The 30-Minute Territory
How place shapes community
At the end of the last post I wrote:
This post, and others I've written about community, have really got me thinking about community and activism and how to get involved in a way that makes a difference. While it's clear that I live in a special place that makes it easier to get involved, I do believe that some of what we have here is teachable and transferable. I'm planning a follow-up post on that.
Well, there will need to be more than one follow-up post. Here's the first, which looks at how place shapes community.
The idea of the 15-minute city has been in the news lately. Its originator, Carlos Moreno, has a new book out, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet. The concept has been politicised by the right as a "war on cars" and has attracted attacks from conspiracy theorists. “I had to have a police escort in Argentina because someone literally threatened to cut me into pieces,” said Moreno, in an interview with Bloomberg.
Less well known is Moreno's complimentary concept for areas less dense than cities, the 30-minute territory.
"The concept of the 30-minutes territory is the same as the 15-minute city with a different implementation. In the 15-minute city, we can offer access within a short perimeter on foot or by bike. In the 30-minutes territory we need to include other mobilities and in particular electric vehicles, on-demand transport etc. With this model, we can implement the same concept in a city like Paris, Rome, Milan but also in very small cities, even ruralities."
Carlos Moreno in this interview
In looking at the way geography factors in to a community's qualities, the concept of the 30-minute territory is a useful lens. Here's a picture of what people should be able to do within 15 minutes of their home in a city, and within 30 minutes in a small town or rural zone.
How do we fare?
My home is on an island in Puget Sound, and I live on the south end of it, in South Whidbey. South Whidbey is a Census County Division. Administratively, it has a school district, parks and recreation district, fire and EMS department, and a port district. The population is 15,000, although that swells in the summer, and skews older with a median age of 57. It even has its own newspaper, at least in name, the South Whidbey Record. It has a small city, two urban growth areas, and two rural centers.
How does this community fare as a 30-minute territory? Rather well, as it turns out. The distance between the furthest two points in South Whidbey is exactly 30 minutes. Let's go through the items in the drawing and see what's inside. Perhaps you want to play along at home and see how your community stacks up?
Work - I work from home. Thank you remote work!
Share and reuse - we have a recycling center, three thrift stores and this wonderful organization: rePurpose Whidbey.
Stock up - within 10 minutes by bike we have a hardware store, lumber yard, garden store, craft store, and bike store, with many more within 30 minutes. And there are always other online retailers.
Enjoy the outdoors - I can walk, bike and run from home and walk my kayak or paddleboard to the beach. Within 30 minutes we have numerous parks and beaches. Traffic is calm and cycling is scenic and safe.
Be engaged in your community - our community is vibrant, and there's no doubt that the geography helps. We go into this one at length below.
Take care of your health - this is a challenge. We have an island hospital which, although just out of our district, is accessible to most and does have an emergency room. In district there are a couple of clinics. Our local EMTs are great and are ready to Life Flight patients to Seattle if needed. The greatest problem is lack of a good pharmacy. We're down to one, which is struggling. This is not unique to this community. Many communities have seen local pharmacies taken over by on of the national chains that wanted to be a convenience store. That model is failing and taking neighborhood pharmacies with it. Telehealth and mail order medications may be a partial answer. Meanwhile, I need to go off island for appointments.
Get around - we have fare-free bus service from Island Transit with several park and rides. The bus connects the towns and rural centers to each other and to the ferry to America. An on-demand service helps those who live off the main routes. There's also an airport shuttle service.
Stay active - there are abundant opportunities for outdoor recreation on land and water. There are golf courses, two gyms and a community pool in the works.
Eat healthy - within 10 minutes by bike we have a grocery store, two farmers markets, and a farm stand.
Learn - The South Whidbey schools are centrally located with good a good school bus network.
To the list in the drawing, I'd add a couple more:
Cultural and entertainment- libraries, book stores, theater, movie theater, live music, bars, restaurants
Spiritual - two monasteries, three retreat centers, and numerous churches
Overall, then, we do well. We're able to get most of our daily needs met within a ten-minute bike ride (actually about six), we can take care of almost everything else except medical appointments locally. We could probably manage with one car. There is always room for improvement. For example, a group of us meets monthly to discuss and advocate for better infrastructure for biking and walking: a bike path paralleling the main highway, wider shoulders, sidewalks, lower speed limits, and bike racks in public spaces.
