Twelve Minutes From Anywhere
A planning idea that spread across a hundred cities in five years is now colliding with the thing that actually determines proximity: who can afford to live nearby.
The proposition is simple enough to fit on a poster, which is a large part of why it travelled: everything a person needs regularly should be reachable within a short walk or cycle. Schools, groceries, healthcare, work, green space. Stated that way it is difficult to object to, and almost nobody has.
The difficulty appears in implementation, and it is always the same difficulty. Proximity is a property of a person and a location together, not of a location alone. A neighbourhood where everything is twelve minutes away is, for that reason, a desirable neighbourhood, and desirable neighbourhoods price out precisely the households for whom a car is the most burdensome expense.
The measurement trap
Most implementations measure amenity access geographically: draw a catchment, count the facilities inside it, publish the score. This is straightforward, auditable, and systematically blind to the question of who lives in the catchment. A district can improve its score substantially while the residents it was intended to help move somewhere with a worse one.
We improved the indicator by twenty per cent and displaced the population it was measuring. Both statements are in the same report.
Where it has worked
The cases that hold up share one feature, and it is not a planning feature. They have a large enough stock of price-regulated housing that improving a neighbourhood does not automatically change who lives in it. Where that stock exists, proximity planning does what it says. Where it does not, it functions as an amenity-led upgrading programme with a walkability vocabulary.
- Measure access by household, not by geography, and publish the distribution rather than the average.
- Sequence tenure protection before amenity investment, not alongside it.
- Treat displacement as a project risk with an owner, not as an externality noted in an annex.
None of this makes the idea wrong. It makes it incomplete in a way that its popularity has obscured. The twelve minutes were never the hard part.