20-Minute Neighbourhoods for Scotland

The 20-minute neighbourhood ambition is more than worthy. Everyone can sign up to living in a place where they can walk to all the facilities and services they need in 10 minutes (a 20-minute round trip). Indeed, this is more important than ever now with people being more home based post pandemic and the cost of travel increasing. New dynamic places close to home that provide our leisure, recreation, day to day needs and interaction are key.

It is a myth that to achieve 20-minute neighbourhood you need to live at high density and that future housing development all needs to be on urban sites in already built up areas. The housing choices that people have been making post pandemic is to move to less dense not more dense locations. Private outdoor space has become very important to people, and it is not clear that the densification of our existing towns and cities will provide what everyone in the housing market will want. Range and choice will remain important.

Greenfield sites on the edges of existing settlements can help create, contribute significantly to and be part of 20-minute neighbourhoods. Indeed, large greenfield releases, if they are large enough, can in themselves be 20-minute neighbourhoods.

Rural areas present a unique challange. For a start “neighbourhoods” are not the norm, the rural area is largely made up of small towns, villages and hamlets.

Rural areas comprise communities with geographies that are different to the urban setting and a different approach may well be needed.

This Insight will concentrate on the more urban context but would point readers interested in the rural context to the June 2022 published report for HITRANS and Sustrans entitled Living Well Locally 20 minute communities in the Highlands and Islands.

Definitions of 20-miniute neighbourhoods are outlined in the insight and it is fairly clear that there is broad consensus on what a 20-minute neighbourhood should be, but this is a fairly loose concept open to interpretation. For this to be a national policy more certainty of what is required is needed to avoid reinterpretation of the specifics and provide clear guidance on what is required for development management purposes. This Insight looks to answer the following questions: