thanks everyone for being here my name is gordon pidelford i'm the executive director of seattle neighborhood greenways we're a non-profit in seattle washington work to make every neighborhood a great place to walk bike and live we have four staff but we are run by an amazing cohort of volunteers all across the city who are organizing in their own neighborhoods to make change and i'm just so glad that you're all here tonight to listen to this 15-minute cities idea which is really taking off like wildfire and we're happy to be partnering with the aia seattle as part of their series on 15-minute cities tonight we're gonna hear from some pretty amazing panelists which will be moderated by david goldberg david played a key role in developing national movements for smart growth and transportation reform he led communications and strategy for smart growth america a national pro non-profit based in dc and their transportation spin-off transportation for america he currently works as the washington state department of transportation liaison the 520 project and is the board of president or the president board for seattle neighborhood greenways and he serves on the seattle planning commission so with that i'm going to turn it over to david thanks gordon it's great to be here yeah we have good representation from the planning commission tonight because two of our panelists are also on the planning commission this is going to be a great discussion we have some fantastic panelists tonight for our discussion of recipes for walkability for a 15-minute city and a discussion of how we can bake them into seattle's neighborhoods some quick housekeeping we're hoping to increase the opportunities for interaction tonight by opening both the chat and the q a for everyone to access if you have additional information or observations related to what you're hearing from a presenter you can feel free to pop them into the chat put your questions in the q a box and the panelists will either type answers if they're quick questions in that q a box or we'll put them in the queue and answer them in the discussion portion to the degree we can get to them before we kick off the presentations i want to offer a quick definition of what it is we're talking about the term 15-minute city refers to complete walkable neighborhoods where people can fulfill six essential functions within a short walk or bike from home those functions are living working commerce health care education and entertainment while the basic ideas are as old as cities themselves the term and the framing 15-minute city are attributed to carlos manos a professor at the sorbonne the current mayor of paris and hidalgo incorporated his ideas into her vision for the city and used them as the basis for her 2020 re-election and the concept gained increasing currency and importance during the pandemic lockdown when we became painfully aware of what our neighbors did and did not provide for us in july 2020 the c40 cities climate leadership group an organization of about 100 major cities worldwide published a framework for cities to use the 15-minute city 15-minute city concept to build back better while reducing climate impact and some city leaders like our mayor jenny durkin embraced it though how strongly and for how long are a matter of debate tonight we'll be talking about how the concept applies in seattle with a focus on how to achieve neighborhoods that are truly walkable each of our four panelists will present for about seven minutes and we'll follow with the discussion i'll introduce each of them in a little more detail just before they speak but here's a quick overview of how things will go in terms of the presentations the anakin tanar will lead off with thoughts on the overarching principles and the considerations that should be brought to bear in thinking about 15-minute neighborhoods and walkability product naira will follow with a look at where seattle stands now in terms of our built environment and planning and regulatory framework that shape it and the socio-political context that we're living in jeff howell will bring our discussion to the neighborhood level examining his own seattle neighborhood through a 15-minute lens while contrasting the neighborhood in taipei where he is living at the moment shannon nicholl will bring us down to the level of streets and blocks using her design expertise to explore how to make them truly great and livable for all so dionne is going to kick us off she's a mobility and urban design expert with experience in the public nonprofit and private sectors relocated seattle in 2019 from mexico city to join the engineering and planning firm wsp where she is the seattle office league in mexico city she led the authority of public space as well as the transportation planning and roads office during a stint as mexico's first bicycle coordinator she implemented the first automated public bike share in the americas she is as i said a member of the planning commission diana thank you so much and i am just so thrilled and uh excited to be here with you uh tonight with this fantastic panel on this very very uh amazing concept to explore for for all cities give me one second here while i share my screen and i hope you all can see my screen now um and so again as david was mentioning i'm hoping we can discuss today some of the generalities around the concept of a 15-minute city and this idea which we know is not new but has been around and is really uh based around uh the the the concept of a decentralization of services in urban areas where we can get to work shop for food go to school go see a doctor access leisure and culture all within 15 minutes and this this concept really is as david mentioned a concept around redesigning complete communities in which all city residents and this is all can meet most of their daily needs in this 15-minute unit time and the interesting thing here is that it centers where people live and where people live of course will depend on who you are and and what stage of life you're in and so uh the question around even why are we considering 15 minutes and this is of course related to a typical human's willingness to walk uh research really has shown that people are not willing to walk more than 20 minutes so that's kind of the maximum time people are willing to uh walk to meet one of their daily needs locally uh but this 20 minute journey represents a half mile walk uh for an able-bodied person uh to reach their destination um and of course uh who we center is is is at the core of this of this exploration and so if you're not an able-bodied person this radius or the the axis or reach uh of things that you can you can get to in this amount of time is reduced so if you're talking about um walking if you're a a child or a person with limited mobility or perhaps a senior you will be walking at a speed of about three feet per second and so that means that um you are also perhaps expected to be walking in flat terrain to be walking at this speed to reach to reach these these distances uh in any case um as as david mentioned the concepts that became popularized by uh ann hidalgo uh the mayor of paris and um that really was uh developed by uh carlos moreno is is a concept that we know is not new it's a concept that uh in in fact this centers proximity and walkability as as a tenant and a lot of cities right now are starting to use similar concepts so we have the one minute city of sweden or the superblocks in barcelona or melbourne's 20-minute neighborhoods but these all share the common decentralization and polycentric organization of cities and so this concept became very relevant uh since the pandemic because we have been forced to rethink how we restructure our lives by staying at home and working from home and so it's a powerful concept in that way uh particularly you know i guess for those that are privileged uh to have transitioned to work from home and it's important to acknowledge it as a luxury um is that uh you know we have seen it's possible to to really replace a long commute uh and still be productive and so this is really helping cities reevaluate how we structure our our daily lives and and time but this luxury of time uh is something that uh you know is is is something that should be democratized and so we need to think about uh who you know who who is uh going to be able to uh be willing to have access to quality of life in a city through our policies uh and so the the best way really to increase quality of life is to give people uh time back and so this means different things for different groups and populations and uh as planners and decision makers and practitioners we ought to understand these differences because not everybody has the same time budget or travel needs uh in our society and so in print in pre-pandemic times uh the puget sound had seen a steady increase in what's termed a super commuter or people with extremely