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.

CNU Diary 2024: Restorative Urbanism

 

Cincinnatus, on the Ohio River Trail

Wednesday, May 15

Jane and I are in Cincinnati for the 32nd annual Congress for the New Urbanism. After an all-day drive, we got here about 8:00 in the evening, too late to register or join the Opening Night Party, but I'll be raring to go tomorrow. We're staying at the Homewood Suites by Hilton in downtown Cincinnati, a couple blocks from the conference site at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza. 

Hilton Netherland Plaza

We walked over there this evening, and checked out a couple potential coffee locales. Jane took some pictures at Fountain Square.

The first thing I noticed about downtown Cincinnati is that most intersections have a NO TURN ON RED sign. Urbanists tend to dislike right-turn-on-red, which was mandated nationwide when I was in high school in order to save on energy use and air pollution from idling cars. It's not that we like either of those, either, but that turning cars add dangers to walking (or riding bicycles).

Thursday, May 16

President Mallory Baches welcomes the convention

What I love about CNU, both the conference and the organization, is the inherent optimism. We are full of hope. I am personally inclined to despair, and I'm sure everyone at this meeting has had considerable experience with their good ideas being rejected by the city council or the public or their boss. And yet, we remain hopeful that the problems of today's cities can be solved and we are the ones who know how to do it. It was this sort of humanism that fueled the Enlightenment, declared Independence, and wrote the Constitution.

(from L) Peter Calthorpe, Aftab Pureval, Ellen Dunham Jones

The mainstage address was given by Peter Calthorpe, co-founder of CNU and co-author (with William Fulton) of The Regional City (Island Press, 2001), one of the first books I read on the subject of urbanism. He talked up Grand Boulevards as the solution to both the housing crisis and the decline of retail strips. Grand Boulevards involve building multifamily units along commercial corridors and near transit, which has worked (says he) in Minneapolis since 2017, as well as a 43 mile long development along the El Camino Highway in California's Silicon Valley. Once you've got a ribbon of development, he says, you can "backfill" transit along the way, by which he means Bus Rapid Transit, since "we can't afford" light rail (in a tone indicating possible irony).

Calthorpe presenting

He was followed on the stage by Aftab Pureval, mayor of Cincinnati, who welcomed the conference and proclaimed today to be Restorative Urbanism Day.  Pureval represents the paradigmatic American dream, as his parents immigrated to the United States from India, his mom having come to India as a refugee from Tibet. But, he says, that dream is "becoming further and further away" for many Americans, so he hopes through policy changes like BRT and zoning to "desegregate the city so there are no wealthy or disinvested neighborhoods, just Cincinnati neighborhoods."

Attendees at the opening event in the Hall of Mirrors

At 10:30 I attended a talk jointly given by Victor Dover, who runs a planning firm in Coral Gables, and Ashleigh Walton, an architect with a firm in Pittsburgh, billed as a "new urbanism starter course" but focused on this year's theme of restorative urbanism. Ashleigh Walton discussed restorative urbanism in terns of reforming "detrimental regulations" that shape our cities and that inhibit walkability, housing affordability and supply, and adaptation to climate change, exemplified by so many "blown out downtowns" across the country. 

We were invited to eat lunch in Fountain Square. I bought a Grabbo's sundae at a food truck called Wild Side Experience that advertised "caveman food." The Grabbo's sundae involves barbecue chips, pulled pork, lettuce, and sour cream, but not ice cream.

Caveman food: Grabbo's sundae from Wild Side Experience

I didn't converse with any urbanists during my lunch, but spent a happy time people watching. Fountain Square is amazing on a nice day. It reminded me of the Trg Republike in Belgrade.

Fountain Square, downtown Cincinnati

For comparison: Trg Republike, Belgrade, May 2022

 

In the afternoon, I went on a streetcar-and-walking tour of the Over the Rhine district just north of downtown Cincinnati, which used to be a German area, then a poverty-stricken area, and now is gentrifying. 

