 inhabitants. That means there is a high probability that there are around 6,500-7,000 fossil-fuel-burning vehicles chuffing around in an area of roughly 1.5 square miles. 

OK, you'll point out, but they aren't all on the road at once. True enough, but perversely there will be more gas-guzzlers in rural towns than in major urban conurbations. Especially if they are affluent.

And you thought you's escaped the big smoke to live in a bucolic paradise.

​There is another way.

The average town of this size will take 20-25 minutes for an average walker to traverse from one extremity to the other. That means 10-15 minutes to walk from an extremity to the centre. If you use a bicycle, that will come down to roughly a third of that for an unfit cyclist.

So we're talking about less than 7 minutes to get anywhere in the town and 3-4 minutes to get to the centre. If you drove it would take a minute or two to park the car and you'd be missing out on the sociability and health benefits of being out there in the open.

For wheelchair users the latent time and effort to get the chair in and out of a vehicle at either end would be pretty off-putting, too. So the benefits of being out and about in the fresh air are lost to many people who most deserve them.

Confirmed car addicts will point at horrible road surfaces and unsafe routes. They will have a point.

Which is why we have to start now to correct those things. It doesn't have to be like that. If we have the will we can make it happen and turn our towns into healthier and nicer places in which to live.

Coming next: How we can achieve this with the 15-minute rule in town planning ...

15-minute communities​

1. What is a 15-minute neighbourhood?
2. Build back better​
3. View from a major construction conglomerate - Amey
4. A lovely video on 15-minutes cities