For urban planning, as long as you define a specific goal for a 15-minute exercise, you can actually get somewhere. The issue here isn’t that the time is too short. The issue is that the goal is too vague. Many people will open up a map, pick a neighborhood, think for a minute or two about density or walkability, and then close the map and do nothing else. That exercise is truly a waste of time. A more useful exercise would be to open up a map, pick a neighborhood, think for a minute or two about density or walkability, draw something on the map, write a paragraph or two about what you drew, and pose one question to yourself to answer the following day. As long as you’re doing something tangible, even 15 minutes a day eventually adds up to something.
So here’s a good way to structure a 15-minute exercise: Pick one very small area to study. This could be a block, an intersection, or even just a segment of a single street. Then pick one theme to investigate. You could look at the pedestrian network, the configuration of building edges, the location of parks and other open spaces, the rhythm of street frontages, or the placement of driveways and other access points. It’s very important to pick only one theme at a time, because urban planning can get very muddled if you try to simultaneously analyze traffic circulation, building massing, public life and land use patterns. With a 15-minute exercise, it’s much better to drill down just one theme very deeply rather than try to superficially cover a number of themes at the same time.
One very common error that people make when they practice urban planning in 15-minute increments is that they use the time to read about the subject rather than to study it. Reading is a fine way to hone your instincts, but if you want to develop your skills then you need to observe, notate and revise. One good way to correct for this is to make sure that every 15-minute exercise results in the production of at least one tangible object. This could be a sketch of a block, a series of circles around dead building edges, a pencil mark indicating where you’d like to see a stronger street edge, or even just a paragraph where you compare and contrast two different street corners and describe why you find one more successful than the other.
If you find that you’re getting overwhelmed during these exercises, don’t give up. Instead, just refine what you’re trying to do. If you find that a full city block is too much to handle, try focusing on just the corners. If an entire park seems too much to redesign, try just focusing on the edges. If a network of bus routes and bike lanes looks like too much to untangle, try focusing on just one single route that somebody might take from a point of origin to a point of destination. Refining your task down to something smaller isn’t cheating or taking a shortcut. It’s just another way of defining what the key planning issue is. I’ve seen a number of people who were initially struggling with these sorts of exercises start to make tremendous progress once they stopped trying to analyze every single study area as if it were a comprehensive master plan.
All of these short daily exercises can actually add up to something much bigger than just filling a few spare moments in your day. They can help you develop a routine, and that routine can in turn help you start to see cities and streets in a different way. You’ll start to notice street walls and the way they do or don’t define a public space. You’ll start to notice which doors are entrances and which aren’t. You’ll notice gaps in the street edge, setbacks that don’t contribute anything and movement patterns that don’t seem to make any sense. Most importantly, a short daily practice will help you stop putting so much pressure on yourself to create something brilliant every time you sit down to study. You’ll stop waiting for the perfect hour-long or half-day block of time to really dig in, and you’ll just start looking, drawing and coming back tomorrow to try and develop your ideas a little bit further.
