What is Walkability?

And why has Australia banned it?

13th Dec 2025

Walkable areas are those where you can walk to meet most of your daily needs - shops, restaurants and public transport. They are areas which operate on a human scale, and lead to reduced noise and air pollution and encourage social interaction. Walkable areas are reliably the most popular areas of cities around the world. Walkability can exist at nearly any scale, from New York and Tokyo to medieval European towns.

The following is based off Jane Jacobs' 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, widely considered the most influential book in urban planning and design today. This looks at 3 of the factors of diversity that she outlines as integral to great cities and how they contribute to walkability.

Mixed Use

Mixed use areas reduce the distance between where people live and where they want to be, when shops, cafes and restaurants are integrated into residential areas, those people have to travel less far in order together to those places.

The purpose of cities is to provide services for people, whether this be shops, cafes, restaurants, sports or workplaces. Within a city, people need to travel between these, and to make the distances shorter between them, they need to be located near to each other. This means cities shouldn’t be planned with explicit uses separate from each other, where we live shouldn’t be separated from where we shop or eat.

Aerial view of Mill Park, Melbourne, with residential and commercial areas shaded as separate single-use blocks — Single-use areas of residential only (orange), and commercial only (blue). Mill Park, Melbourne.

In Mill Park, single-use zoning vastly extends the walking distances, and large areas of car parking make it unpleasant for anyone who tried. This is a common suburb design throughout Australia.

Aerial view of Burwood, Sydney, where shops and housing sit together in the same streets — Mixed use area in Burwood, Sydney.

By contrast, Burwood has integrated land uses, with residential, commercial and transport all mixed together, reducing distances for everyone and encouraging business activity.

Small blocks

Smaller blocks benefit cities by making the distances between places shorter, and through increasing the amount of street interfaces available.

They provide many more opportunities for shops and businesses, and making housing being built better utilise the lot through not needing access space. Small blocks not only makes walking distances shorter, but feel much shorter due to less unnecessary deviations.

Aerial view of Homebush, Sydney, showing large street blocks with few routes through them — In Homebush, Sydney, large block sizes mean much longer walking distances than the direct distance.

Aerial view of Richmond, Melbourne, showing a fine grid of small street blocks — In Richmond, Melbourne, small blocks reduce walking distances and make more routes viable.

The Richmond example also shows how many different routes with the same distance could be taken, meaning more different places could be visited on the way, without inconveniencing the walker.

High concentration

Increased concentration of people and businesses makes a city more walkable. Higher populations combined with mixed use allow this to happen.

If we look use an example of a shop that requires 10,000 people to support it’s operations, we can see how density dramatically affects the number of people who can easily walk to it.

At a typical suburban density of 2,500 people per square kilometre, this shop would need 4 kilometres squared to support it.

Diagram of one shop and its 800 metre walking catchment across a low-density suburb, reaching only a small part of the area

Only 16% of people are within an 800m walk here.

If we raise that density to a typical medium density amount of 10,000 people per square kilometre, 4 of these type of shops could be supported in this area.

Diagram of four shops and their 800 metre walking catchments across a medium-density suburb, reaching most of the area

Spread out in this way, these leads to 64% of people being within an 800m walk.

The Australian Context

In Australia, around 70-80% of our cities are zoned to only allow for detached housing. In these areas it is illegal to build anything except a detached house.

This high prevalence of low-density, single use form of zoning means few walkable areas exist outside of inner city areas.

The driving mode share in Australia reflects this, with 70% of trips in Melbourne, 75% in Canberra and 80% in Brisbane involving driving.

These zoning rules were introduced after World War II in the 1951 Sydney Cumberland Plan and 1954 Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme. These were heavily influenced by the United States' functional zoning system, which envisioned the car and detached house as the future of cities.

To improve walkability, Australia needs to adopt widespread mixed use, medium-density zoning policies.