Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
Green within three minutes’ walk
Put an open public green within about three minutes’ walk of every house, large enough to be used and not just looked at.
≤ 750 ft (≈ 230 m) from every house
At Vauban the “green spines” between the housing clusters run from the central avenue down to the stream, so that no house is more than a short walk from open ground; the old trees of the barracks were kept in them.
Related rules
On an equator-facing window, make the overhang deep enough to shade the whole window from the high noon sun of summer, and no deeper, so that the low winter sun passes beneath it into the room.
noon sun altitude = 90° − latitude ± 23.44° · overhang D = window height ⁄ tan(summer altitude)
Place heavy materials (concrete, stone, brick, earth) where the winter sun falls on them inside the insulated envelope, so that they absorb heat by day and give it back at night.
Make neighbourhoods compact, pedestrian-friendly and mixed in use, with a clear centre and edge, so that daily needs lie within a short walk: about a quarter of a mile, five minutes, from centre to edge.
centre to edge ≈ ¼ mile ≈ 400 m ≈ 5 minutes on foot
Lay out the rows east–west so that the long, glazed face of every house turns to the south (in the northern hemisphere), taking the low winter sun and shading easily from the high summer sun.
Set the gap between rows so that the shadow of each row at noon on the chosen winter day falls short of the glazed face of the row behind it.
gap = H ÷ tan α, with α = 90° − latitude − 23.4° at the winter solstice (at 48° N, α ≈ 18.6°: gap ≈ 3 H)
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Green within three minutes’ walk”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/accessible-green. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.