15-Minute Cities are old wine in a new bottle
Unwarranted, unworkable, unnecessary
15-minute cities are nothing but old wine in a new bottle. The current international furore doesn’t change the fact they are a fad; unwarranted, unworkable, and unnecessary.
The concept is simple: urban areas are (re)planned to ensure most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling within a 15-minute radius. It’s about organising urban neighbourhoods, not entire cities, into semi-independent villages.
The utopians and dystopians are both deeply invested, with the war of ideas playing out daily across numerous online and social media spaces. Those inclined towards utopian thinking see the 15-minute city as an overdue return to a local way of life and an essential component of sustainability and low carbon living. Their visions are of vibrant local areas, multi-generational life on the streets, and better social cohesion. It all harks back to notions of the classic neighbourhoods of Paris or London, or the mid-century New York captured documented by Jane Jacobs.
For the dystopians, the concept is the thin end of a wedge. It opens potential for petty bureaucrats, still high from the recent excessive powers granted to them around a public health emergency, to further meddle in the private lives of people. Many see it as the start of a road that eventually leads to neighbourhoods becoming outdoor prisons. Localised lockdowns under the auspices of environmental protection will surely follow, along with technocracy, living in pods, eating bugs and social credit scores.
15-minute cities are nothing but old wine in a new bottle. The current international furore doesn’t change the fact they are a fad; unwarranted, unworkable, and unnecessary.
A recent history
The last few years have seen a rapid cultural diffusion of the concept, with many cities experimenting to various degrees. For example, Singapore's Land Transport Authority recently released a new master plan that included the goal of ‘20-minute towns’ set within a ‘45-minute city’. Shanghai emphasises the ‘15-minute community life circle’, aimed at allowing residents to complete all their daily activities within 15 minutes on foot. Various cities in the UK, including Oxford, are currently experimenting with the idea. Paris was an early adopter.
The work from home shift brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic led to a drastic change in the way people feel about the necessity to be in the office every day, or even at all. Of course, thinking has changed quickly and often on this topic in very recent times. It now seems that working from home occasionally will be utilised by many employees to reduce commuting a few times a week. Working from home has become a lifestyle choice for many. However, these people do not necessarily need or want to be bound to their neighbourhoods for everything.
The seemingly permanent shift to more working from home has enhanced the 15-minute city concept in the minds of many planners and policymakers. The big demand for re-thinking local neighbourhood planning has faded a bit from the intense imaginations of 2020/21. Still, the general understanding of the value of good neighbourhoods is more heightened in the public mind now. Seizing the moment, many policymakers and planners have leveraged the 15-minute city concept as a neat solution.
Lessons from history
The main dilemma of the 15-minute city concept is something that has long challenged urban planning: translating a compelling theoretical idea into a successful, universally accessible, and desirable spatial reality. Creating functional urban spaces is surprisingly tricky, not least because the realities of human behaviours, perceptions and desires are often at odds with the ideological expectations of planners. What looks good in two dimensions may be a disaster in three.
For a clear example of this, consider the Modernist movement. Inspired by the utopian promises of the architect, Le Corbusier, high-rise social housing towers sprung up across European cities from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Promised as thriving neighbourhoods in the sky, most of these developments in European cities were poorly designed, built an integrated with their surrounding cities. Social infrastructure was usually non-existent or very basic. Many soon fell into social dysfunction, disconnection, and despair.
Housing the needy using Modernist planning and design principles looked utopian on paper but turned out to be the exact opposite in practice. Despite the clear lessons, many of these developments limp on in increasingly poor repair, perpetuating cycles of social and spatial deprivation.
Similarly, the success of any 15-minute city project will depend on it happening in the right setting, with careful design and management. There must be clear and transparent governance. It is also essential for there to be extensive, ongoing consultation with all residents, stakeholders, and user groups. It’s a tall order.
What looks good in two dimensions may be a disaster in three.
Unwarranted, unworkable, unnecessary
Cities all over the world have already spent decades trying to deliver vibrant urban neighbourhoods. Urban consolidation, new urbanism, transit-orientated developments are just some of the similar concepts that have gone before. Realising the current 15-minute city vision successfully in spatial reality will require massive behaviour change and public buy-in. None of this is guaranteed, no matter how convinced some planners and policymakers might already be.
Slashing car use and relying on reasonable walking and cycling distances to reach all the services we need is a massive logistical and financial undertaking for governments and councils. It’s probably not even feasible, at least not at scale. Duplication of services would be required at levels far beyond current provision. Market efficiencies would be disrupted, perhaps lost, ensuring that many private service providers won’t go along with it.
I have yet to read an article proclaiming the benefits of 15-minute cities that deeply considers the impacts on children, people with disabilities, pregnant women, seniors, or any other cohort with limited or reduced mobilities. I find similar silence in the literature when it comes to accounting for the carriage of goods and people’s belongings. Likewise, any evidence of real consideration of how outdoor climates and exposures might be properly accounted for.
It’s easy to design space for young, healthy, and childfree adults, but it’s much more difficult and expensive to design for universal access and inclusion, which are increasingly becoming foundational urban design standards, not add-ons.
The concern raised often by the dystopians is that city authorities will confine residents to their 15-minute neighbourhood, using surveillance technology to minimise the number of times they can leave, and fining them for breaches. Obviously, restricting movement in such a way would be a gross violation of human rights. It also extends way beyond the brief of a city council. The extraordinary powers granted to authorities under the auspices of Covid will not apply. Legal justifications for restrictions on movement and commerce are unlikely to hold up to the inevitable challenges that will swell the caseloads of many courthouses.Â
For a 15-minute city project to have any hope of success, the primary goal must be to realise the vision in ways that genuinely reduce the need for most residents to leave often. Compliance can only ever be voluntary. Councils should pay close attention to communicating this point at every opportunity if they are to secure wide public support.
Social media is already replete with videos of residents of various cities in the UK up in arms at their local council’s plans to prioritise the concept, generally after minimal consultation. Community opposition shouldn’t be surprising in such cases, but often appears to be for policymakers. If they don’t want pushback, then they need to be much better at genuinely communicating with communities.
To conclude, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of outcomes from the current focus on 15-minute cities. The likelihood is that they will be neither utopian nor dystopian. Some projects might work out, others won’t, and yet more will never translate from vision to spatial reality.
No matter what side of the debate you might be on, it is important to remember one undeniable reality: Planning history is filled with two dimensional dreams materialising into three dimensional nightmares. Based on this history, I see low potential for 15-minute cities to be any different.
I think your comment re: it being voluntary is key, and is the component that will mean that a) 15-minute cities will probably not lead to dramatic shifts, but also b) that it will never be anything like the dystopians seem to imagine it will be. I completely agree that it is old wine in a new bottle, but it is useful in terms of pushing forward greater diversity of uses (through zoning changes, primarily, though perhaps also by some devolution of city services away from efficient-but-inaccessible super-facility models back towards smaller, more locally-serving facilities) in suburban developments that only do one thing. Because urban development is such a piecemeal, distributed activity, decisions made decades ago usually take several decades more to shift in a new direction.
So yeah, nothing that new to see here, but if it helps to distill down complex, technocratic planning concepts into something that is more easily grasped by the general public, I think there's some value to it.
So what do you believe is the solution? Modernism was a period and approach that respectively is easy to see as not the way to go. Surely in a western society tax payers money where it is most beneficial for the public good should co-locate higher density with public transport and this generates the 5 minute walk catchment. Positive again to get people moving on mass transit where they may have just sat in car commuting. Love more comments. Jennifer