long commutes that is uh 90 minutes uh one way per per commute and so since 2010 the population of super commuters in the central puget sound region increased about 75 percent and so now the region ranks third out of the top 25 metropolitan areas in the nation in this increase in super commuters so it will be very interesting to see the data and patterns coming out of 2020 but in any case this 15-minute city concept can really be so powerful and truly impacting people's quality of life and so it begs the question to apply an equity lens on where we can consider affordability and quality of opportunities people can access from their homes and uh this time allocation for commuting or travel budget as it's uh termed uh in a more wonky uh environment is different depending on income level and of course where where people live um so a 15-minute city conversation begins with assessing a city or a neighborhood's walkability and according to walk score the city of seattle apparently is very walkable uh you know uh it walkscore says seattle is the eighth most walkable large city in the u.s and uh the ingredients as we know for walkable communities include high density mix of uses short blocks higher tighter density intersections roads with slow speeds comfortable and pleasant routes so at a first glance we would say that seattle's ability to become a 15-minute city looks pretty promising but walkability alone in this sense is agnostic of of quality of of access to to these amenities and uh in in that sense uh we have to think you know who is seattle seattle walkable for is it truly accessible and affordable for all are the parks in places someone can access equally acceptable in quality and throughout the city and i think we all can probably agree that this is not the case if we spent some time in the city so this begs the question of you know what are some of our major barriers to to become a 15-minute city uh and as it applies to to seattle in the puget channel region and so we know and and our panelists will help us explore several of these barriers and challenges to think about uh one of the most prominent ones of course is uh the fact of how we're zoned and the fact that single-family housing is likely uh you know the biggest challenge with 75 percent of zoning in the city being being um in this type of zoning or moreover how we relocate more street space for pedestrians and cyclists to improve walking and cycling in infrastructure with safer speeds so with this i know that we have a great group of panelists to to explore more of these ideas in detail uh but we really ought to try to have discussions like this more often and uh create the regulatory environment that can encourage more of these inclusive zoning and mixed-use developments in flexible buildings and spaces so thank you very much for your time thanks diana that's great a lot of a lot of food for thought and um things to to uh tease out of you to talk about more when we get to the discussion part uh next up is radhika naira she is an urban planner with a multi-disciplinary background in policy research and analysis in land-use planning and community engagement at burke consulting erotica manages projects including community and economic development plans housing studies and park system plans she most enjoys her work when she's integrating equity and social justice into decision and policy making in order to affect change that benefits by bipac impoverished and immigrant communities as i said she also is a member of the seattle planning commission veronica thanks david um and thanks deanna for setting up the regulatory framework which is what i'd like to spend some time on i'm going to share my screen here and hopefully it will come up for you all um i'm using my husband's mac so it's a little different today can you all see my screen yeah okay great thanks um so something i wanted to talk about which steps back a bit from zoning is seattle's growth strategy and its comprehensive plan or it's currently adopted comprehensive plan it is going through a major update which will happen in 2024 and the foundation of seattle's comprehensive plan is its urban village strategy or its growth strategy and the growth strategy the urban village strategy is the city's unique response to the state mandated growth management acts requirement for cities to plan so the way the strategy is intended to work is that it concentrates growth in specific areas of the city as you can see in the different colors that i'll just talk about in a second and it it's intended to create these concentrated areas of growth that's pedestrian friendly is compact and has a mix of uses currently seattle has about six urban centers there are these darker blue ones there that includes downtown and include some denser areas like uptown south lake union capitol hill university district and northgate but there are also 24 urban villages and they come in two flavors that's too much detail that i won't get into right now but these 24 urban villages are noted here in the light blue all these ones and then there are two manufacturing industrial centers that are in gray and those are intended to be where industrial activity and industrial employment will be concentrated and the urban village strategy has been really successful in concentrating growth um it has been in place for 20-some years or so and in those years most i would say 75 of new housing and new jobs have been in the urban villages and the urban centers even though they only occupy 17 of the city so it has been a really successful strategy for seattle but one thing to understand is how these urban village boundaries and how these villages were defined and the strategy was adopted in 1994 shortly following the growth management act um and the city gave a lot of leeway to neighborhood groups to come up with these boundaries and to define urban villages and as a result as you can see they come in very many different shapes and sizes and and scales this one here for instance this is very different from another and the other thing to note is that the city proposed boundaries but neighborhoods carved out many areas out of those boundaries so this chart here shows the wallingford urban village and the the dashed line is the is the area that was included in the neighborhood planning and the uh the dashed line in here in gray is the urban village boundary so what happened was that there was a lot of discussion about urban village boundaries by people who lived outside of the urban villages and people who were inside the urban villages didn't necessarily have more say or it was never evaluated how much they participated in the process um and one one other thing to note is that this was in 1994 this was before the city had the race and social justice initiative or the racial equity lens and if this was not a broad and inclusive process that included people of color or people whose voices are typically not heard in a planning process something else that is worth noting is how many urban villages there aren't for instance magnolia over here which has a really walkable center has good schools good parks does not have an urban village similarly laurelhurst doesn't have an urban village montlick here really good schools parks quick access to the east side no urban village there are walkable areas in ravenna bryant wedgwood where i live which has good parks good schools but that's not included in an urban village and so you can see that the urban village strategy has created what many planners talk about as a downside of 15-minute cities which is that you're not intended to create islands of walkability uh the idea is that they would be overlapping areas that are connected in this polycentric fashion and in many ways that's not what the growth strategy that we currently have would get us to and the comprehensive plan the 2024 update is a real great opportunity to rethink the growth strategy but before we talk about city-wide changes i will turn it over to jeff to talk a bit more about the neighborhood scale i want to introduce jeff howe jeff is professor of landscape architecture and director of the urban urban commons lab let me turn my my camera back on here sorry about that in addition to being a landscape architect he's someone who's well known for his pioneering writings on guerrilla urbanism and bottom-up placemaking something i want to hear a lot more about his work focuses on civic engagement community design public space democracy and design activism during the pandemic jeff has been focused on mutual aid efforts among the marginalized social groups and has been involved in projects including the seattle street sink jeff way thank you uh thank you david and uh and thanks to the seattle neighborhood of greenway for uh this important invitation uh it's not often that the planned concept uh captured the imagination of a large group of people around the world