Book review: The 15-Minute City

 

Carlos Moreno, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (Wiley, 2024), xxii +276pp.

"The 15-minute City" has become a widely popular concept and widely used phrase, especially after it was adopted by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to guide that global city's ongoing development. The phrase sprung from the mind of Carlos Moreno, a native of Colombia who is now professor of systems technology at the Sorbonne, when he was attempting to humanize his approach to technology-based city design.

Although I was a pioneer in the emerging field of "smart cities," I saw technology as a powerful lever but no longer as an end in itself. My definitive break with technology-centered approaches came in 2010, when I decided to turn to urban service design as an essential methodology for transforming our cities.... 

[Drawing on the work of Jane Jacobs] My approach has refocused on the design of urban services that meet the needs and aspirations of citizens, putting people at the heart of the debate and integrating fundamental thinking on the geography of time, rhythms, quality of life, and chronotopia--a spatio-temporal concept in which the intersection of place and time creates unique and dynamic experiences in a given environment. [Moreno 2024: 89]

The idea that resulted was that of a city "in which the essential needs of residents are accessible on foot or by bicycle within a short perimeter in high-density areas," or a somewhat larger perimeter in less densely populated areas (p, 14). By reducing the need to commute long distances in cars, the approach is intended to reduce human stress on the natural environment like climate change, but also to reduce the difficulty and time people spend getting places, and to improve individual quality of life and social connection. 

The first third of the book seats the idea in the history of western cities, as a response to the disruptive impacts of cars, Euclidean zoning, and most recently the coronavirus pandemic. These disruptions are familiar to anyone who studies cities, but the story does bear retelling. After 75 years of sprawl we find that "Proximity plays an essential role in lifestyle change and city transformation. The concept of the '15-minute city' and '30-minute territory' is at the heart of this new urban lifestyle..." (p. 13, italics mine). 

It sounds like urbanism! Moreno's multi-faceted approach is indeed similar to that of Jeff Speck, Charles Montgomery, and Jan Gehl (who wrote the forward to The 15-Minute City), as well as not-yet-famous me. Moreno's main contribution is the convenient metric, though at his Congress for the New Urbanism address last month he warned against overfocusing on the number 15.

Carlos Moreno at CNU, May 2024

As we approach mid-book, then, we're set up for a series of examples where the 15-minute city concept has been translated into policy. And we kind of get that. Beginning with Paris (chs 10-11), we go to Milan (ch 12), and then to Detroit (ch 13) and Cleveland (ch 14) in the US, then to Buenos Aires (ch 15), already an admirable array of cities in different situations and parts of the world. The array seems to be the entire story, though, because while we would like to know how cities overcame obstacles to achieve good outcomes (or in the case of Cleveland, which has just begun under Mayor Justin Bibb, what it plans to achieve), we pretty much just get long descriptions of issues and short lists of achievements: Buenos Aires replaced some of its excess of roadways with plantings (Calles Verdes, pp. 186-188); Sousse, Tunisia, adopted a comprehensive plan that included considerations of times and distances travelled, with positive results on a variety of measures (pp. 195-200); Melbourne plans to redevelop a failed mall site (pp. 208-209). Pleszbew, Poland, has built "buffer car parks linked to train and bus services" (p. 221), but I don't know what those are if they're somehow different from regular station parking lots.

When I think of my own town, I think of all the aspects of the problem I wish this book had addressed: How do you assess the problems and potential of your city? How do you overcome inevitable public and interest-group opposition? What are the obstacles to successful formulation and implementation of 15-minute-city-inspired policy? (Speck's book in particular does a much better job of this.) Once the policy is in place, what are some useful measures of success? What are some ways cities have responded to complex or changing facts on the ground? (I think of the presentation on the complicated history of  Barcelona's superblocks I heard this spring.) Some of these are considered in chapters 10 and 11 on Paris, but even then only to a small degree. I'd have preferred four meaningfully detailed cases to a dozen quickies.

At CNU last month, Moreno seemed baffled by the political outrage his viral phrase has inspired. (The first video that came up on an Internet search described 15-minute cities as "the new reservations.") A second edition of this book might address this opposition in a practical way. By "practical" I don't think you're going to convince auto manufacturers and oil companies to be cool, and there's really nothing to be done about the cultural attachment to a car-dependent lifestyle, which is intimately connected to climate denial. But as anyone knows who's engaged even a little with city development, people are more afraid than hopeful about any change that will affect them. Moreno can go on about "happy proximity," but many of us outside of big cities aren't used to any kind of proximity. In Iowa, I'm lucky if someone agrees to share a lap lane at the YMCA pool. One street south of mine, people got everyone to sign a petition against a sidewalk on the south side of the street, including 35 homes on the north side that already had a sidewalk. A new chapter that holds people's hands and assures them everything will not only be okay, but joyously so, and coaches advocates on how to talk to the anxious masses, would be a good addition.

Linin' up at Dunkin', November 2021:
How many of these drivers want to live in a 15-minute city?

Thinking about Cedar Rapids also illuminates why Moreno does not want to fixate on a number. There's more, as he would be the first to tell you, to purposeful walking and biking than measuring radii. According to Google maps, a 15-minute walk is about 0.7 miles. I live reasonably close-in, but all that's within that radius is an elementary school, a credit union, two dentists, a grocery store that's closing in a week, several churches, and two fabulous parks (Bever Park and Brucemore National Historic Site). 

Getting on a bicycle means 15 minutes is roughly equivalent to 3.0 miles, which expands my reach to all of downtown, Kingston Village, New Bohemia and Czech Village. Besides all the bars, restaurants, coffee shops, and museums--and hair salons, which New Bohemia has in spades--I am within three miles of the middle school and high school my boys attended, two Hy-Vee Grocery Stores, Bruegger's Bagels, CVS, Walgreen's, two hospitals, Coe College, Mount Mercy University, Cedar Lake (destination attraction in process), and the 16th Street Dairy Queen. When the casino comes, as currently seems inevitable, it will be within three miles as well. But in our town of "happy motoring" (phrase lifted from James Howard Kunstler), not every three mile bike trip is an advisable one. Some of those places require the non-driver to ford huge parking lots, and I won't be riding on Mount Vernon Road any time soon!

Mt. Vernon Road SE, fall 2024: getting in this zone requires a car

So, three cheers for the concept, although I won't be living in a 15-minute city any time, and one and a half cheers for the book.