The 15-minute neighbourhood: a planning legacy of lockdown?

There is no doubt that 2020 will go down as a defining year in our recent history. Pre-2020 ways of living and working are likely to be very different to post-2020 methods, and we are yet to fully appreciate how our daily patterns will have permanently changed in the post-Covid era.  

Over the past seven months, we have become accustomed to improvisation: converting the spare bedroom into a make-shift study; using online video platforms to catch-up with our colleagues; and increasingly walking or cycling to the shops, rather than driving or using public transport, to get that daily exercise in. 

As we emerge from the challenges of this year, it is clear that some of our new practices will be here to stay: a more flexible approach to working, which is no longer reliant on the daily office commute, for example. As the new work-life balance manifests itself, there will be a need to find permanent solutions to those improvisations which we have recently become reliant on, and therein lies an opportunity for new development solutions to arise. 

In the residential team at Planning Potential, we are already beginning to see our clients react to changing practices: a renewed emphasis on the importance of quality outdoor space; the value of larger living units which facilitate purpose-built studies; and even the advent of communal “work pods” in higher density residential developments. The sector must be quick to react and embrace change. 

The concept of the 15-minute neighbourhood has become an increasingly referenced buzz-phrase in the planning sphere over recent months, as policymakers consider the long-term effects of the crisis on the built environment. It centres on the basic premise of people having everything they need in terms of work, retail, education and leisure within around 15 minutes of their home and draws on ideals of sustainable travel and self-sufficiency. Hardly ground-breaking for those people who remember a pre-globalised world, but it is astonishing how it now appears as a new vision. A useful comparison is how out-of-town retail centres became the craze from the 80s, slowly replacing our habits of popping to the high street, something that we have now started to see reverse as people fight to save town centres with shopping local.  

There is an opportunity here for the development sector to place a renewed emphasis on the role of community and neighbourhood; to instil a civic pride in places that were formerly desirable simply by their proximity to a railway station. 

Use Class E is rightly paraded as a positive planning adaptation to changing commercial ways of operating, acknowledging the need for flexibility and fluidity. Class E has a key role to play in the recovery and adjustment into new work / life patterns: and will facilitate creative opportunities for adaptation. Local workspaces and meeting venues could become a regular feature on our local high-streets, and new retail concepts might recognise the untapped resource of commuters staying local. 

Might we also see the rebirth of the live-work units as a fresh housing typology with renewed market attractiveness? Can we expect further changes to Permitted Development Rights to respond to a previously unimagined need for home-working? What about the previously overlooked opportunity to invest in that neglected shopping parade?  

As the exceptional becomes the normal in terms of our daily working patterns, it will be exciting to see how the development sector embraces the opportunity for change.