The Fifteen-Minute Neighborhood
This pattern is shaped by
Problem
When daily needs — groceries, school, a park, a café, a doctor — require a car to reach, people spend hours each week in transit, neighborhoods lose their social fabric, and the elderly and young become dependent on those who can drive.
Evidence and Discussion
The concept has been validated globally. Paris, Melbourne, and Portland have restructured planning around the principle that essential services should be reachable within fifteen minutes by walking or cycling. Carlos Moreno's research at the Sorbonne demonstrated that neighborhoods meeting this threshold show higher social cohesion, lower carbon emissions, and stronger local economies. The COVID-19 pandemic made the case viscerally — people confined to their neighborhoods discovered whether those neighborhoods could actually sustain daily life, or whether they were merely dormitories.
The traditional idea of a community large enough to support basic services but small enough to feel coherent assumed car access. The modern version acknowledges that *accessible without a car* is the critical threshold, not merely *nearby.*
The forces: residents need variety and access; businesses need foot traffic to survive; communities need casual encounters to build trust. All three are served by proximity.
Therefore
arrange every neighborhood so that a resident can reach groceries, a school, a park, a primary care clinic, a gathering place, and public transit within fifteen minutes on foot or by bicycle. Use this as the primary test for any proposed development — not density alone, not zoning category, but functional completeness within walking distance.