15-minute-city

A website to explore Liverpool where your everyday needs are within a 15 minute walk or cycle

Intro

(This blurb lifted from the somebody-should issue where initial investigations happened)

Via Dan Hill's excellent (if extensive :-) Slowdown Papers I learnt of Paris' plans for a "15 minute city":

This simple notion — that all your basic everyday needs, from education to commerce to healthcare to culture and so on, are located within 15 minutes walk or bike of your front door

That seems to me like a good tool for thinking about how to make the city more walkable, and to explore how the city might adapt to include more local, distributed approaches (particularly post-pandemic and with an increasing climate crisis).

A few years back, the Liverpool Architectural Society ran the Integrated City Project, which had some echoes of this. I'm not sure much of it ever ended up online, and now all I can find is my blog post about it.

However, it does give us this interesting map of 32 areas of the city, which we could take as a starting point to see how we fare at the moment.

Lots of these areas have existing focal points for shops, libraries, etc. Maybe we can identify gaps that we can work to fill, or barriers that make it hard for the flow of people between neighbouring areas. Or maybe we'll realise we already have a 15-minute city, and we just need to think about it differently.

Design Thoughts

Taking a lead from this site showing accessibility of Amsterdam schools we can maybe build a Jekyll site to generate a bunch of isochrones for the 32 city areas, and then have Leaflet.js/Turf.js load them and allow visitors to generate new ones for points of their choosing.

It would be good to build a land-use tile set too, to show residential/retail/office/industrial/amenity/green space, as that will let people see what is missing/over-supplied/etc. from each area.

Getting Started

If you just want to get a static local version of the website on your network at localhost:4000 127.0.0.1:4000 you'll need a few components on your computer to make that happen

• Copy or git clone this repo.
• Descend into the repo's directory
• Install Jekyll and all it's dependencies like Ruby.
• Install Bundler which is a Ruby gem that will keep all the jekyll dependencies up to date. gem install bundler

• Run bundler bundle install and wait for it get all the dependencies

  Now serve up the webpage from the index.markdown file with bundle exec jekyll serve. You might want to do that in another terminal window with screen or something so you can leave it serving and then you can get on with customising it for yourself

The website should now be served locally at http://localhost:4000 or at http://127.0.0.1:4000

Using Your Own Map Background Tiles

If you want to make it pull in your own data you'll need to get a different instance of cyclOSM going as a starting point (partly because it's bike-focused, partly because it's documented...).

Refer to issue #13 for now.

Making a Version For Your City

This site is focused on Liverpool, but it should be fairly easy to spin up a version for somewhere else. You'd need to do something like:

1. Spin up an instance of OpenTripPlanner covering your area. As a starting point these are the steps we followed in creating the Liverpool version
2. Fork this repository, and point it at the OpenTripPlanner instance you set up in the previous step
3. Update the _data/areas.json file to contain the neighbourhoods/districts/whatever for your area. Finding the data to put into that doesn't require any coding ability, this is how we worked through that for Liverpool