Comment #5143

2025-01-31T22:24:43Z

This post has not let go of me. Indeed, if the 15-minute city was the large-scale confinement described, it would be an awful idea.

But that's not what it is. If you want to spend eight minutes listening to Carlos Moreno, who first popularized the idea, explain the 15-minute city, that might help, but I'll summarize it.

Dr. Heying's first paragraph is a good start. The idea is to minimize the travel time necessary for basic necessities: living, working, commerce, healthcare, education, and entertainment, thus saving resources on a daily basis.

However, Dr. Heying seems to have grossly misunderstood both the motivation and the implementation of the concept. People will not live like dogs chained to a post in the yard. They will live like cats that don't leave the neighborhood because it contains plenty of mice, birds, trees, and kindly people. And the idea is not to have individual little self-contained 15-minute (circular?) pockets, but simply a good distribution of services across the city so that, no matter where you touch down (or ascend from the metro), none of the services mentioned are far away.

Obviously, this concept best works in sufficiently densely populated areas. (That's why it's the 15-minute city.) It is a marked departure from the concept of having a central business district that welcomes crowds in the morning and is empty by dinner. It faces challenges in dealing with existing built structures wisely and economically and particularly attractive areas may well price out many people in the way upscale neighborhoods do. There are unsolved issues that will have to be dealt with.

But the following are not issues I anticipate in 15-minute cities:

travel restrictions

close tesselation of houses of worship, operas, sports stadiums and similar large facilities

splitting up of large central facilities into lots of little parts

forced relocation of inhabitants

forced assignation of medical providers

Let me briefly explain why.

There will be no travel restrictions because it's not necessary. If you want to leave your neighborhood, you do that. You can commute cross-town if you like: it's your choice to spend your time like that. The city planners are in the meantime working on making your neighborhood more attractive. What might feel like travel restriction are roadways with more space allotted to bicycles and pedestrians and less space allotted to cars and parking.

Large facilities will not be duplicated every fifteen walking minutes. A short consideration of their size alone should make it obvious that if that was done, they would fill the city all by themselves.

The concept does call for smaller-size neighborhood entertainment options, which I assume are restaurants, community centers, small parks, boutique theaters, and the like. Again, as you rightly point out, it makes no sense to divide a municipal museum into two dozen hole-in-the-wall tiny museums that each house a different subset of the original museum. Paris, in its attempt to pursue the 15-minute city concept, will not place bits and pieces of the Notre Dame in a hexagonal grid across the city. This is an unfounded fear.

And people will still get to decide where they live, under very similar constraints as today. Any forced relocation to bring family members closer would soon result in the entire world living in a single city, given just how closely I am related to a Japanese rice farmer or a Nigerian businessman.

Finally, the whole concept is there to offer useful services nearby, but if you prefer other services, you are free to travel farther. No GP will have a monopoly on all the people that live closer to him than any other GP.

All these fears are of a concept that is nightmarish indeed--outlandishly so. I wish Oxford had simply set up a retractable bollard on those roads they wanted to limit traffic on. They could have given taxi drivers and emergency vehicles a remote to lower the bollards. However, as good stewards of public funds, they opted for the cheaper approach of setting up a few signs and cameras—thus fuelling fears of total surveillance. But many of the nightmarish conclusions mentioned don't even justifiably derive from Oxford's cameras. For instance, what was prohibited was using a selection of roads, not traveling to another part of Oxford. You could get to the other end of Oxford, just not using those select roads. Using the cameras to fine people isn't much different from using cameras to catch speeders.

You ask a good question: Who dreams up these nightmares?

Well, cui bono? Who benefits from scaring Sursumcorda and her readership?

Maybe the highly intelligent person who misrepresents facts and misunderstands ideas and thus shows that she can see past the simple beginnings of nefarious schemes? Whose article garners attention and gets shared online? Who can thus burnish her reputation as an intellectual maverick, free and independent, questioning everything?

Let me finish by sharing this link to a world map of proximity indices for most larger cities. (In the US, they seem to have mapped counties, like this.) And I'd encourage readers to entertain new ideas like the 15-minute city instead of dismissing them with dreamed-up nightmares. Perhaps more walkable cities would help make America healthy again?

And maybe people scaring you don't have your best interests at heart.

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Comment #5143