As the world continues to face unprecedented challenges from the COVID-19 pandemic, we should remain optimistic about global sustainability trends and the resilience of our communities and built environment.
Reasons include:
- Continued declines in renewable energy costs, as well as advances in efficient lighting, mechanical systems, and high-performance envelopes, mean that achieving net-zero energy for new building construction by 2030 is readily achievable. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), for example, solar PV in 2021 is expected to be 20% less costly than the cheapest fossil fuel competitor: coal-fired plants.1
- With operational carbon in new construction heading to zero, an industry-wide focus on sustainable materials — including supply chain transparency — is emerging. This will dramatically reduce embodied carbon impacts. Open-source tools such as EC3, Tapestry, and the Sustainable Minds Transparency Catalog are enabling this trend.2
- The third pillar of resilience, extending beyond buildings and materials into the configuration of neighborhoods where we live, work, shop, play and learn, is gaining momentum. For office workers, this includes a shift away from 40-hour-weeks at the office to more flexible work/home schedules, an inevitable transition helpfully accelerated by COVID-19.3
Neighborhoods are an essential component of a sustainable and resilient world. The idea is not new, but the aspirations for what is possible continue to evolve.
The notion of a “30-minute city” first emerged early in this decade. It is an urban planning approach that seeks to reduce the effective distance between housing and employment via public transit and has since been incorporated into planning guidelines of cities such as Melbourne, Australia.4 In other cities, the idea has been further refined into the “20-minute neighborhood,” by emphasizing walkability, biking and transit in urban environments. Examples include the Oregon cities of Portland and Eugene.5
We can extend this idea further into the “10-minute neighborhood,” which provides the basic functions of working, shopping, playing, and learning within a 10-minute travel radius from home. (The term “neighborhood” vs. “city” is useful because high density is not a prerequisite.)
Is a 10-minute neighborhood too aggressive or idealistic? Hardly! To illustrate my perspective, I will share a personal case study: my own life. The 10-minute neighborhood is exactly how my wife Regina and I have lived over the past ten years.
A Tale of Two Neighborhoods
Nowadays, Regina and I spend most of our time in two neighborhoods – the “East Cut” of San Francisco (postal code 94105) and the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami (postal code 33133). Together, they provide west and east coast bases for our consulting work.
From a family point of view, San Francisco is closer to our family in the Bay Area, while Miami is closer to our family in Brazil.
At first glance, the two neighborhoods appear completely different. The East Cut neighborhood, one of San Francisco’s newest, is located at the base of the Bay Bridge and includes areas formerly known as Rincon Hill and the Transbay Transit district.6 Its redevelopment began after the 1987 Loma Prieta earthquake severely damaged the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway adjacent to the San Francisco Bay. Reconnected to the waterfront after the freeway’s demolition, East Cut has since become the San Francisco home of some of Silicon Valley’s best-known companies, including Facebook, Google, and Salesforce.
Coconut Grove, on the other hand, is Miami’s oldest neighborhood, founded in 1873.7 The neighborhood became part of Miami in 1925 when the city annexed Coconut Grove and most of the town of Silver Bluff. Historic Coconut Grove includes The Vizcaya Museum and Gardens and the 1934 Pan American Airlines Terminal Building, which has served as Miami’s City Hall since 1954. The lushly landscaped streets of Coconut Grove remain a popular retail and dining destination for residents and tourists, and the neighborhood includes a waterfront boardwalk, marina and boat launching ramps.
What attracts Regina and me to both neighborhoods is how much of our day-to-day lives are accessible by walking. (During the last eight years of my career at Gensler, I lived across the street from the firm’s San Francisco office. During that time, I joked that I had the shortest carbon footprint commute of anyone at the firm: 150 feet. Today, my daily commute is even shorter: less than 20 feet from living room to home office.)
Both neighborhoods offer generous well-maintained parks and open space. The crown jewel of East Cut is the recently opened Salesforce Transit Center, including a 5.4-acre public rooftop park with 600 trees and 16,000 plants in 13 different botanical areas. For its part, Coconut Grove features a half-mile of contiguous waterfront parks, the densely wooded Barnacle Historic State Park, as well as several island parks easily accessible via kayak.
