It must be noted that although the illustration suggests ‘local jobs. It was clarified from the interviews with officials (James Mant) that it should interpreted as promoting local retail services and thus local jobs, and also while provisions for co-working spaces shall be provided in community hubs, it may still mean that people might move out of 20 minute neighbourhoods for job commutes. (Mant, 2020; Municipality of Melbourne, 2017; The State of Victoria Department of Environment, Land, 2019)
The official documents suggest that local scale of neighbourhoods represent an apt scale to meet the basic needs of citizens, promoting walkability and engagement in planning processes. A wide array of local services at walkable distance shall benefit not only minimise transport trips but also enable social cohesion.
In terms of planning, this 20-minute time distance is calculated from the research undertaken by the local administrations which concluded that people are comfortable to walk 10 minutes for a trip, thus in 20 minutes residents should be able to perform round trip to a service. In spatial terms, this 10-minute radius translates to a distance of 800m to local services. According to the city officials, this 20-minute walk is also supported by the research on obesity which suggests that at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise should be performed by an individual everyday and thus the name. (Shannon et al., 2019; Thrift et al., 2020) The structural feature of the 20-minute neighbourhood are the ‘Neighbourhood Activity Centres’ (NAC) which are the co-location hubs and community anchor points for provision of retail services, community hubs, schools and also act as public transit hubs. These hubs are to be designed with relatively high density to justify the economics of service provision and be the focus of decision making on local assets. (Geography Teachers’ Association of Victoria, 2018; Pisano, 2020; Pozoukidou & Chatziyiannaki, 2021; Streets Alive, 2020) (Refer figure 23) It is implicit that the role and function of every NAC varies based on its location, size and socio-economic context within the metropolitan region. In order to support range of activities, these NACs should be high density developments and should be mixed use.(Stanley & Stanley, 2014) To co-ordinate the localisation of services and urban functioned in the NAC and the neighbourhood units with respect to the densities to be created, a liveability matrix is created with the intention to guide the local councils. Accordingly, it is observed that the NAC should have minimum 25 dwellings per hectare to accommodate the selected services. Table 2 illustrates the important components of the Liveability matrix. (Badland et al., 2019)
3.2.3. Strategies for spatial proximity The strategy for spatial management of Melbourne is job-focuses polycentric constellation and liveability of communities through 20-minute neighbourhoods. The former proposes creation of new six nationally significant employment clusters outside the 68
