‘News to me’: Inside the suburb flagged as Melbourne’s first walkable neighbourhood

Trucks and cars speed past the intersection of Eastfield and Bayswater roads in Croydon South. A sprawling car park on the corner services a strip of shops with slightly faded signs for a laundrette, fish and chip shop, cafe and pharmacy.

There’s not much to indicate that eight years ago the Eastfield shopping strip in Croydon South was designated as a pilot site for a 15-minute-city .

“That’s news to me,” says Ebony Talbot as she sits down to her coffee and breakfast at her mother’s cafe, the Eastfield Coffee Co, at a table on the footpath beside the car park.

Across the road is the green expanse of the Cheong Park oval, home of the South Croydon Football Club, and behind the shops is the concrete-lined basin of the Tarralla Creek.

Talbot has lived in the area for several years, and this is the first she’s heard of the shopping strip’s link to the 15-minute city concept, a principle that everything you need should be within a 15-minutes walk of your home – schools, shops, libraries, parks, transport, job opportunities and healthcare.

“It’s a nice area,” she says of Croydon South. “It’s a little bit sleepy. It’s very much a family vibe.”

French academic Carlos Moreno pioneered the concept of a 15-minute city in 2016. Nearly 100 mayors worldwide later embraced the concept as a way to help their cities recover from the COVID pandemic.

The timeframe is slightly fluid: 15-minute cities are also referred to in urban planning-speak as 20-minute neighbourhoods. In 2018, the Andrews government launched the 20-minute neighbourhood pilot program in Melbourne, selecting three neighbourhoods as pilots: Sunshine West in Brimbank City Council, Strathmore in Moonee Valley City Council, and Croydon South in the City of Maroondah.

Moreno will be one of the keynote speakers of The Age ’s Melbourne Assembly conference in October, presented in partnership with the University of Melbourne.

The conference will be Moreno’s first visit to Australia, but he devoted a chapter of his book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet , to Australia, by identifying Croydon South’s shopping strip as “a local hub of activity”.