Planners Don’t Get 15-Minute Neighbourhood: STANKOVIC

What’s Wrong with Ottawa’s 15-Minute Neighbourhood Concept?

Let’s see.

Recently, planning committee chairman Jeff Leiper, announced that the City of Ottawa and Ottawa Public Health have been nominated as finalists for planning excellence by the Canadian Institute of Planners.

The category concerned their Official Plan policies dealing with15-minute neighbourhoods. Reading from a pre-prepared script, Kitchissippi Councillor Leiper commented that the concept was “developed through extensive community collaboration and informed by science.”

The 15-minute neighbourhood is one of the most important parts of the city’s new Official Plan.

The concept takes up huge swaths of the OP. According to the city’s 202115-Minute Neighbourhood Baseline Report, they are “compact, well-connected places with a clustering of a diverse mix of land-uses where daily and weekly needs can be accessed within a 15-minute walk. This includes a range of housing types, shops, services, local access to food, schools and childcare facilities, employment, greenspaces, parks and pathway.”

In fact, the concept of 15-minute neighbourhoods is not new. It was first introduced in the Five Big Moves released in 2019 which provide the most significant policy directions for the then-new Official Plan.

The concept is actually not more than a rebranding of something that has been around for a long time. It is a throwback to the street-car era with its older, denser neighbourhoods and historic villages such as the Glebe, Westboro and Hintonburg, each with their own traditional commercial main streets. These same communities are still considered to be 15-minute neighbourhoods in Ottawa. One can even go back to the Bytown settlement when the primary mode of travel was either by foot or by horse-and-buggy. So the 15-minute neighbourhood is not new.

References to 15-minute neighbourhoods can also be found in planning documents that were prepared by the surrounding pre-amalgamation municipalities except they were described with more understandable terms such as town centres and compact, complete neighbourhoods. For example, the former city of Cumberland’s official plan describes the designated Orleans Town Centre as a mixed-use centre with “a street network that provides convenient and pleasant walking and cycling environment which links housing, employment and the rapid [bus] transit station – the mixed-use Centre designation encourages the development of ‘complete neighbourhoods’ – a definition that is not unlike the city’s in the new Official Plan.

I don’t know why planners like to introduce buzzwords into their vernacular. Perhaps it’s to impress elected officials and the public of their expert knowledge that they gained at university learning about the work by Carlos Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne in France who is considered to be the contemporary visionary and trailblazer behind the 15-minute city movement.

Perhaps if the concept is repeated enough, readers of the Official Plan might eventually accept its importance as a critical planning principle. Other Canadian cities also have similar policies but they seem to stay away from the more dogmatic definition found in Ottawa’s Official Plan. They stick to the more traditional descriptors such as compact and complete.

As well, Leiper’s says the concept of 15-minute neighbourhoods was introduced into the new Official Plan, not through extensive community collaboration. Not true. Instead by a top-down approach.

At a planning committee back on May 11, 2020 during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, city planners made a presentation on the new official plan that staff actually stated that it was Ottawa Public Health that advanced the notion of 15-minute neighbourhoods. Indeed, the focus of the Official Plan with respect to such neighbourhoods is on encouraging healthy communities and improving wellness. This also explains why Ottawa Public Health is included with the city’s planning staff in the Canadian Institute of Planners planning excellence awards announcement.

The potential problem of following a top-down approach together with the use of buzzwords is that it could lead to an unclear understanding by the public of a 15-minute neighbourhood. Recognizing the idea conceptually does not necessarily equate to understanding it.

I am not even sure that Ottawa planners themselves are able to recognize a 15-minute community.

For example, in November 2022, city council approved a zoning change for a major high-rise residential complex consisting of 956 units located near the future Trim Road LRT transit station in Orleans. The report claimed that the proposed development is “character-setting as it will be the first in the area to provide a compact, complete, healthy, mixed-use developments” and “it will serve as a model for 15-minute transit-supportive neighbourhoods.” The proposed residential high-rise development is separated from the nearest residential community of Cardinal Creek Village, about 1.5 km from the LRT station, by a four-lane highway and the LRT rail corridor itself as well as a business park and industrial area. Then there is the large park-and-ride area on the south side of Highway 174. Residents in Cardinal Creek Village also have to walk or bike on not-so-pedestrian-friendly Trim Road with its two car roundabouts.

None of the above actually matters if the city’s measure of success is based on the number of new passengers added to the LRT service as opposed to achieving a true 15-minute neighbourhood. There is a difference between what planners call transit-oriented developments and 15-minute neighbourhoods.

Again in Orleans in November 2023, council approved a zoning amendment for a site  on Trim Road, about 550 metres south of the future LRT station to permit a car-oriented, single-storey, commercial strip mall on Trim Road. The staff report states this “proposal furthers the development of a walkable 15-minute neighbourhood because a key component of such neighbourhoods is commercial services to reduce travel time for daily needs and provide jobs and other economic opportunities for residents.” Yet the proposal’s on-site economic activities are clearly car-centric. For example, an auto-service centre and a drive-through fast-food restaurant are located nearby. The report even states in the summary section that the “permitted uses are intended to serve passing traffic.”

Good luck to the city planners on winning the CIP performance award but I won’t be voting for their 15-minute neighbourhood concept.

Dan Stankovic is an Ottawa consultant and former municipal public servant in economic development and housing.

For You:

Home Value Is Determined By The Beholder: BENN

City Needs To Ready For Tariff Tourism: PATTON

Taxpayers Will Cover Budget Hole: THE VOTER

Bookmark The Bulldog, click here