The nine-minute city

Planners like round numbers. The fifteen-minute city has become shorthand for a place where daily needs are within a short walk or ride. But when I asked residents of five different neighbourhoods how long they would walk for a loaf of bread, the answer clustered at nine.

Nine minutes is roughly seven hundred metres, the length of a bus stop catchment, the distance a school-run parent will push a pram. It is the limit of the casual, and it matters because anything beyond it requires a decision.

Designing for the casual trip

Cities that retain corner shops, small clinics and pocket parks inside that radius see less car use and more spontaneous contact between neighbours. Those that consolidate everything into large centres see shorter opening hours and emptier streets.

None of this needs a masterplan. It needs the unglamorous work of rezoning, of protecting the small unit at the bottom of a building from becoming another lobby. Streets are made of ground floors.