and uh 15 minutes that it happened to be one of them what uh i want to kind of it's great to kind of follow uh uh vienna and uh and uh to build on what uh they have laid out as uh sort of a concept and bring it down to the ground level in my talk i uh i'm actually speaking to you from taipei today like david has said but i was also in seattle in the beginning of the pandemic early last year and uh and like everybody else uh you know one of the things that we have done most often during the pandemic was to walk around our neighborhood which was what i did and i and i got to know my neighborhood uh really well uh through all the walks and i was as i was walking around my neighborhood i realized that uh you know my neighborhood was already a 15-minute neighborhood which argue one can argue is a building block for a 15-minute city and so i thought i would start from there in my talk today so this is my block in the in the bryant neighborhood uh located between wenchwood and ravenna you may recognize a few things here in the google earth view and in my neighborhood i we're very fortunate to have two groceries market within 10 minutes of walking or more if we go a little further there are also three parts of different scale ranging from a neighbor scale to urban scale within 10 to 15 minutes of walking biking or riding the bus we are also within 10 minutes of walking to our nearest elementary school and middle school which our kids went to and also within 10 minutes to roosevelt high by bus my spouse and i can both get to work within 10 to 15 minutes by bus to uw and also to the green lake community center we can also get to the seattle children's hospital and the uw medical center within 10 to 15 minutes by bus as well so this is all great and we have uh really enjoyed our time uh living in seattle over the past 20 years and look forward to be coming back uh but we do and we do recognize that not uh every neighborhood is like this but i also know that our neighborhood is not the only one with this kind of convenience and walkability but something that's not quite right with our neighborhood device which is why i think was still far away from becoming a 15-minute city or a 50-minute neighborhood now first there are just not enough people with access to this 15-minute convenience the density is simply too low and then there are also issues of demographics and as well as diversity of housing types while many neighborhoods in seattle have great walkability as mentioned by the privileged speaker is that kind of walkability is not available to everybody so how can we address this issue obviously increasing density is a necessary strategy if you look at the four criteria for the 15 minutes that he has laid out by claus moreno we're missing out on most of the criteria given of predominantly single-family uh residential zone and this is one of the most fundamental barriers in my view to 15 minutes city concept in seattle so what does a city of higher density look like how is it better in serving a greater number of people i i thought it might be interesting to compare foreign with my current neighborhood here in taipei which is shown at the same scale here as you can see the blocks in taipei on the on the right hand side are much more compact more much more finer grain it's also much easier to get to places by foot bike and also with public transit with a greater number of people the city can support a greater number a also variety of services and businesses uh take the grocery market as an example so within about the same walking distance or time i have access in taipei to in my neighborhood to eight different grocery markets uh you know more choices and greater uh price range from the very traditional uh produce market to a market that uh focus on imported uh goods uh from overseas uh not to mention you know schools parks greenways and hospitals are accessible within 10 15 minutes of walking and then with the metro system pretty much the entire downtown can be rich in 15 minutes but most importantly this urban fabric can serve a greater number of people uh obviously it's not uh you know conceivable or even desirable for our neighborhood see how to become become like those in taipei with the density that is more than 10 times that of comparing brine with dime for example it's also a very different kind of lifestyle than social fabric but what if we can strategically increase the density in some locations in seattle just a little bit more and in neighborhoods where many of the amenities and services are missing what if we can increase the density and the number of residents so that the businesses and services can become viable in those neighborhoods and so how can we bring walkability to a greater segment of our population how can you achieve not only proximity vowels or diversity density and ubiquity these are these ingredients also need to be part of the recipe walkability thank you excellent jeff a really interesting way to bring it home to seattle and also introduce some ideas from outside of seattle i want to introduce shannon nickel shannon is a landscape architect and co-founder of gist of sun guthrie nickel or ggn her designs including chicago's lurie garden and boston's north end parks are recognized for being deeply embedded in their social contexts since 2016 shannon has been the leading design has been leading the design for india based in shoreline park in san francisco's bayview neighborhood seeking to restore walking connections to local services and amenities in a historically isolated and underserved neighborhood shannon thank you david and uh i seem to have an unfortunate pattern of following jeff um in uh presenting uh and uh people that i admire um i am not a planner um i am not a policy maker i am a designer and the scope that i usually have as a landscape architect quite frankly is selecting street trees designing plantings and furnishings and things like that that contribute we like to think contribute to the sense of potential and alignment with a walkable place a place that prioritizes local life and daily life and the people who might be living in a space and using it every day and we've been doing our best to do that over the last over 20 years in in our projects so bit by bit we get these little scopes might be a sidewalk on one side of a block it might be one crossing it might be you know designing the details of something but we've really been focused on how much can we with these these iterative little scopes um emphasize and build help people see build up that mentality of looking at our streets as part of the neighborhood ground and right now as i think we all are aware when we look at a 15-minute radius of walking around most of us we probably don't have enough available ground to serve our needs and the mobility options that we'd like to have on foot so uh just talking about some of the things we do with our scopes that may be sidewalks around the perimeter of a building or something like that we like to step back and get ourselves the architects we're working with and also the folks that may be coming to community meetings into a mindset of um seeing the streets as their local neighborhood ground not just as vector lines that are engineered devices that are sort of dividing the neighborhood up so here's south lake union in seattle this is one of the drawings my colleague david malda did and i love this because it helps us just remind us that streets are simply excerpts of a larger piece of ground that we all share and each part of the ground is different it has a topography it's way older than us it's way older than the current paint lines on the street but when we start to see streets as ground we start to see them as surfaces for living and shared space they're omnidirectional surfaces they're not just linear um tubes that are aligned that we're we're fighting over um and i think that's important because when we all travel to other parts of the world this happens to be the dalton borean osaka we see that there's places where streets are simply treated as spaces between buildings and that simple notion is actually of course really old but it's also beautiful and pleasurable and feel safe and you can let go of your kid's hand and i find it thrilling to get into these kinds of spaces as somebody who's lived in seattle for 30 years and grew up in the western us so it's interesting to look we always like looking at how much streets have changed in just the last few decades especially in america to remind us that we can change them again and make them more accommodating of all the things we need to fit in a 15 minute neighborhood so here's pine street looking from first avenue east up to capitol hill in 1936 and one of the things we notice is the pace and scale of all the little details and signs that are reaching out to the pedestrian pace of walking it's on a second scale not even a minute scale then we go to 1963 everything's one way everything's about regional flow how much can we charge this whole corridor as this vector line between distant places we don't even see and the local folks are not being served there's not kids in the street there's not people standing and talking in the street and i want to bring kids up because as a landscape architect they're one of my main constituents they are so poorly served in the city um and i would say that um play you know definitely overlaps with four of the six um uses that were talked about as the liberal livable city uses living healthcare education and entertainment um play is all of those things and how do we get back to the point of this is normal this is what streets have been used for for millennia and kids are on a one minute neighborhood not a 15 minute neighborhood parents would love in the apartment buildings in our denser neighborhoods to be able to open their front door and let go of their kid's hand and let their kid play there that's a one minute thing so we have a long ways to go but i'm super excited about the 15 minute neighborhood concept so how do we as designers uh architects landscape architects but also just people thinking about what our expectations should be in our streets in front of our front doors how do we rebuild the local ground for humans to walk on live in and play in space for us to exist and survive outside of our front doors and one of the things we do as designers is we pretend we pretend even if it doesn't look like it right now that every square foot of the spaces in between our buildings is valuable valuable at the human scale so this happens to be the tunnel ride probably a lot of you did it a few years ago when the tunnel opened in seattle this is my kid giving me adrenaline just standing on this piece of infrastructure that's designed for 60 mile per hour vehicles everybody was stopping and resting there was no cars there how do we get from this feeling of like we shouldn't be here in this space on this detached piece of infrastructure to this is part of my local ground and it's safe it's it's earth i can stand on and use and walk on in multiple directions and so a lot of times in my industry the first um impulse may be expensive unit papers they do work there is something about the unit paper it's the heat scale of the hand it's the scale of the human it also shows this attention to the value of the ground surface and it breaks down the scale it creates friction it slows fast things down there's all sorts of great things that unit pavers do but sometimes we die on that sword if you can't afford to put unit papers across the street then it's like the baby goes with the bathwater talking about kids so i just wanted to bring up some local examples of small steps that my firm has been involved in to um just like little design details that can help things feel more like spaces for people with really cheap materials this is at the burke museum at the university of washington it's a parking lot with some concrete around it but if you notice there's not the typical vehicle speed uh radiused paint corners rounded corners in the paint they're sharp 90 degree corners we're saying this is at the scale of the human hand and eye for somebody standing there this is designed like a room and as a result it has been it's not a perfect space but it's calmed the way that people drive and one of the things that's delighted me is during the pandemic and actually even now that it's being used people are teaching their kids to skateboard there ride their bikes there all the things like what do you do with pavement that feels kind of safe like you're not going to get run over the other thing we did here and it took a lot of work was get rid of curbs you can see we have bollards and texture strips um it's accessible number one for people on wheels or who maybe have various kinds of physical um challenges but it also puts the people in the vehicles and the people on foot in this same space so when you're driving there you feel a little like someone might walk out in front of you at any time so you slow down again it's a first step right next to it part of this was working on 43rd street and it is stephen's way here it is a pedestrian mall there was a lot of questions during our process should we then make it a wavy path so it looks like a human path and not a street and there was a really interesting dialogue about well it's not really a street because there's not cars on it you shouldn't call it a street and we said no we are excited to call this a street it is a complete intersection with four streets that meet here one of them happens to only have only only have human beings on it but it is equal to the other streets so we purposely designed this um meeting of paths to be equal on all four sides flexible no curves um and it is in our view a 100 crossing of paths in the city this is all about how do we elevate the importance and visibility of walking in our ground that we have in the city which is streets 30 percent of our ground then just a few examples before i close second avenue at seattle center is a prototype you can find locally with it does have unit pavers but they're affordable locally produced concrete pavers no curbs the water drains and actually infiltrates along the edges seattle center was great on this this is was really looked at as being what is an affordable replicable design for a curbless street that does allow heavy truck truck traffic on it at times but also could be uh not only a place for people to walk linear uh up and down the corner corridor but have events and all sorts of different uses on it this happens to be pride weekend which is one of my favorite times to go and this is pride month so i thought it would be a fun um example to share and i'm just going to close out on thinking about that cross grain as designers we can think about the cross grain to balance out that fast linear emphasis and one of the interesting examples of this recently last year were the black lives matter murals that started here in seattle but there was something about the letters and these gestures that occupied the middle of the street and also created this crosswise cadence of the letters that slowed it told you that this was a place that people were using and occupying um and uh it's not business as usual and that the materials are inexpensive for that and i'm gonna close on north end parks uh in boston it was part of a linear um freeway uh lid there was a lot of pressure to um make this entire 1.7 mile park sort of uniform and parallel to the dominant direction of traffic we really uh were interested in emphasizing the local cross traffic and this is little salem street this is actually a right-of-way that we pulled across the parks we thought it was important to have streets local streets um connecting through these little parks for this for the additional options they bring for walking routes that people could take locally in their neighborhoods and i'll uh end on that note thank you um so i realized that that this is a lot to take in in that when you're starting to think about how we would put together 15-minute cities you're starting at a regional scale and you're getting down to uh the city level and then what we do in the in terms of how do we make it arrange the neighborhoods and then right down to how do we make the most use out of the right-of-way that our streets represent to make them not only safe to get around if you're on foot or are rolling but also places to play and i love shannon's elucidation of play and how many how many things that it touches on in fact maybe that should even be its own thing although you're right that play plays into so many of those other uh of those other six of the other six aspects um you know we and we we talked about so many things and we didn't even really talk about the regional scale how do all these how do these uh individual neighborhoods that are walkable add up to a region where we have far-flung employment we have people as diana pointed out you know making 90-minute commutes so i with all that swimming around in our heads i kind of want to ask where should we start you know erotica pointed out some places on the map that are already looking like maybe beginnings of a 15-minute city jeff pointed out that we have some parts of the city where you can actually get access to a lot of things but we but maybe there aren't enough people who can get that access because we don't have the density and then we other other parts of the city where we have not enough density to support all the services that would be required for a walkable neighborhood and when in the lens we're using here today with seattle neighborhood greenways being our sponsor is really that walkable neighborhood we want to get to but where do we where would we start any any of you can jump in that feels like you want to want to do it but