The 5 Keys To Creating A 15-Minute City

It's tricky to create a neighborhood where people can thrive by walking. But the basic principles remain the same whether you're retrofitting a suburban neighborhood of building on a greenfield site.

My newsletter on Monday about 15-minute cities got way more response than I expected.

It was liked and restacked on Substack a fair amount and I heard from a lot of people, including my very conservative brother who said he deliberately moved to a 7-minute city in the mountains of North Georgia. (Our hometown was about a 10-minute city in Upstate New York). I also heard from some New Urbanists, who noted quite correctly that their ideas have been met with the same concern about affordability.

But the bottom line, as I said on Monday, is there aren’t enough 15-minute cities to meet the demand for them and, partly for this reason, the ones that exist are not affordable. So I thought that, as cities and developers in the United States, try to figure out how to build more of them, I’d throw out a few ideas about what it takes to create a 15-minute city.

I think these ideas apply no matter whether you’re talking about retrofitting an existing community to become a 15-minute city or you’re trying to create a new one from scratch. Because while context matters a lot, the basic principles are the same no matter what you are trying to do.

Here, then, are my five keys to building a successful 15-minute city: