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Purgatory : 15 Minute City
This discussion was created from comments split from: Coping in the Time of Covid-19 - New and Improved!.
Comments
I like the idea - just not sure how it might work IRL...
It's an hour commute by bus for me to work, and I hate that. If I drove, it would be between 10 and 20 minutes, unless traffic was very bad. I would rather a life that didn't involve regularly travelling in a motorised vehicle, but just walking. Though that is of course based on the fact that I can walk.
I'd love to be able to walk, or cycle, but it's just not possible now. I guess I'm one of those useless b*ggers the government would like to be rid of...
It's a lovely idea, in theory. I work in a hospital in an expensive part of Glasgow - many of the staff (you know, domestics, admins, some of the technical/nursing/HCA etc staff in the low pay bands) will not be able to afford to live within a 15 minute walk, and since it's majority flats within the same walking radius anyone wanting a house with a garden is probably going to struggle...
At the moment I have two small instances of big supermarkets plus three independent 'corner' shops, and a butcher. But the economy of aggregation whereby one business attracts others is threatened by the closure of the local coffee shops, Vegan restaurant, and wine merchant.
Making it easier to get around generally by foot, cycle, bus, tram, or whatever, may eventually come to be seen as a Good Thing to emerge from The Nightmare...
There are neighborhoods in Seattle like that. If you make less than a hundred thousand a month you probably can't afford to live there.
Being within 15 minutes walk of a supermarket seems to imply rather high density housing. I currently live about 15 minutes walk from my nearest grocery store (but this is American suburbia, so I'm probably the only person who ever walks there). It's half an hour to the nearest actual supermarket (but I never walk there, because whenever I go, I buy more than I can carry.)
I don't think I ever lived 15 minutes walk from a supermarket in the UK. There's always been something that close - a corner shop, Tesco Metro, or whatever, but never a full-on supermarket. If you expand to 15 minutes cycling, then you encompass my normal UK supermarkets (and normal method of getting there) - but my range on a bike is about a factor of 5 or so bigger than my range on foot.
My point is that in order to have your housing (new housing - whatever) within 15 minutes walk of a supermarket, you need to have very high density housing. Supermarkets need a large customer base in order to justify their size, and you want all those people to be about a 1km radius of the supermarket. A typical supermarket seems to require something of order 25,000 customers to support it. If we assume a planning scheme that doesn't permit competition between supermarkets (so you assume all the people in that 1km radius are captive customers of a single supermarket) that gives you a population density of 125 square meters per household. UK average is 2.4 people per household, so that's 50 square meters per person. That's pretty dense.
(European cities are typically 150-200 square meters per person. US and Australian cities are about 4 times less dense than that.)
If you allow the 15 minutes to be travel by bike, your required population density goes down by a factor of between 10 and 25, depending on what assumptions you make about cycling speed, which is easily achievable.
Having given this a bit of thought, I think this is wrong - I think this is counting shopping visits rather than distinct people.
Here's some different math. ASDA has 600 stores in the UK, and 15% market share, which implies about 16,500 people dependent on each supermarket. Roll those back in to out 1km radius, and you get 190 square metres per person, which is right around the normal mark for a European city.
There's also the fact that with the big name supermarkets in the UK, people can have quite rigid preferences. The supermarket near me is Asda, which suits a low income area of many council homes, but over time the council homes get sold, and not everyone will be low income, and plenty of people hold the attitude that they'd never go to Asda, so they'll go further afield to Sainsbury's, which is considered a bit more upmarket.
I have no idea how many square metres per person where I live. Googling gives population density the other way round - number of people per square mile, or square kilometre. There must be a way to convert from one to the other, but my brain is feeling sleepy and fuzzy!
Large supermarkets are more useful, because they carry more lines. You don't just take a small supermarket and have three times as much of everything on the shelves.
Yes, I am aware how supermarkets work. But I'm also thinking this 15 minute thing would be a bit of a simplified lifestyle anyway. Less choice, more basics. In reality, we don't generally need much of the huge amount of choice available to us. It's fun to have lots of different possible donut fillings, for instance, but quite possible to live a happy and fulfilled life without them.
Also tubs of spreadable butter (as opposed to all those adulterated with vegetable oil) only occur in the largest branches of only some supermarkets.
Maybe I'm terminally corrupted by forming my tastes on unlimited choice and need to go back to my parents' ethos (conditioned by Rationing) of enjoying what I can get.
Does reduced consumption have to mean reduced choice? You might reasonably argue that 50 different kinds of breakfast cereal was too much choice, until your preferred variety is the one that gets canned. But if all the shops go corner-shop scale, nobody can stock 50 kinds of cereal, and everyone will just stock the top few.
So whatever distance you think corresponds to a 15-minute journey, that would mean that having everyone within that distance of a hospital requires 20 times the population density of having everyone within that distance of a supermarket.
As an exercise in utopian city planning, maybe you'd take some number of people (?10,000?) And design your city as a set of hexagonal cells, with each having facilities for that number located in the middle of each cell. And then size the hexagons for a 15-minute radius and scale the services - retail, medical, education, recreation, office space for employment etc - to that level of population. Accepting that people will have to travel further to access higher-level facilities (hospital, theatre, museum, TV studio, whatever).
I just have this sneaking suspicion that by the time you've made space for those facilities, cramming your 10,000 people into the surrounding residential area will give high densities. You'll find you've reinvented the high-rise city.
As well as the obvious concerns about dystopian centralised planning that gives everyone what the government thinks they should have instead of what they choose. Is there a church of your denomination included in those basic facilities ?
The corporation housing is low density (we have a lot of green space around) and would have a population of about 40-50,000 and all built around a model of each neighbourhood (about 10 in the town) having a local shopping square plus smaller parades, primary school, recreational spaces, doctor and dentist, and easy access to the town centre. Since the 80s many of those facilities have closed (most doctors are now in a single central health centre) or their function changed (local shops that had been banks, greengrocers etc are now other specialist shops or offices), but that basic infrastructure is still there. Also, a lot of new housing has been added around the outskirts of the town without the same access to local services, or including larger retail plazas that are near these new developments but also near the main roads so they can bring in cars from further afield (bus services to these are abysmal). About half the town population are in these newer housing developments. It's still quite a compact town - half an hour would allow someone to cycle from one side to the other, for most people everywhere in town is within 15 min bike ride.
Behind the high street there's a sports centre, no swimming pool, although that's supposed to be coming with the redevelopment of the old junior school site, and a library. Two or three primary schools (depends if you count the next door village) and a secondary school that covers a bigger area, a couple of big sports fields and industrial areas, plus a hospital without A&E, two doctors surgeries and a few dentists are all in the main town.
The highest residential building is 4 storeys, the tallest buildings are the church and a couple of other towers. There are five churches, six denominations: RC, CofE, Methodist, URC and Quaker meeting house, Elim Pentecostal meets in a hall. There used to be a little Plymouth Brethren church, now a house, and families, and the Elim Pentecostals had a tin tabernacle, flattened for housing years ago.
Good bus routes and a tube station give access out and a lot of people work in London, but there's a fair amount of work in town. I can walk to the edge of town in most directions within 15 minutes, although it's 10-15 minutes walk to the tube and the town extends out in a ribbon beyond, and 20-25 minutes walk to the hospital where there's a new housing development beyond where the old ground floor wards were, now replaced by a taller modern building.
We do get concerts and local exhibitions in the church, folk in the old workers club and occasional theatre in the gardens or hall of the big house, but need to travel for regular theatre or exhibitions.
Then there's the variety of shops on offer. There are still shops in most centres selling women's wear, but you'd be lucky to find any men's or children's clothing outside the larger centres. Most of the other small shops that existed when I was growing up have become cafés and restaurants. No small hardware shops either.
It's not particularly flat here either. The High Street runs along a ridge with the tube station down the hill towards the valley below.
Supermarkets are quite small around my way, but given I have (counts them) 6 different ones within 10 minutes walk from my home, I can buy just about anything I want. I think we also buy our groceries in smaller quantities, given that 50% of us don't own a car. Going to work is the obvious exception to the 15 minute rule for most people, but public transport is usually quicker than car, and less trouble - another effect of the population density is that parking is a nightmare. FWIW between last year's strikes and the epidemic there's been a big uptake in cycling.
I don't think that's quite true. I've got a 1940s booklet somewhere called 'The London Plan' which is all about how the complex mix-up of bomb sites, old industry, good housing, bad housing etc etc was going to be sorted out as London was rebuilt. In it there are diagrams showing how local shops are going to be spread out so everyone can walk to them (no cars yet for the masses) rather than clustered in the existing ad-hoc high-street setup.
Anyone my age or over grew up around the decaying concrete realisation of those great ideas - high-density versions like (where I came from / where I am) Tower Hamlets / Salford precinct and low-density versions like Basildon / Wythenshawe. Those remnants that didn't get messed with seem to have survived best of all, once they got old enough to be 'quirky' (G*d I hate that word).
Here's what comes up when I lookup Mocha Parade.
Here's the nice side.
*The quarter had under 500 people in it at the time, which was growth from the low point of 2, it now has over 6000 people and I expect with the current and planned building work for it to reach 10,000 in the next five years. This takes no consideration of growth of housing in other quarters which has also been substantial
Absolutely.
Guide dog owners also suffer all the time from parked cars blocking the way.
You and me both. It was 'inner city' then, and now it's 'desirable area'. I couldn't (by factor or 4 or 5) afford to do it now.
Here, it was 'better then', except for the car crime, regular burglary, gun crime and the resulting absence of shops and especially cash machines for (literally) miles. I didn't personally have an opinion about the prostitutes. But I do think back with some affection.
That depends on anyone wanting to live there.
For me cities are hell-holes, full of noise, people and threat.
High-Density housing is a phrase which terrifies me.
10-15,000 people is still a relatively small community, a small town would have several such communities (though there would be some overlap). That's sort of the size of a council ward (in Scotland, I think English council wards are probably closer to 5,000 people).