where would you start and just picking this apart and taking those first baby steps towards a real aspiration toward a 15-minute city that you presented last year and i'll put you on the spot first uh certainly i was thinking since i presented last i'm not you would get a break say bad enough of me um i uh where would i start well there's there's low-hanging fruit and then someone also had a question in the chat is like think bigger tell us you know bigger things that need to be done but i'm a low-hanging fruit professional so i'll start with that and someone else can come in with some more profound um changes uh this is i'm just gonna pick a place but traffic warrants um i have i've i've spent a lot of my time in seattle and a few other cities on um and this is getting better but where are controlled crossings so as looking at things not as an ornamental space but simply as uh uh looking at space in our city as how people survive and get from point a to point b when they're on foot which may not be parallel to the hierarchy of vehicle corridors and let's take mercer street for instance there's a really high density of seniors that live on opposite sides of mercer street from where their services and bus stops are but there are many missing controlled intersections there because they don't have traffic warrants per mutcd and other standards meaning there's not enough cross traffic there might not be enough numbers of pedestrians or documented accidents to warrant a signalized crossing in my view that mean that's all the more reason why we need a signalized crossing there because there's poor folks that are there by themselves that don't have a crowd of people around them making them more visible or a vehicle which is the only thing us as drivers notice at intersections they need the support of a controlled intersection and you need it every block especially if you're physically impaired you're a kid or you're elderly so there's a lot of missing controlled intersections in our city and we spend a lot of money to put hawk lights and all sorts of dance dances around putting a flippin stop sign in which is cheap um put a four-way stop or put a traffic light in but it's at the it's it's concerns about um slowing down the flow or time from point a to point b on some of these prioritized uh traffic ways and i i respect the person in the chat who said it's not just about those big ugly roads we need to do more comprehensive things about density and i do agree with that jeff i'm curious you um uh you raised the issue of making a neighborhood like yours denser um is that where you'd start and how would you do it yeah i mean that's i think at a basic level i think that's a good place to start but i think we need to be strategic it's not just throwing density uh everywhere uh i mean we have a model to build on i think the urban village concept that uh you can mention i think is we should be able to build on that but perhaps looking at something that's kind of in between you know uh the the reality that we have now and the uh what has been uh accomplished with the urban bridge and you know maybe i think there's something between that we could you know consider and expand uh the practice to uh places in the city but this you know especially in the northeast that has been uh you know resisting uh the urban village concept for uh you know such a long time and uh and you know so for example uh you know in my neighborhood actually i actually live in a tampon which is already a higher density than the single-family vloggings but the town homes in i think most neighborhoods in seattle are very piecemeal they don't really create a a desirable uh environment except for the individual units on their own uh the the the physical fabric of the city is pretty still pretty much designed for the single-family dwellings and so i think there is a urban urban design kind of exercise that is needed you know to create a denser neighborhood that people love to live uh not because they they can only afford to uh but these are you know desirable places that you would enjoy you know closer proximity with your neighbors you can walk to places your kids can play with other kids in the neighborhood rather than having you know drive them around you know like across towns now that is not a sustainable way of living so i think we should be looking more proactively uh not at the not in terms of just housing type but also in terms of creating the kind of neighborhood that people want to live with the higher density so that's the place that i would start i can i can see us drawing walk sheds around major neighborhood assets like a walkable neighborhood center or a transit stop something like that and trying to understand what's missing to make it a more complete neighborhood in using that to frame up what kinds of investments the city could make or what might be those partnerships because it feels like each neighborhood would have something that's a bit unique that's missing and so you wouldn't have the same starting point in in every neighborhood i can see that analysis and a conversation being the starting point i'd like to maybe piggyback on on radica's idea because i absolutely think that that is the way to start and i think the first thing is to provide a an assessment of you know where where are the areas or the neighborhoods that we would deem as most complete and start with those that are actually are the most incomplete and uh have the largest amount of people living in them so uh crossing uh high density with perhaps uh areas with uh low access to opportunity and that's something that the city of seattle has already done they've mapped they've done an index around access to opportunity uh for for the city and so looking at those neighborhoods and then uh making sure that we we are always cautious as practitioners who we always think uh we know best and uh we tend to love to make choices for people especially for the poor or disenfranchised population so making sure that we can go directly to these communities once we identified some of these gaps and asked them and i in fact remember meeting for the first time jeff about three years ago and he presented a series of fantastic ways in which to do outreach around these creative ideas and he presented um a an idea around the i'm probably butchering the name of it jeff so please jump in um to create basically your neighborhood uh buffet and so if we were to say you have a tray and that is your 15-minute city neighborhood and you were to try to put the kinds of destinations or amenities that you'd like to reach what would the tray of a senior citizen or senior resident look like if they were living in close proximity to say a child's 15-minute city neighborhood what would that tray uh have i probably would have a school and a playground and um and parks and and places like that what uh and there might be an overlap with that of the senior uh resident who would also want to enjoy that park but they would both have different needs and so uh looking also at how to look at our cities and repurpose through time of day or have multi-use and function it's also a very immediate way to try to start addressing some of the deficits uh so that's uh how i believe we should engage is first and foremost analyze and identify uh where can communities need to be completed then go to the communities themselves and ask them what they need and what they would like to see there and then of course uh turn to policy and identify ways in which we can support those communities to to get there quicker so um i think i want to put put this to the side for a minute but but but that brings to mind the uh the politics of all this and you know the 15-minute city framing seems to capture a lot of people's imagination i'm not so sure that folks who are facing displacement and gentrification would be as excited i mean they might might see this as something that is going to bring money to their neighborhoods and and might mean there's not a place for them once it all happens so um there's there's that aspect of the politics and there's of course the folks who are living in those single-family areas uh who are a little wealthier and are fine uh existing mostly in the car it seems and um maybe but maybe not maybe maybe there are some allies in there that we don't know about so it seems like uh you're gonna ask me where where to start one is having some really serious conversations about folks who have been the most vulnerable and the benefited the least from our growth over the years and really ask them does 15 minute city does that resonate with you and if it does what's in your 15-minute city you know i i live in wallingford i have sort of a 15-minute opportunity here and it's great and i kind of know what i like about it and i know what i think is missing um and if somebody came and asked me i'd have some ideas but i would i would really love you