Stephen Thirlwall
Making a conscious effort to get to know your community better is always good. In the future, it may become a necessity. The current pandemic has shown us that sometimes we may have to rely heavily on nearby services.
To understand your immediate community, the best way is to walk through it, participate in it, and experience what it has to offer.
Take a walk southward from your home walking at a moderate pace. How far can you go in just 15 minutes? That marks the southern extent of your 15-minute community. Do the same walking north, east and west. You might also go southeast, southwest, northeast and northwest in zigzags along the blocks. These trips map out the full circle of your readily accessible neighbourhood. Each individual or family circle will be somewhat different from others but many will overlap to a high degree.
The concept of a 15-minute neighbourhood is an interesting and appealing proposition. We will be hearing a lot about it during the next year as the city determines its long-term direction for its Official Plan.
The concept suggests that almost everything you need could be available to you within a 15-minute walk, and that you know many of your neighbours well enough that you can rely on them for some assistance and they can rely on you. Your neighbourhood would function like a small village. You would save a great amount of time and energy, and decrease pollution by avoiding lots of daily driving. Everyone would also get regular exercise walking to all their important destinations.
What to look for on a walk
To truly understand how well this concept applies to you, you have to get out and do the walk and your own survey of the environment. What do you see within this circle? How much of the area is residential? What are the different types of homes: single family houses, multi-unit houses, older apartments, and newer mid-rises and high rises? How are they distributed? How much of the area contains businesses, organizations, and government offices?
Are all these types of buildings in separate districts or more mixed together? What groceries, pharmacies, banks, hardware stores, clothing and other shops are present? Can you see doctor and dentist offices, health clinics, community and cultural centres, hairdressers, restaurants and pubs, cafés, bakeries, gyms, post offices, libraries, museums, cinemas? How many parks serve the area and are they large or small? Do street festivals, parades, or other events ever happen here?
Stephen Thirlwall/The BUZZ
Most importantly, how many of these services do you currently use and how many people do you know close to where you live? Are they friends or just acquaintances? Can this area and these people be your social and safety network?
If you are not a walker, you will have difficulty knowing your neighbourhood or making others living there aware of you. Assistance must be provided for those unable to walk even moderate distances so that they can keep in touch.
My own neighbourhood crosses boundaries
As a specific example, my 15-minute neighbourhood extends from Queen Street in the north, the Queensway in the south, O’Connor Street to the east, and the intersection of Chinatown and Little Italy at Preston Street to the west. This neighbourhood includes much of western Centretown, a long stretch of Bank Street and the heart of Chinatown. So you see, one’s personal neighbourhood does not strictly reflect the named and defined districts throughout the city.
How does the 15-minute idea match with the current form of Ottawa–an increasingly complex metropolitan city–and with our current lifestyles and patterns of daily activity? Is it practical?
Everywhere in Ottawa?
Different parts of the city support this concept to varying extents. There are many fairly distinct community areas in Ottawa. However, in both the inner city and the suburbs, amenities such as grocery stores and shops are in shopping plazas or small malls that are well outside the 15-minute circle for the majority of residents. In the inner city, there are strips of stores, restaurants and some clusters of amenities (doctors’ offices, pharmacies, etc.) along a few main streets. These may or may not be inside one’s circle.
Downtown, if you live in a high rise where people are warm and friendly, you are lucky. If you are in a high rise where people stay private, you can be very cut off from community.
Older parts of Ottawa were designed to be walkable. As you go outward in the city, residences become further separated from amenities, with driving to work and shopping the expected mode of transportation. In the last 40 to 45 years, the urban metropolitan area has exploded in size as it rapidly expanded into huge suburban areas. These areas are highly focused around cars, trucks and buses, and the movement of large numbers of people across long distances.
Older shopping centres along Carling Avenue are disappearing as more residential high-rise developments are rolled out there. Does this make sense? Or do we need to start redeveloping other areas to provide amenities to those new high-rise dwellers?
Restructuring our lives
There are many barriers to us adopting a 15-minute neighbourhood. We would have to restructure many things in our lives, especially our daily habits and our patterns of thinking. And society would have to restructure itself as well, for example, with more people working regularly from home and/or with more offices closer to our residences.
Again, I will give some personal examples. When I was working, I was always a half hour to one hour travel distance from home to the office. The work location changed a few times from one side of the city to the other, while home has always been near the centre. My doctor is a half hour drive to the southeast and my dentist a 20-minute drive southwest. Most of my grocery shopping is a 20 to 30-minute drive south, as are the shops where I buy hardware, household items and clothing. To get to the library and several festivals that I regularly attend, I have to walk five to 15 minutes further than the 15-minute limit.
For me, a 30 to 45-minute walking circle works best. This allows me to travel to all parts of Centretown, the ByWard Market area, part way down Rideau Street, to the University of Ottawa, Ottawa East along Main Street, the Glebe, Chinatown, Little Italy, Dow’s Lake, and Hintonburg. Add another 10-20 minutes and I can also reach Old Ottawa South and Billings Bridge Plaza. For individuals who prefer cycling, their circle is automatically doubled for short and moderate trips.
Take a walk through the 15- (or 30-)minute neighbourhood around your home. Does what’s there meet most of your needs? Are there gaps? Could they be filled?
Then think about other parts of Ottawa where you work or where your friends or family live. Do people living there have to travel long distances for their basics?
And let your city councillor and community associations know about your conclusions, and your suggestions for remaking Ottawa on a more intimate scale.