Investigating the practicalities of the 15 minute city concept in your local area
This activity will either require fieldwork with your students to gather some primary data collection, or involve the collection of secondary data.
The purpose of this unit is to explore how feasible the plans for a 15 minute city would be for your own local area.
Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash
Solving a problem like this relies on a number of stages.
Activity: With your students, look at the implications of the suggested improvements solving this local problem
How difficult were the suggested improvements? The use of space is very important. Mapping this information can offer useful guidelines.
Activity: Explore the ESRI pavement width map created to help with social distancing during lockdown, but which is now useful for this work
Activity: Use Survey123 with your students to explore what changes local people would be willing to accept to make the 15 minute city a reality.
The results of this survey can then be used in the presentation in the final part of this module.
You might be able to get some useful ideas from the Planning for Walking toolkit from London, UK.
Your students should be able to provide some ideas for changes that need to be made to the local area. These changes may allow people to alter the timings of when they would normally have done something. This is part of the 15 minute city approach. for example, if people don’t all need to travel to work at the same time in the morning there should be a reduction in traffic congestion. This is called chrono-urbanism.
Activity: Find out more ideas about the potential of chrono-urbanism by looking at the presentation
Chrono Urbanism changing the timings
Linking to the Sustainable Development Goals
we are all being asked to make changes to the way we live in order to create more sustainable lifestyles. This is closely related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Activity: Explore The EuroStat Sustainable Development Goals data dashboard
This shows how much progress is being made towards each of the goals by different countries. Identify your country and choose SDG 11.
Investigating your local area
Activity: Review the learning outcomes for investigating your local area
You could make the transcript of the Carlos Moreno TED talk available for your students to interact with. This can be downloaded as a PDF in numerous languages.
Activity: Open the document for Investigating the practicalities of the 15 minute city concept in your local area