know personally love to to start that conversation uh at that level and then find you know neighborhoods that want to put their hands up and say hey why don't you start here and we'll do uh you know we'll we'll be your guinea pigs and and we'll we'll build on the assets that we have and we'll fill in the gaps that exist and that kind of thing um but i want to shift for a second to transit a couple people have raised that in the questions uh is does transit have a role in all this is 15 minutes is this transit part of the 15-minute calculus and i'm also interested in in the idea that we are building a lot of transit a lot of high-capacity transit in seattle if we get st3 built and we get the west seattle the ballard built we will have what is it 40-ish stations in in the city which you know really if we were going to do it right almost all of them except maybe in the industrial areas would be which is another question why do we have them in the industrial areas but um almost all of them it seems to me would be a 15-minute neighborhood so i don't know start with this question does transit have a have a role in this 15 minutes conversation and what role is that and why don't you all just take yourselves off mute and feel free to have a more uh freeform conversation so i can jump in that i think uh i think transit is definitely uh part of the 15-minute city i think most of the the rhetoric is around walking and biking but if you uh if you're a trans user you know that uh you know trend your public transit is sort of an extension of walking you're more likely to walk if you can pop you know take public transit to you know from point a to point b and uh so i would like to see your public transit as help you know play a much more prominent role in the discourse on fit in the city and we really need to look at it i'll jump in right there and i think that there's two ways of looking at transit in this in the through this framework of the 15-minute city and one is to see the transit station as an amenity or a destination in it of itself and so uh as long as you have a transit station that you can live uh close by to or that you can connect easily to by a secondary means of of transportation um you know that's that's essential i believe to make sure that we are connecting different neighborhoods and then different 15-minute neighborhoods together so that's that's one piece the second is of course the opportunity that david uh uh uh called out which is we're investing massive amounts of of uh money and and transit projects and expansions and so every single node uh of course we know like a cousin of this concept is transitory into development of trans-oriented communities and so they're one and the same so i think we're talking about parallel concepts and and opportunities one which centers the transit station at the center of that 15-minute walk shed and the other in which we can make the transit station a destination or an obliged destination of any community uh to to reach there and just uh i guess pile on a little bit that i see that as a yes and um answer and i hope that we can have great livable places that um you don't need to be a you know adult in your prime of life to navigate um hopefully transit will become uh that accessible for us soon but there is um and i'm not saying that's what's going on here but i'm always interested in seattle that we have i've been here for a long time i do it too but there's that sense of almost like pitting great ideas against each other and what i love about the 15 minute city is it's this like underlayment in a way it's sort of talking about and maybe it's because i'm a landscape architect so i see it through certain limbs by like let's treat the ground um let's fix the ground and and have transit and have mobility and have the ability to commute but let's and i think one of the things that we're all saying is let's make sure the ground is awesome and accessible and equitable on both ends of the line so if the the end of the line for the commuter that needs to live outside of the increasingly expensive city center should have an awesome walkable livable safe ground to let go of their kid's hand uh and and it should also be that way which it's not right now in central seattle sunset will likely play a really important role in the transition too jobs are pretty centralized in seattle and if we want to make sure that there's access to jobs i think transit would need to play a part in the 15-minute city which brings us back oh sorry dave no just uh i think it brings us back to also uh i think the uh real spur of the concept right and as i brought up in in in my uh initial remarks uh the pandemic really is what has made this this idea and this framework really come to life and and really have uh cities and and leaders think about how to have successful recovery particularly now that we've had such a fundamental shift in the way we work and the way um people are are allocating their their productive time during the day and so uh the question really is uh what is going to be the future and we know that this is a question that um is being explored in many other uh forums but the future of our downtown knowing that the majority of uh that space is office space and now uh people are not necessarily gonna be going downtown at least not not every day it is the fact that people that at least are uh office dependent or uh that they used to go to the office like i said we have the privilege to work in an office and not necessarily be someone that you know couldn't work from home during the pandemic which is it's part of the fundamental question how can we make this 15-minute city concept apply to both those they can telecommute and those that cannot and i think uh the the the the beauty of the of the concept and the lens and the framework is uh ensuring that we can return that quality of life and access to achieve many of your needs within that that that unit of time that is is reasonable and possible one of our attendees mike eliason writes that density is the overwhelming problem keeping from making most of seattle walkable let alone anywhere close to a 15-minute city nibbling around the edges with small-scale changes isn't going to move that needle focusing everything on loud polluted arterials won't either where's the guiding vision from seattle's leading firms and politicians on what a sustainable dense livable seattle could look like is the comp plan the problem and there's a whole bunch packed in there um you know there's there's the idea of focusing everything on loud polluted arterials is one of the um artifacts of the urban build strategy as it's been pursued as radical was pointing out when we when we drew these boundaries to sort of keep the single family areas off limits we tend to put all the multi-family around around arterials and that is an issue robin randle's in the in the q a uh raises the issue of the of aurora avenue you know aurora has a lot of stuff has been migrating towards aurora under the current zoning and the planning regime but it's still a very dangerous state highway so there's there's a lot um there's a lot to fix about what we've done to this point and a lot to to figure out about how we make our growth strategy work better his last question is the comp plan the problem i want to reframe that is the comp plan the solution we're starting to work on getting to a new comprehensive plan uh to start to rethink or evolve i guess the growth strategy a little bit is there an opportunity here and where what where should we put our focus um in revising the growth strategy and and putting down some firm policies uh in the next comp plan which which is intended to guide how the city grows well i think to continue uh what i mentioned before i think you know building on the urban village strategy uh maybe there needs to be some a second level maybe we can call it an urban suburb uh strategy uh you know taking uh looking at what work and what did not work and perhaps in addition to looking at these major transit centers looking at you know neighborhoods and how can we introduce density at the next level and i agree with i think what others had mentioned before that every neighborhood is unique in some way that we need a different kind of strategy and that that those strategy i think need to be developed through you know consultations and bottom-up process and so i think we're looking at a we need to be looking at a creative uh kind of neighbor planning process kind of moving forward and uh and i think we do need to kind of uh incorporate that into the complex process i agree with the bottom-up approach and a creative neighborhood planning process that we can come up with a growth strategy that includes more people and reflects what's possible in seattle it seems like along with that bottom up planning we should we should communicate some frameworks for what say a rational framework for how