Resilience
Just over a dozen years ago, about to become semi-retirees and empty nesters, we had the opportunity to relocate from suburban New Jersey. Like many, we placed resilience in the face of climate change high on the list of qualities in a destination. The Pacific Northwest scored highly, although sea level rise and forest fires have since diminished the score. Back then, we were looking at resilience and our other criteria purely in physical terms. While climate projections led us towards the Pacific Northwest, our choice of destination within the region factored in many of the items that are also on that 30-minute territory list. Community was not one of them.
I feel embarrassed now looking back at how we must have come across to our realtor with our lists and demands, but she must have sensed in us a need that we didn't recognise ourselves. Perhaps picking up on our concerns about climate change, she took us one evening to a meeting of Transition Whidbey, South Whidbey's attempt at becoming a Transition Town. That was our introduction to community, something we didn't even know we needed.
While all the items in the 15-minute city/30-minute territory list increase resilience directly, they help more by supporting the one at the bottom—be engaged in your community. There are likely no more than two degrees of separation between any two people in South Whidbey. We don't tailgate or cut people off; they might be our neighbor. People we know from biking we'll meet through a non-profit. The owner of the hardware store knows us by name, although when I figure out how much we've spent in there, it's no wonder! We'll see a County Commissioner in the grocery store. All of this makes the community close-knit, networked, and resilient. It inspires the non-profits that are feeding needy children, fixing up houses, building low-income housing, and providing medical transportation.
Although being on an island and sharing a coastline helps define our community's sense of place1, sharing resources within a 30-minute territory does more and it can work anywhere, regardless of geography. So, I'm curious. How does your community rate as a 15-minute city or 30-minute territory? How would you rate your community for resilience? Please let me know in comments. In the next post in this series, we'll take a closer look at local activism. The best way to make sure you don't miss that one is to subscribe to Mostly Water.
Thanks, as always, for reading or listening.
Trimbach, D. J., Clark, L., Rivas, L., Lyon Bennett, B., Hannam, G. A. G., Lovie, J., … Delie, J. (2022). Examining coastal sense of place through community geography in Island County, Washington. Landscape Research, 47(7), 992–1008. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2022.2092087
We have vacationed several times on Whidbey several times via AirBnB and we love it - you made the right choice to live there.
Inertia plus the thought of cleaning out over 20 years of accumulated crap is keeping us in our too large Sammamish empty nest.
But if and/when we do decide to downsize, downtown Redmond would be my choice. It has the shopping, restaurants, parks, bike trails, the old folks medical care we need and soon a light rail station. My husband can no longer drive, and if I lose that ability too, we'll be in a world of hurt if nothing is in walking distance.
We know quite few couples our age who have gone the "retirement community" route. But I like having kids around, plus I notice that retirement communities in this area don't reflect the true diversity of King County.
Thanks for sharing conversation about this concept.
Hi Neighbor (sort of): I am part of a family that owns a cabin on Useless Bay (Han’s Place) and enjoy the photos you sometimes post. We are not there a lot because we are living within a 15-minute city in New England right now, though packing to move to somewhat less dense surroundings. In fact, we can easily walk to the essentials except for a hardware store. This is wonderful, but it does feel crowded to me (a rural kid who has spent time as a ranger in various wild places) at times and there are specific drawbacks. Traffic noise during the warm months when windows need to be open (and I think this increases energy consumption because people run air conditioners more than necessary as white noise). This is about my self discipline really, but living within a 10 minute walk of 4 good bakeries has not helped my weight. My biggest complaint is, I guess, spiritual. You can’t really see the stars and open fire is discouraged. But also, the rents are astronomical. No new housing stock and high amenity mean that the people who work in the walkable paradise all drive on from rural areas.
Beyond living here, I was also deeply involved in creating a “new” 15-minute suburban growth center while working as a town planner. Thst work began some 20 years ago so it is possible to evaluate. It’s very attractive and pretty functional, though there are specific traffic issues, etc. Nothing is perfect. And it is almost totally unaffordable to-working people. There are serious tradeoffs involved in making places nice in a competitive capitalist economy. We increased density roughly 7 times and the cost of housing did not drop. In fact, it came close to doubling.
Enough for now. There are a lot of tradeoffs, but the main lesson is that if you don’t have the political will and clout to address affordability, your 15 minute city will be operated by workers who are commuting a lot farther than that