Nearly a century before the 15-minute city became a shorthand for walkable urbanism, American sociologist and planner Clarence Perry was asking how close the things people need should be to where they live. Formalized in 1929 as The Neighborhood Unit: A Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community, part of the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, Perry’s model organized housing, schools, parks, civic facilities, and local services around a pedestrian catchment.
It was intended to protect residential life from the growing dangers of automobile traffic, creating a stronger sense of neighborhood community. Its legacy, however, is more complicated than the contemporary revival of proximity planning suggests. The same spatial boundaries designed to make neighborhoods safer and more coherent could also reinforce social and racial segregation.
Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit, 1928 via Wikimedia Commons
walking distance turns into a planning formula
Perry developed his ideas against the upheavals of early twentieth-century American cities. Industrialization and rapid urban growth were transforming traditional street networks, while the growing presence of private automobiles made streets increasingly dangerous for pedestrians, particularly children. Perry imagined the neighborhood as a relatively self-contained social and spatial system within the larger metropolis. His thinking was influenced by his observations of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York, a planned community designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and developed with support from the Russell Sage Foundation. There, Perry saw a model for organizing residential life around shared spaces and local institutions.
Perry proposed a population of approximately 5,000 to 6,000 residents, enough to support an elementary school serving around 1,000 to 1,200 pupils. The school would form the civic center of the neighborhood, surrounded by community facilities, recreational areas, and open space. The physical unit covered approximately 160 acres, or 65 hectares. This established a walking catchment of roughly a quarter to half a mile between the residential perimeter and the central civic facilities. Parks and playgrounds were intended to occupy approximately 10 percent of the unit.
Traffic was pushed toward the edges. Arterial roads would carry regional and commuter movement around the neighborhood, while internal streets were arranged to discourage through-traffic. Curving residential roads and cul-de-sacs were intended to create quieter environments for domestic life and children’s play. Commercial activity was similarly concentrated at the perimeter, where shops could serve local residents while remaining connected to larger traffic routes. Perry was attempting to make the physical city correspond to the everyday routines of family life, particularly the journey to school and the independent movement of children.
A diagram of Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit, illustrating the spatiality of the core principles of the concept, from the New York Regional Survey, Vol 7. 1929
From neighborhood unit to suburban superblock
Perry’s proposal belonged to a wider movement toward decentralized, human-scale planning. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model had already imagined smaller communities organized around shared infrastructure and green space, while Progressive Era planners were exploring the relationship between physical environments and social life.
In 1929, architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright translated many of these principles into built form at Radburn, New Jersey. Its superblock arrangement separated pedestrian paths from automobile circulation and placed continuous interior parkland within the residential fabric.
Perry’s model subsequently became institutionalized through professional planning, housing policy, and municipal development. During the postwar suburban expansion, the neighborhood unit became a repeatable template for master-planned residential communities, helping establish the bounded neighborhood as one of the dominant forms of twentieth-century suburban development, but its success also exposed a fundamental problem: the assumption that physical design could produce particular forms of social behavior.
Greenway Terrace, Forest Hills Gardens. Queens, NY | image by Carol Betsch, 2001
The problem with designing community
The neighborhood unit was rooted in a form of physical determinism, the belief that spatial arrangement could help engineer social relationships and recreate the intimacy of smaller communities within the industrial metropolis, an assumption that became increasingly difficult to sustain as cities grew more mobile and socially complex. People’s work, education, friendships, cultural interests, and family relationships rarely remained within a single neighborhood. Metropolitan life depended on movement between multiple districts rather than on complete self-containment. More seriously, the neighborhood unit could provide a spatial framework for exclusion.
Reginald Isaacs’ 1948 critique pointed to a problem with the way the neighborhood unit divided the city. By setting clear boundaries around each neighborhood and placing an elementary school at its center, the model could make it easier to separate residents by race, culture, and income. Roads, green spaces, and school catchment areas were meant to protect the neighborhood, but they could also act as barriers between different communities. The problem, then, was not proximity itself. It was the way proximity was tied to fixed boundaries. Once schools, housing, and services were organized within these defined areas, those boundaries could also help produce more socially and economically uniform neighborhoods.