we might think about the size of these and the overlap of these and how these might connect because learning some lessons from the past in terms of how the boundaries have played out and how those conversations have gone would be really important i also think that this there's some concern for many communities when cities come in and make lots of investments that really increase the quality of life it can lead to gentrification so balancing balancing that and approaching this with the racial equity lens is really important those are evolving the growth strategy and not just tinkering with the urban village strategy i think is really important and approaching it with an equity lens i think it's really important for the comprehensive plan rock howell one of our attendees writes we have so many small neighborhood business nodes that lack an urban village designation could we start by making each of these places fifteen minute neighborhoods we suggest alki tangle town wedgwood sellwood and some others is that a is that a place to start definitely i i feel like that's definitely a place to start i mean it's not it's already clear why areas in the city that could support more density that already are functioning as in some ways a 15-minute village 15-minute city framework if they're not included in the growth strategy and are not receiving as much multi-family housing or signaling interest into the developer community as as we could so that's i think definitely on the table and should be i'd also add that kind of qualitatively or culturally those are those would be great ambassador pilot projects because the architecture that we're starting with is appealing uh to a wide audience it's beautifully scaled it's not intimidating a lot of people i've noticed when you say transit oriented development they instantly think of what to them is sort of intimidating modern glassy towers with sterile frontages and you look at some of those nodes and they're all over the city and they have lots of detail i mean i don't need to spend too much time i suppose talking to this audience about it but there's lots of human detail along the street and they're buildings that people like and they like the engagement of the street with storefront windows even if right now they have you know metal blinds that are covering them up um so i think a lot of us probably go by those nodes and and think man you know it would look better more people would like these historic streetcar corner buildings and corner groceries if they had goods in them and and were commercial and and maybe even had some people living above them um and and some towers tucked back there so i'm all for that from a uh messaging uh standpoint a way to help people see how beautiful density can be speaking sorry yes speaking of messaging i think 15-minute city or 15-minute neighborhood which is more friendly to me uh it's certainly a much better way to talk about this than transit oriented development which has you know a collection of words that most people don't necessarily get warm and fuzzy about you know if they like development they want to be oriented towards me not towards transit we have a question that's interesting how do we promote density without displacing amenities that are required for the 15-minute city in the urban villages i'm seeing retail and grocery stores and restaurants replaced with apartments the additional housing is great but it removes some of the walkability i'm not exactly sure where we're talking about but i think i know it's you know i can think of a couple of examples in our in our uh in our capitalist um society in our current real estate world is that is that something we can manage how do we manage that so i'd like to jump into that because i've been recently thinking about that and uh i think there's a huge role for um for really thinking about the positive ways uh for for real subsidies in which there's a role in the government um and in in local uh governments and state governments to subsidize the differential between uh allowing a business that perhaps was there i can think of a place in beacon hill that um i know is about to be redeveloped where there's uh one of the best viria and mexican food um in in in the neighborhood and uh we know that it's uh the clock is ticking for that shop um and so it is very unlikely that that restaurant is going to be able to afford the rent in the new in the new building once it opens up but what if there was a a program where the city provided the complimentary support for say a period of time five years i don't know three years whatever there needs to be some analysis to to identify what is reasonable but where you could support those businesses that were perhaps a community jewel to remain in place after the building gets developed and where also there's a role for the office of economic development to provide support and identify ways in which these businesses can become more competitive to become more profitable and hopefully slowly cover more of that potential rent we know we can't forever subsidize businesses and it could be seen as an unfair practice eventually uh but at least initially there should be ways in which we can have opportunities for having in placement strategies uh that that could be explored um i was just going to mention that we've worked on ways in which there can be land use code that can support transitions for example requiring that even if it's residential in the beginning that the ground floor be 15 feet and can transition to a commercial use where their demand or enough retail need so those there are things that the city can do to make the land use code a bit more supportive of transitions to commercial even if they start with residential i i wanted to talk about schools for a minute there are a couple of questions and comments about that um and schools schools have been uh you know in in uh in paris one of the things that they've done is look at schools as uh actually borrowing from america i'm told by someone who worked for the mayor there um the the idea of of making schools and school grounds available to the community for other uses outside of school hours they've also started implementing uh what they're calling school streets and some of this was pandemic influenced in that they were trying to give people a chance to just sort of socially distance as they drop off their kids and have a place to mix and mingle but keep the cars farther away but all this is interesting because um you know schools can really be centers of neighborhoods and they really are how many of us when we're bringing up our kids organize our lives is there and this whole idea of multiple uses of buildings and really being super efficient you know because you could maybe pack more uses into a smaller area if you can find multiple uses but what are you what are you seeing hearing and thinking about in terms of school school building school grounds safe routes to schools the role of schools in the 15-minute city concept i'll jump in if someone else doesn't want to but very briefly um i think from the perspective of uh the biggest challenge and barrier for those uh types of multi-use experiences to happen in neighborhoods has nothing to do with planning or even design it has to do with the kinds of agreements between different agents to be corresponsible for the management of a space so for example if if a school has um you know is responsible for maintaining their own grounds right and if there is a different use for that school in you know after hours and there is uh some kind of uh event you know whose liability is it and so this is where we need to turn uh from um the practitioners that are represented in this group which are planners architects urbanists etc and really turn to the lawyers and we need to invite more lawyers into these conversations to help us understand what are the appropriate mechanisms that will legally allow for these figures to start coming to life with reduced barriers of entry and it is through having a clarity of of an accountability for the use of a space it's management um and programming that we will be able to get there and so the answer will lie not in a comprehensive plan but rather in creative mechanisms and agreements between different parties well i think focus in our school is actually a good way uh part of i think the bottom-up process i think we mentioned before i think when you mention uh only density i think people kind of freak out uh but if you talk about you know like safe routes to school uh how to make the neighborhood safer and more walkable and bikeable i mean a lot of kids bike to school as well so i think that changed the nature of the conversation i really focused on the issue that matters to people rather than a concept that may you know scare people away i'd just add in just observationally i live quite close to a school and um have noticed in seattle and this all of course it keeps circling back to the density issue schools are magnets for crazy driving because you have a lot of parents driving their kids to school they're late anytime you have people in their routine they're on autopilot it makes the streets surprisingly dangerous ironically these local neighborhood streets with uncontrolled seattle intersections uh i won't let my 10 year old bike a few blocks to school because of certain streets he has to cross or intersections that are full of parents right so there's something about needing to use i love the safe routes to a school program and i think you know piling onto jeff i think it's been a really wonderful um program to get progress and help us understand how much we all share the priority of keeping kids safe and seeing schools as they they have to be equitably accessible to everyone including um kids on foot and bike but we need to look at the design of our streets all around schools not just prioritize routes or crossings and maybe be a little more aggressive than what is warranted based on policy maybe take a few steps extra to control intersections and prohibit parking from sight lines at the intersections etc where you have small bodies some things like that that are kind of like little detail things but could make a big difference in terms of whether parents would choose to drive or let their kids walk through their neighborhoods to their schools yeah i'm aware of a program sorry um go ahead that changes asphalt playgrounds to green schoolyards because i also live close to a school and it is a public space that the name even people without kids use so programs like that even investments from the city to change asphalt playgrounds to green spaces or change it into open space could be super helpful starting with schools are i think it's a great idea i think i just wanted to jump in and follow up on what shannon was mentioning because it sounds like you uh have gone through similar um experiences in projects uh in terms of what does it mean to really change the form and function of our streets and really what is playing up against these amazing ideas is uh the lack of regulatory definitions that support this and so we need a much more active and hands-on um group of practitioners informing um these regulations and definitions so things like uh level of service we know that that is a common conversation and so the level of service of intersections and what meets the definition of acceptable performance right when acceptable performance is to design to high capacity throughput of of motor vehicles rather than allowing for a little bit of additional delay in queuing at an intersection for the sake of uh safety improvements or or or people crossing the street we're never gonna get there and so the biggest barriers uh you know arterials become um insurmountable barriers for pedestrians even when you're trying to to when a government's trying to change them if we don't change the definition of what can be deemed as acceptable and change goals around vehicle miles traveled what is acceptable in terms of counter measures that need to be implemented for safety etc so i say that a hard look at our definit our very technical definitions that are the hidden um uh support this the structural just like their structural racism their structural auto centric uh development and so we need to take a look and uncover uh those those definitions to to dismantle it yeah and several people in the chat mentioning that they they actually are pretty close to a 15-minute city but don't feel that way because they can't safely get the access or they feel cut off or they don't feel that it's a good idea to uh to try to walk to some of those amenities um really the elephant in the room is is this is the automobile right i mean it's the it's the it's the mecha mechanism whereby we were able to take the parts of the city and spread them out and connect them by the automobile so people live in one place shop and work go to school and other places and connect them all by the car and it's also the reason why if you live in a almost walkable neighborhood you don't feel like it is and in seattle you know we've had for quite some time we've had a complete streets ordinance we've had grand policies about aspirations toward a number of different modal plans and towards climate improvement and climate reducing transportation emissions we know that transportation is the biggest source in seattle transportation emissions why the hell can't we do it what's what's stopping us are we ready now is it have we reached a point or are we just going to go electric and we're going to be good i i agree with so many of the comments in the chats and what you just summarized david um sort of pushing us forward a little bit it's uh the very visible elephant in the room and it's fascinating to me that on paper and i find this with a lot of things i also find this with measuring net zero carbon projects and things like that on paper we seem to be doing great and maybe by some quantitative measures we are statistically safe because we're not trying to act like normal human beings have acted in our streets for thousands of years but something's really wrong and that is one of the reasons why on our projects we try to at least to disrupt our own thinking look at historic photos look at how weird this time is and how recent it is and the whole timeline of humans needing space to exist and use in different ways pretty close to where they live and and you know ideally out the front door of their building and i know i keep coming back to kids but i think that starting with the most vulnerable user rather than the most sophisticated user is a good design principle for any user interface and um designer and we're not doing that now like we we may have places that work great for commuters adult commuters and people who know how to navigate different kinds of um divided user interfaces like bike lanes and bike signals and pedestrians yeah and those um those historical photos and and that and that comment you make about what a brief moment in human history this really is it's it's really helpful perspective i mean it's we look wistfully back sometimes but they had their own issues too but but it really is helpful to think about um how things do change and how we have it in our power i think to change things um shannon since you brought that idea up i'd like to give the other three uh and we're closing in on our time uh you know 30 30 seconds or so for any last thought you might want to offer jeff do you mind starting off sure i think on this question of you know how can we you know facilitate some some major changes i think we need stronger leadership and we have a mayoral election coming up this is a great opportunity so we push for some greater vision and and for uh the the you know the civil society organization to really come together and support you know a candidate that can really push that grand vision and when you run i'll support you deanna i think uh this begs the question uh to really uh think about and analyze um i become more and more uh convinced that what uh the puget sound region and and seattle as the city itself needs and i can speak to my experience in mexico city uh is that aggressive parking management and uh is is needed as a foundation to make enable any of these visions because in the end the elephant in the room the car uh is silently sleeping every day in our streets and our buildings in a parking spot and so the way to limit uh how much we're inviting vehicles uh motor vehicles to come to our neighborhoods and to disrupt these the the the social fabric uh and and the urban fabric of our of our communities is by reducing those invitations for them to come to our neighborhoods and that is by telling them you can't come and sleep and and stay for the day or for part of the day um elephant sleeping on your street exactly i would just say that we need more voices in the 2024 comprehensive plan update it's our best opportunity to change our growth strategy and i would say that's uh as many voices as we can about 15-minute cities would be great so get excited about the comp plan may be wonky but it maybe determines your future on some level thanks so much you guys are brilliant this has been a lot of fun and um i hope uh folks watching listening have gotten what they wanted out of this i know we there's a lot more to dig in on on this and uh we really appreciate you taking the time to attend and for you guys taking your time to participate thanks so much gordon did you have any parting thoughts before we close out uh no that's great david thanks everyone for coming and the video will be available on youtube probably sometime early next week so if you have friends or colleagues who missed it and want to check out this amazing panel send them the link and thank you david thanks so much for inviting me take care you
