20 Minute Neighbourhoods
Leeds City Council - Local Plan Update Consultation
Introduction
As part of our Local Plan Update we’ve been exploring the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood - the idea that people should be able to reach most of the facilities that they need and value within a 20 minute walk - 10 minutes to walk there, and 10 minutes to walk home again. This page presents the work we have done so far.
How it works
With our consultant partners we have created a system that looks at walkable access to a range of facilities we think are essential for sustainable and local neighbourhoods.
We plotted the locations of these facilities on a map and created a 10-minute walk area around each one, based on a set of rules that use average walking speeds, road networks and public rights of way. Each type of facility was given a score (from 1-5) based on how important we think those facilities are to a sustainable local neighbourhood. The facilities and their scores are in the table below.
Next, we split up the district into lots of small hexagonal “cells” and counted the facilities within a 10 minute walk of each one. We added up the scores of those facilities and did a bit of maths to get an overall "weighted" score for each cell. This number shows us how well that little part of Leeds meets our definition of a 20-minute neighbourhood, and by putting all of the cells together on one map we can see how well the whole Leeds district measures up.
Results
The results are shown in two different ways on the maps below.
Heatmap: this map presents all of the cells in a spectrum of colour based on their weighted score.
Classes: this map divides the cells up into 4 accessibility categories - the best 25%, the worst 25%, and the two other quarters in between.
Both maps are interactive. Each individual cell can be selected to see its total accessibility score. Underneath that is a list of the facilities and their weighted contribution to the overall score.
Accessibility Maps
Further Information
More detailed information about our 20 Minute Neighbourhood work can be found at the links below:
