Figure 4.1 Accessibility standards for key services

Figure 5.1Accessibility standards for key services

Sustainable residential urban areas should include for example local shops, nursery, primary school, community center, post office or pub in the closest neighborhood up to 1 km. In further zone up to 2 km secondary school, health center, leisure center or shopping mall should be located. Larger park, hospital or public institutions like museum or city hall in most cases can be located around 5 km from some residential units, however, lower frequency of visiting these places is not against sustainable patterns of everyday life in these areas. The most crucial aspect is to keep all the necessary services and workplaces, as well as places for entertainment and relaxation which are commonly visited more often in the area or closest neighborhood of residential buildings. The ideal is the distance that we can easily cover on foot in 5-10 minutes, which corresponds to 300-800 m (walking distance). They should be within such a radius from every place of residence locating basic retail outlets, clinics, nurseries, kindergartens, primary schools, meeting places for the local community, widely available sports facilities and small gardens and parks. A well-planned and designed residential area is an environment in which, moving in a relatively small area, we can live life to the full, realizing our everyday needs and ambitions [2]. Therefore, there is a need to calculate some basic indicators characterizing local communities in order to guarantee proper standards of public services. For example while building a new school it is possible to assume how many students can use it in a comfortable way. Knowing this number and the approximate number of kids per household we can analyze from how far student will have to come to reach a school. Lower density will result in the same number of kids on bigger area which will not support walking to school. As a result parents can be more eager to use private cars to transport their kids to school, which increase traffic on roads and emission of air pollutants. This example is applicable to many other objects and public services.