The 15-Minute City and Post-COVID Urban Development Ideals: Part One.
The 15-Minute City and Post-COVID Urban Development Ideals: Part One.
Cites around the world are emerging from the traumatic era of widespread shutdowns, widespread sickness, millions of deaths, and related public health crises that were caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Disruptive crises often spur utopian reform movements once the crisis ends. The COVID-19 crisis is no exception.
As the post-pandemic era begins, one of the most common reform themes inspiring city planners and urbanists around the world is the concept of the "15-minute city." This concept is widely credited to Carlos Moreno.
Moreno serves as a professor at the Paris Business School of Management, which is part of the Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.[i] His concept, "Ville du quart d'heure" was first coined during the COP21 Climate Conference, which was held in Paris in 2015. The concept was adopted by the Mayor of Paris in her successful reelection campaign several years later, and it was folded into the global reform ideals about Smart Cities and climate adaptation.
Simply put, the 15-minute city concept argues that cities should redevelop themselves so that all residents have access via 15 minutes of walking and/or bicycling to six major categories of urban experiences and services: 1) affordable residential options for all income levels; 2) employment opportunities; 3) retail services and related commercial options; 4) health care services; 5) lifelong educational opportunities; and 6) entertainment options.
The 15-minute city vision is a sharp departure from the style of car-dependency and mass transit dependency that has shaped and reshaped most densely populated cities since the middle of the twentieth century. It argues for a full embrace of the mixed-use development concept and applies that concept in a radically uniform manner throughout all parts of a city.
The result is a vision of the city as a series of densely populated and fully functional villages, or neighborhoods, that are easily walkable and bikeable. Each area would contain a wide spectrum of diverse residents as well as a wide spectrum of all six essential urban experiences and services. People would be free to move from one village or neighborhood to another if they choose, but no one would be required to go far beyond their own walkable or bikeable range in search of a high-quality source of any needed service.
On one hand, Moreno's 15-minute city concept is a radical departure from the status quo of most cities. Yet on the other hand, Moreno's concept harkens back to city life before it was transformed by the industrial revolution.
Until the invention of horse-drawn streetcars in the 1830s and 1840s, later replaced by electric streetcars before World War One, the dominant method of getting around every city in the World was by foot. All cities were "walking cities."
Yet the walking city experience in the past should not be romanticized. Densities were high yet zoning codes had not yet been invented. Sewers ran into the streets or directly into nearby streams and rivers, which were also the main sources of drinking water. Only those few who could afford a horse, a place to board it, and perhaps a carriage, were able to travel routinely beyond their own walking capacity. And those horses collectively left behind tons of manure every day on each city's streets. Few essential services were provided to anyone, regardless of where they lived and/or worked.
Conditions became even worse in most cities when large-scale factories -- many with thousands of workers -- were added to the urban landscape beginning in the 1880s and 1890s. Densities soared as new workers were squeezed into overcrowded and often squalid housing nearby the factory gates. Social tensions soared as new immigrants from other cultures mixed with rural refugees from the nearby countryside who came to the cities in search of new wage-paying work. Racial tensions also sparked, especially in the U.S. since many of those rural refugees were African American workers who were trying to escape the crushing effects of Jim Crow rural poverty and racial violence. Smokestacks belched noxious fumes (and unknown carcinogens), and factories dispersed untold toxins into nearby rivers and ground water sources.
In an era when most cities were ruthlessly controlled by small networks of powerful local elites, reform movements faced many barriers. The two groups who had the social authority to seek reform in most cities were also the two groups who benefitted most from the status quo.
The wealthiest city residents could afford to escape to nearby country homes, returning to the city for business and entertainment purposes when necessary. The nascent middle class, most of whom worked in the downtown headquarters and factory offices of the companies owned by the wealthiest elites, had fewer options. Their escape was to find a way to afford a house in one of the nearby "streetcar suburbs" that began to pop up once electric streetcars became more common. Few were willing to face the ire of their employers by joining local reform movements.
The mass production of cars after World War One expanded the options available to middle class office workers in cities from Berlin, London, and Paris to New York, Buenos Aires, and Cleveland. Cars allowed them to move further away from the central city, beyond the last stops of the streetcar lines, where lower density suburbs could be built, far away from the cultural influences they feared from working class immigrants and Black migrants.
It wasn't until after World War Two that working-class people were commonly able to start moving away from factories and using private cars for their daily commutes. They too voted with their cars and moved away from factories. Working class suburbs grew rapidly. But these new suburban spaces were highly segregated by race, and often segregated by ethnicity as well. Racially discriminatory wage levels within newly established unions, and racial exclusion policies in new governmental home-lending programs, reinforced racial segregation in working class suburbs just as it had done in middle-class suburbs.
When urban reform movements did begin taking hold in the 1960s and 1970s, the principles underlying reform did not challenge the overall framework of organizing urban, and then metropolitan, spaces around the physical separation of four basic services: residence, work, leisure, and circulation. Reformers also did little to challenge the class-based and racially based patterns of segregation that dominated the urban landscape.
Rather, they focused their efforts on improving access to the most important services for all people, regardless of where they worked or resided. Increasing mobility and managing the patterns of traffic circulation were argued to be important pillars of reform. Core services such as employment, health care, and entertainment could be centralized in specific places as long as all residents could be equitably brought to those service centers. Doing so by car was the most common way of increasing access.
The 15-minute city concept flips these reform principles upside down. Instead of focusing on bringing all people to specialized spaces where they can access services equitably, the 15-minute city concept seeks to decentralize the delivery of services and bring them to each place where people reside. This would entail a radical decentralization of previously centralized urban service areas.
Furthermore, the 15-minute city concept seeks to achieve that radical decentralization of services without reducing the quality of services that are provided in each area. In this way, the 15-minute city seeks to break down the entrenched residential patterns of class and racial segregation within cities by ensuring that uniformly high levels of all services are made available in close proximity to all city residents.
This is where the 15-minute city concept intersects with the Smart City reform movement and the broader reforms that are being enabled by the so-called ICT (information and communications technology) revolution.
Part Two of this essay will discuss how the ICT revolution is an essential component of the 15-minute city concept, and how some cities are beginning to achieve important milestones to move forward with this new concept. But how universal are the aspirations of the 15-minute city movement? What kinds of cities can benefit, and what kinds of cities will be most challenged to realize the promised benefits of this new, utopian vision for high-quality, equitable urban life experiences?
Bob Gleeson
[i] Moreno has a very unusual background for someone who has become a champion of urban design and planning reform. Born in rural Columbia, he won political refugee status in France at the age of twenty. He studied mathematics, artificial intelligence, and robotics with a focus on creating feedback control methods within complex production systems for aircraft parts. He later designed steam control systems for nuclear power reactors before gaining venture capital to start up his own firm. After selling his firm he began adapting his expertise to the Smart City movement, which led him to become involved in urban reform efforts. He was recently honored with the prestigious Obel Award for architectural achievement.