Urban Villages: The Key to Sustainable Community Economic Development
True sustainability involves more than just environmental protection: it balances environmental, social and economic goals. There is plenty of guidance concerning how to increase environmental sustainability by reducing resource consumption and habitat degradation and a growing body of guidance for achieving social sustainability by creating healthier and more equitable communities, but there is less guidance on economic sustainability. Let’s start to fill that gap.
Economic development refers to progress toward a community’s economic goals such as increased employment, income, business activity, property development, and tax revenue. My research indicates that a very effective way to achieve these goals is to create urban villages.
What are Urban Villages?
Urban villages are compact, mixed-use, multimodal neighborhoods where most commonly-used services are easy to access by walking, bicycling, and micromodes (e-bikes and e-scooters). There are many types of villages. In rural areas they consist of small towns with 2,000 to 10,000 residents. In suburbs they include walkable, mixed-use commercial districts, sometimes developed around a transit station. In cities they include commercial districts and shopping streets (in England called “high streets”). Their development is sometimes called Smart Growth, New Urbanism, Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), or recently, 15-minute communities.
An urban village should have a Walk Score over 70, indicating that most errands can be accomplished without a car, as indicated below:
Walkscore Ratings 90–100 Walker’s Paradise.Daily errands do not require a car
70–89 Very Walkable.Most errands can be accomplished on foot
50–69 Somewhat Walkable.Some errands can be accomplished on foot
25–49 Car-Dependent.Most errands require a car
0–24 Car-Dependent.Almost all errands require a car