While both neighborhoods are flat and walkable, each offers different characteristics.
East Cut provides exceptional public transit access, although nearby schools are non-existent. Coconut Grove, on the other hand, has several public and private schools in the neighborhood, but offers significantly less access to transit (which remains underdeveloped in Miami as a whole). While East Cut includes a balanced mix of office and residential building types, Coconut Grove is primarily residential with limited office. Both neighborhoods offer a diverse mix of convenient retail and dining venues.
Getting Started
Interested in living in a ten-minute neighborhood? A variety of organizations and online resources can help you influence the development of your own neighborhood or evaluate new ones.
Walk Score is a Seattle company that scores the walkability, bikeability, and proximity to public transit of street addresses that users enter on their website.9 Using the company’s model, our East Cut home earns a Walk Score of 89 (“Very Walkable”), a Transit Score of 100 (“Rider’s Paradise”) and a Bike Score of 87 (“Very Bikeable”). In Coconut Grove, the scores are 93 (“Walker’s Paradise”), 45 (“Some Transit”) and 83 (“Very Bikeable”).
The Walk Score web site also provides a free interactive tool that displays “access sheds” from any street address based on target travel time and mode of transportation: walking, bicycle, car, or transit. Shown here is the 10-minute access shed via walking from our home in Coconut Grove.
A growing number of cities around the world also publish planning guidelines that suggest design criteria for walkable neighborhoods. The government of the province of Victoria, Australia, for example, describes the features of a 20-minute neighborhood in their Plan Melbourne 2017–2050.10 The city of Kirkland, Washington has embraced the notion of 10-minute neighborhoods as part of the Kirkland 2035 Comprehensive Plan.11 And Ottawa’s Plan for Canada’s Capital implements 10-minute neighborhood concepts to transform federal work campuses from single-purpose use to transit-oriented, mixed-use communities.12 These plans and others are useful learning resources.
To date, most mobility scorecards like Walk Score focus on three metrics: 1. walking, 2. bikes and scooters, and 3. public transit. This makes sense, as each offers sustainability benefits compared to single occupancy vehicles, particularly those powered by fossil fuels.
Going forward, a fourth dimension will emerge that incorporates the next generation of on-demand ridesharing: autonomous electric vehicles powered by 100% renewable energy. Such sustainable “personal transit” significantly expands 10-minute access sheds. Personal transit also addresses one of the common criticisms of neighborhoods that strongly emphasize walking and bicycling: they do not appropriately support seniors and those with disabilities, for whom such modes of transportation are either impractical or impossible.
New urban and transportation planning guidelines are embracing this transition toward personal transit. This includes a shift from fixed-rail public transit (streetcars and light rail) and fixed bus routes, both of which are inherently less flexible and less efficient for shorter neighborhood trips than on-demand ridesharing networks.
In many cities, these networks have already reduced parking requirements for office, retail, and entertainment uses. In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors voted in late 2018 to eliminate parking minimums citywide for all building types. The amount of parking provided in new developments is now determined solely by the developer, not by regulation.13 And in Philadelphia, because of plentiful transit options and walkable neighborhoods, the amount of off-street parking around downtown shrank by about 3,000 spaces (7%) between 2010 and 2015, despite a growing residential population.14 The emergence of sustainable, autonomous ridesharing networks will accelerate these positive trends.
Making It Personal
Although public policy and regulation are useful tools to achieve sustainability and resilience goals of our cities and neighborhoods, they are often lagging indicators of innovation, not drivers. Within government-sponsored guardrails, each of us also makes personal decisions every day about what we buy (or don’t buy), what we eat (or don’t eat), and where we live, shop, play, learn, and work.
In aggregate, those individual decisions have enormous influence on the behavior of private sector companies above and beyond – or even in the absence of – government intervention. Taken together, those personal choices create the markets in which private sector companies operate and invest daily.
