15-Minute Neighbourhoods
Richard Harries
What went wrong? The idea behind 15-minute neighbourhoods – that our basic everyday needs should be available within a short walk or bike ride from our homes – used to be simple and non-contentious. Then all of a sudden, on 9th February this year, the Don Valley MP Nick Fletcher stood up in Parliament to call for “a debate on the international socialist concept of so-called 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighbourhoods.”
Barely ten days later, thousands of protestors were marching through the streets of Oxford to protest against the imposition of what many saw as a system of totalitarian control by the local council. In the words of one, “We’re obviously in opposition to this rollout of 15-minute cities and the implications of what that means when you are effectively locking people into zones in their own hometowns. It’s made to sound like this wonderful idea because it would be fantastic if we have all these nice little community hubs with amenities within close reach, but the actual reality of what this means is that you are being tracked and traced within your own town. You’re looking at having to have permits to leave the zone that you find yourself in.”
How on earth did a benign planning policy intended to give people more control over their lives metastasise into a secret plot for tyrannical control (apparently orchestrated by the World Economic Forum)? Anyone interested in the search for a better way to deliver economic prosperity and human flourishing needs to reflect deeply on this question.
All the more so because it didn’t have to be that way. Just 50 miles to the east of Oxford, in the London Borough of Waltham Forest, the council took a wholly different approach. Working closely with The Young Foundation, they chose to spend less time worrying about ‘lines on maps’ and low traffic neighbourhoods, and more on building a data-rich and resident-led vision and framework for the local area. This thoughtful approach was warmly received across the borough and has now been formally adopted by the council in its new five-year corporate plan.
Centre a definition not on time or distance, but on individual experiences
When it comes to 15-minute neighbourhoods, the first thing to avoid is the temptation to get tied up in definitions. Should it be 15 minutes? Or perhaps 10 minutes? Or 20 minutes? (Technology only accelerates this confusion, with powerful tools like this ‘isochrone and isodistance’ calculator for Google Maps). Should it be about walking or ‘wheeling’? What about public transport? What about rural areas?
Yet seen from the perspective of individual residents, it should be obvious that we all have our own personal 15-minutes boundaries: a fit young man may be able to travel further than his elderly grandmother, whose access is bounded by poorly-maintained pavements and mobility limitations, but he may find his own geography shaped by the tags of rival gang territories. Good policy comes from careful listening and thoughtful implementation. For 15-minute neighbourhoods, this means taking a fluid and flexible approach that respects the context of the local area, not creating false boundaries through rigid adherence to arbitrary metrics.
Prioritise working with residents
This focus on listening to the voice of residents is one of the reasons The Young Foundation was keen to work with Waltham Forest. With over 1,000 people registering their interest to take part, residents played a critical role in shaping our thinking, and it is thanks to their insights that we moved beyond a narrow consideration of the physical assets in a local area to a wider accounting for the experiences those assets enable. Their priorities shaped the strong commitment to inclusion, safety and social connection in the council’s corporate plan, ensuring neighbourhoods work for “me and my neighbours”.
In our report to the council, we emphasised the benefit of maintaining this participatory approach. We know from our wider work at The Young Foundation that this sort of continuous dialogue can change the way that councils work with residents: playing to each other’s strengths and supporting greater resident-led action and community power. Seeing 15-minutes not as a narrow policy to apply, but instead valuing the conversation it enables.
Accept that there is no perfect solution
The concept of 15-minute neighbourhoods may have originated in planning departments but it has the potential to cut across every aspect of the local realm. It is one of those rare topics that can unite conversations across council hierarchies, focusing on what people need to thrive, whilst honouring the different aspects of their lives. As the austerity ‘jaws of doom’ continue to bite hard on council finances, any opportunity to reduce silo working must be welcome.
Of course, there is no guarantee that 15-minute neighbourhoods will work everywhere. Public policymaking is a messy business. What Waltham Forest has shown however is that, when implemented well, the policy can transcend lines on maps and instead become a framework for councils and residents to navigate the tensions, trade-offs and opportunities that come with making decisions in local places. A better way, not a perfect panacea.
———
Richard Harries is the Director of Caritas Westminster. For the last two years he was Director of the Institute for Community Studies at The Young Foundation and before that he was Director of Research & Development at the Power to Change Trust.
