Five Features Every Neighborhood Needs - TOWN PLANNING STUFF, Ep. 5 

I want to redesign existing cities and this is very useful

Thanks for letting us know you found this useful, Maxwell. What sorts of town planning content are you looking for in 2021? We're producing the second season of Town Planning Stuff now.

Thanks for your encouragement! Please subscribe and share these videos with everyone you know :-) Are there any topics you'd like to see covered in future episodes?

@@vdoverhokie if it's possible can you create a video of explaining how some of the world's succesful planners planned a well inclusive public spaces and the architecture in those spaces.

No, it's not that simple. What happens when you need emergency medical service (it's not an if... everybody needs that from time to time) and the next hospital is 30 minutes drive away? That means you won't get to see a doctor for at least an hour... if you are lucky. Urbanists are talking about all the easy stuff like walkways and they never mention the hard stuff like employment, shopping and healthcare.

Thanks for asking. We use all sorts of tools, including Sketchup, Lumion, and other 3-d modeling programs, as well as Adobe AfterEffects for certain motion graphics. Are you also modeling neighborhoods?

Neighbourhoods are a basic building block of a city, or a town. In 1929 Clarence Perry documented what he called the neighbourhood unit, and his diagram remains very useful. That diagram has been updated several times since, including this one from Doug Farr's book "Sustainable Urbanism." It works like this; when you have one neighbourhood standing alone among the farms, or along the shore, or in the woods, or the wilderness, that is a village. When growth leads to several of these villages positioned tightly together, you get a town, and with even more neighbourhoods, a city. This way both small towns and big cities like; Paris, or New York, or Washington are all cities made of neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods vary a lot but they have five basic characteristics. We keep these five things in mind when planning a new neighbourhood, or when carefully updating, or restoring an existing one. First, a proper neighbourhood has an identifiable centre and edge. You know when you have arrived at the heart of a neighbourhood for instance. Second it is limited in size, about a five minute walk from centre to edge. That is an easy distance to navigate without driving. Next, it has a mix of land usage, and building types, and housing types, and prices. That variety allows for some of life's basic daily needs to be satisfied within the neighbourhood. An old rule of thumb says, "If you can buy a quart of milk within five minutes walk, that is a more livable neighbourhood." The neighbourhood should have an integrated network of walkable streets. Last, it should have some of it's best sites reserved for civic purposes, like public buildings, and gathering places. Neighbourhoods, they are number five on my list of town planing stuff everyone needs to know. For more information, visit the Dover Kohl youtube channel, or doverkohl.com, or take a look at Doug Farr's book "Sustainable Urbanism" I think I am spot on with speech to text. According to a Google search, Sustainable Urbanism is easy to find if you are interested.

And now you probably live in a city where variety is five minutes walk away. As opposed to suburbia in which mickie D’s and a terrible American grocery store is 20 minutes by car away.

@@guyfawkes8873 Not quite. American cities are not pedestrian friendly, either. Truthfully... nothing was ever pedestrian friendly. That's just a stupid idea of some people who can't accept that personal transportation is one of the greatest inventions, ever. Delusions, even those that are meant well, are not solutions.