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have already seen a dramatic and unprecedented shift in the attitudes of corporate leaders regarding the live/work balance of their employees. A survey of American CEOs by Fortune and Deloitte, for example, found that 76% of CEOs believe they will need less office space in the future, not more, and 28% predicted the need for a lot less.15 What changed? Only their employees’ preferences. Although a small minority prefer to work from home full-time, a majority now prefer to work from home at least some of the time. After COVID-19 is eventually conquered, this significant shift is unlikely to snap back to pre-pandemic levels.
In the product world, one of the most famous examples of consumer-driven change of private sector behavior occurred 30 years ago when McDonald’s decided to stop using clamshell polystyrene packaging for its hamburgers.16 At the time, the company used about 2 percent of all polystyrene produced in the U.S. However, as customers increasingly avoided the non-recyclable material, McDonald’s quickly eliminated it. More easily decomposable or recyclable paper wrapping worked just fine.
Challenges
To transform the idea of the 10-minute neighborhood into action, I challenge every reader to look at their own lives. Where do you live? Where do you work? How much time do you spend commuting? How much time do you spend alone in a car, away from family, friends, and neighbors? What is your personal carbon footprint?
Obviously, the answers and choices are different for every individual and circumstance. Too often, choices are constrained, and decisions are not easy. Housing affordability close to employment, for example, remains a significant challenge in many neighborhoods.
But I strongly believe we will achieve a truly sustainable and resilient world when we not only build appropriate regulatory guardrails, but also make voluntary personal choices about how and where we live, shop, play, learn, and work that reflect the future we believe in.
Regina and I made our move. It’s your turn now!
Ken Sanders, FAIA is a frequent contributor to DesignIntelligence.
References
1. Renewable Power Generation Costs in 2019 (IRENA) https://www.irena.org/publications/2020/Jun/Renewable-Power-Costs-in-2019
2. Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (Building Transparency) https://www.buildingtransparency.org/Tapestry (AEC Design Transparency) http://tapestry.click Transparency Catalog (Sustainable Minds) https://www.transparencycatalog.com/
3. Insights from Gensler’s U.S. Work From Home Survey 2020 (Gensler) https://www.gensler.com/research-insight/blog/insights-from-genslers-u-s-work-from-home-survey-2020
4. The 30-Minute City: How Do We Put The Political Rhetoric Into Practice? (The Conversation) https://theconversation.com/the-30-minute-city-how-do-we-put-the-political-rhetoric-into-practice-56136
5. What is a 20-minute Neighborhood? (City of Eugene, Oregon) https://www.eugene-or.gov/1216/What-is-a-20-Minute-Neighborhood
6. The East Cut (East Cut Community Benefit District) https://www.theeastcut.org/
7. Coconut Grove (Coconut Grove Business Improvement District) https://coconutgrove.com/
9. Walk Score https://www.walkscore.com/
10. 20-Minute Neighbourhoods (City of Melbourne, Victoria) https://www.planning.vic.gov.au/policy-and-strategy/planning-for-melbourne/plan-melbourne/20-minute-neighbourhoods
11. 10-Minute Neighborhood Analysis (City of Kirkland, Washington) https://www.kirklandwa.gov/Residents/Community/Kirkland2035.htm
12. The Capital and the Healthy 10-Minute Neighbourhood (City of Ottawa, Ontario) https://ncc-ccn.gc.ca/blog/the-capital-and-the-healthy-10-minute-neighbourhood
13. San Francisco Eliminates Parking Minimums (StreetsBlog USA) https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/12/17/san-francisco-eliminates-parking-minimums/
14. Lots To Lose: How Cities Around The World Are Eliminating Car Parks (The Guardian) https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/27/cities-eliminating-car-parks-parking
15. 76% of American CEOs Say They May Shrink Office Space (Fortune) https://fortune.com/2020/10/22/76-of-american-ceos-say-they-may-shrink-office-space/
16. McDonald’s Trashing Its Foam Containers (Washington Post) https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/11/02/mcdonalds-trashing-its-foam-containers/e1ac982a-8058-4308-8d6f-fff1bef20ec5/