Jane Jacobs later challenged another central assumption of the model. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she argued that urban safety and vitality depended less on insulating residential areas from activity than on maintaining active streets, mixed uses, dense networks, and continuous pedestrian presence. For Jacobs, the city worked through permeability. Shops, homes, sidewalks, workplaces, and public spaces needed to overlap. Her concept of ‘eyes on the street’ offered an alternative to the neighborhood unit’s emphasis on protection through separation.
Airview. Radburn, New Jersey – safety film negatives, Library of Congress
The 15-minute city changes the metric from space to time
Carlos Moreno’s 15-minute city, introduced in 2016, returns to Perry’s basic proposition that essential activities should be close to where people live, but it changes the metric. Perry’s neighborhood unit is fundamentally spatial. Its boundaries are established through acreage, population, road hierarchy, and walking distance. Moreno’s chrono-urbanism instead treats time as a primary measure of urban accessibility.
The 15-minute city seeks to make six essential functions, that include living, working, supplying, caring, learning, and enjoying, accessible within roughly 15 minutes by walking or cycling, imagining a polycentric city in which multiple neighborhoods contain overlapping combinations of uses.
Where Perry concentrated commercial activity at neighborhood edges, contemporary proximity planning favors mixed-use streets and active ground floors. Where Perry’s model sought to protect an internal residential realm, the 15-minute city depends on permeable networks and multiple forms of mobility. The change is therefore not simply from a five- or 10-minute walk to a 15-minute one but a shift from designing a fixed physical container to reorganizing the temporal experience of urban life.
Perry’s neighborhood assigns relatively stable functions to specific spaces: the school is the school, the park is the park, and commerce belongs largely at the perimeter. Contemporary chrono-urbanism increasingly asks how the same infrastructure can support different activities at different times. Schoolyards can also become public recreational spaces outside school hours. Streets can shift between vehicular movement, pedestrian activity, dining, and public events. Civic buildings can accommodate cultural and community uses after their conventional working day. This temporal flexibility increases the effective capacity of existing urban infrastructure without necessarily requiring additional land and also responds to changes in how cities function. Remote work and digital connectivity have weakened the division between residential districts and centralized employment centers. The neighborhood can become a place not only to sleep, but also to work, socialize, learn, shop, and participate in civic life.
the Caoyang New Village in Shanghai is based on the neighborhood unit concept | Fayhoo, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Proximity is only progressive if it is shared
The most important lesson from Perry’s model is that proximity alone does not guarantee a better city. A neighborhood can contain a school, park, grocery store, civic center, and local shops within walking distance while remaining socially exclusive. Housing costs, zoning, infrastructure, and uneven public investment determine who can access those amenities and who is pushed beyond them.
The 15-minute city inherits Perry’s belief that everyday life should not depend on long motorized journeys, but it has the opportunity to reject the cellular logic of the neighborhood unit. Its more ambitious goal is not to create perfectly self-contained communities, but to make essential resources broadly available while maintaining strong connections between neighborhoods.
Today, almost a century after Perry formalized the neighborhood unit, the central question is how a city can distribute services, public space, mobility, and time so that proximity becomes a shared urban condition. Perry imagined the metropolis as a collection of carefully bounded communities. The 15-minute city proposes a network of overlapping local worlds. The continuity between the two lies in the belief that urban quality begins close to home. The difference lies in what happens when the boundary disappears.
the superblocks model explained. Urban Mobility Plan of Barcelona 2013-2018
This article is part of designboom’s MODES OF HABITATION chapter, exploring how the spaces we inhabit can reshape the ways we live together. Discover more stories rethinking domesticity, shared living, and the many forms a home can take here.
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