Surrey’s 15-Minute Neighbourhood Vision Gets a GIS-Powered Boost
How do you turn a long-standing urban vision into measurable progress? Surrey’s planning team is doing just that—using GIS to support livable, walkable neighbourhoods. From sidewalk planning to grocery access and council reporting, spatial data is driving smarter decisions citywide.
Surrey is growing fast. Its population, now around 680,000, is expected to top one million by 20421. In peak years, as many as 15,000 people put down roots in this scenic B.C. city annually. That rapid growth has put pressure on housing, transportation, and public services—all while increasing the need for climate resilience.
To manage this growth thoughtfully, Surrey is embracing the 15-minute neighbourhood concept. The goal is to support access to daily needs—like groceries, schools, parks, and transit—for most residents within a short walk from home. “The idea of a community where you can live, work, and play has many benefits, including reducing driving and protecting environmentally sensitive land,” says Don Buchanan, who worked as a Community Planner at the City of Surrey at the time.
But for years, the vision was more aspirational than actionable, since planners lacked clear benchmarks to translate the vision into measurable outcomes. Gaps in available data, aging infrastructure in older neighbourhoods, and limited resources that had to be carefully prioritized all made it difficult to track progress.
Strategic Framework
ArcGIS as a Planning Catalyst
In 2023, the city upgraded its existing GIS capabilities by purchasing Esri’s ArcGIS Business Analyst, a tool that blends rich demographic and business data with map-based analytics. While GIS had already played a role in Surrey’s planning work, this upgrade gave the city new power to turn its 15-minute neighbourhood vision into reality—making it possible to move from high-level ideas to a practical framework grounded in data, repeatable analysis, and measurable outcomes.
“Purchasing Business Analyst was a game-changer,” says Buchanan. “We originally bought it as a one-off for this project, but quickly realized how powerful it is for both analysis and visualization. Someone with technical skills can dive deep into the data, but even non-technical users can get tremendous value from the way it presents information.”
Traditionally, service areas for key amenities were measured “as the crow flies”—a straight-line distance to an amenity. But this method ignored the realities of road networks, sidewalks, and other potential barriers to accessibility. With ArcGIS, Surrey can now run more precise, network-based walkability analyses. By combining spatial data on land use, population, infrastructure, and key services, planners can identify gaps and forecast growth.
“GIS has allowed the city to become more proactive than reactive,” says Planning Analyst Jack Shi. “Surrey’s size meant we used to wait for individual service requests—like fixing a sidewalk only after someone called it in. Now, if we have the resources to repair ten kilometres of sidewalk, we can use data to target the areas where that work will have the biggest impact.”
Access to Key Amenities: With vs. Without Sidewalk Considerations
A Ground-Level Look at Walkable Food Access
Like schools and transit, grocery stores are critical infrastructure, and their accessibility plays a major role in shaping liveable communities. To better understand food access across the city, Surrey used ArcGIS Business Analyst alongside its own business licensing database to build a detailed grocery store inventory and classification.
A seemingly simple question—what counts as a grocery store?—turned out to be more complex than expected. One of the project’s key innovations was assessing each store based on the Canada Food Guide’s three core food groups: grains, proteins, and fruits and vegetables. Stores were scored from one to three depending on the variety of items they carried. The city then ran multiple service area analyses to map which households had walkable access to all three food groups—even if those items came from different locations.
Sidewalks, Equity, and Real Access
This work led to detailed maps that not only showed proximity to essential services, but whether people could realistically walk to them. One set of maps highlighted access to all three food groups; another layered in sidewalk access.
Mapping sidewalks wasn’t simple. Many older neighbourhoods lacked updated data, especially areas built before sidewalk construction was mandated. The team filled those gaps by combining aerial imagery with manual checks, while also navigating ongoing policy discussions—for example, determining that local roads may only require a sidewalk on one side, whereas arterial roads should have sidewalks on both sides.
To incorporate an equity lens, planners also added demographic layers, including data on renters, recent immigrants, and Indigenous populations. The result was a much clearer, more grounded picture of walkability—one that reflected how people actually move through and experience their neighbourhoods. These GIS insights now directly support internal performance goals around livable, equitable, and connected communities.
Public Engagement with Visual Tools
Public engagement around the 15-minute neighbourhood concept has been overwhelmingly positive in Surrey. “People love the idea of having things close to them,” says Buchanan. “Their eyes light up when we talk about it at events. It’s not about forcing anyone to do anything—it’s about making daily life easier.”
At open houses, the city used large-format maps—created with ArcGIS’s powerful visualization tools—to show walkability gaps and nearby services, helping residents understand the city’s planning rationale and see how decisions are grounded in real data.
For example, Surrey’s Parks division has been using these tools to help them meet park service targets and identify gaps, which have been very helpful to engage the public in developing new community plans. Their current target is to have a park within a 500m walk of all residents, and ArcGIS allows very accurate visualization of where that metric is being met and where gaps are. Park planners can then analyze the gaps and propose future parks to fill them. ArcGIS has been integral to simplifying this and visualizing it for easy analysis and communication to the public.
Childcare Walkability Dashboard
A Shared Language for Planning
Internally, the project has fostered collaboration across city departments. Shared datasets and mapping tools have created a common language for discussing priorities between planning, transportation, parks, and other teams.
“On the land use side, GIS is helping us understand what makes a 15-minute neighbourhood work—and it’s allowing us to shape policy using a metrics-based approach,” says Shi. “In short: less intuition, more data. It’s also a valuable tool for transportation capital planning.”
Transportation teams, for example, are identifying sidewalk and transit gaps around schools, grocery stores, and bus stops—and tying those gaps to population data to understand how many people would benefit from improvements in a given area.
These GIS insights now feed into the city’s performance dashboard, supporting three of Surrey’s six top-tier KPIs. By reporting on walkable access to parks, transit, grocery stores, and schools, the city provides clear metrics to guide council decisions and strategic funding.
Refining the Tools and Expanding Access
Surrey’s planning team continues to refine its GIS approach—not just through better tools, but through ongoing policy discussions and collaboration across departments. To improve internal coordination, the city hopes to develop a centralized web map that would allow staff across departments to explore walkability data and service gaps independently.
“Right now, departments come to us with their project ideas, and we run the analysis,” says Shi. “But ideally, they’d be able to explore the data themselves.”
Looking ahead, the team plans to share insights with more departments and refine models to account for overlooked walkable spaces—like heritage highways with pedestrian access.
By bringing together strong data and thoughtful policy, Surrey is turning long-standing goals into measurable progress—and shaping neighbourhoods that are more connected, equitable, and truly reflective of community needs.
[1] https://www.surrey.ca/news-events/news/surrey-launches-2024-economic-strategy
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