Typical Italianate style building on Elm Street:
1st floor retail, tall windows, little chunky tabs at top

Race Street: built to the sidewalk, with breezeways so
residents didn't enter through the 1st floor store

porch at rear of beer garden on Vine Street, used for public speeches

Hanging out in Washington Park on mosaic-encrusted bench

This morning, as soon as I walked into the conference hotel, I ran into Jeff Wozencraft, a planner with the City of Cedar Rapids, and as far as either of us knows the only other person from Cedar Rapids who is here. Given the nature of conferences, I figured that would be our only encounter, but as it turned out, we were at the same happy hour event in the evening, sponsored by the Michigan and Midwest CNU chapters and held at a Unitarian Church-turned-event space called the Transept. Jeff and I were joined at the event by a lively bunch from Sarnia, Ontario. Maybe Cedar Rapids and Sarnia could be sister cities!

The Transept, 1205 Elm Street

As part of the happy hour event, I "debated" Eric Schertizing of Lansing, Michigan, on the value of historic preservation. When he's not debating me, Eric is executive director of the Michigan Association of Land Banks. We had an interesting conversation, though audible to very few in the super-live former sanctuary with a lot of side chatter happening. One of us "won," as determined by audience cheers, though I couldn't tell who.

Friday, May 17

Prepping for bike tour

Happy Bike to Work Day! Today I and a couple dozen other bikers braved the rain to tour the riverfront trails in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. 

Breakfast on the Bridge

We began with Breakfast on the Bridge, a 15-year-old Bike to Work Day tradition on the Purple People Bridge between Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky. We got there as they were preparing to wrap up, but there were still a lot of people there. I had some complementary coffee and chatted up some folk from an architecture firm and from the transit agency. I also scored a couple clementine oranges, which a sympathetic fellow traveler stored for me in her bag.

Entering Kentucky
(which starts at the river's edge per US Supreme Court in 1980)

View of the Ohio River from the Purple People Bridge

We were out a little over two hours, riding across the Ohio River twice, and sampling trails on both sides.

New and probably pricey riverfront apartments in Cincinnati

Tree canopy over the Ohio River trail

  

Must be a barge coming through!
(behind it is where the Licking River flows into the Ohio)

Covington: Boyhood home of Daniel Beard, founder of Boy Scouts of America

Covington murals, religion section

Covington murals, baseball section

The Roebling suspension bridge was the prototype for the Brooklyn Bridge
(Pro tip: Don't tell anyone here it looks like it was inspired by Brooklyn!)

 

Riverside Drive, Covington: End of the trail (for now)

Ohio River Trail, Cincinnati: bike channel on staircase

6th Street, near the bike shop: One more mural, baseball section

This year, unlike in 2023, my e-bike worked, though I mostly found the electric boost inconvenient and had it off except for steep hills. My biggest problem this year was finding a helmet that fit; a couple people had brought their own, and maybe I should do that next year. One of our guides not only had his own helmet, but brought his own shade as well!

Worn by one of our tour guides: Da Brim. I need one.

I met up with Jane for most of the afternoon. We had lunch in the Over-the-Rhine District...

Iris Book Cafe

...then went to the Underground Railroad Museum.

Underground Railroad Museum entrance

I returned to the conference for a late afternoon session on small developers, presented by Joe Klare of Covington-based Catalytic Fund and developer Brian Boland. The Catalytic Fund provides loans that bridge the gap between what a bank is willing to lend and what a small developer needs to make a project work. I sat with a woman from Portland who works on parking issues. She asked how they were able to overcome public concerns about parking with their projects. The presenters were more sanguine than she was (or I am).

In the evening, Jane and I went to a brewpub across from the Cincinnati Reds' stadium, then heard live music (Indie night) in Fountain Square.

Saturday, May 18

The conference rang down today with a closing address by Carlos Moreno, the Paris-based academic credited with the concept of the 15-minute city. I bought his new book today [The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet (Wiley, 2024)] at Roebling's onsite store, along with Megan Kimble's City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways (Crown, 2024).

starting the day at the excellent Deeper Roots coffeeshop downtown

I also took in a couple of panel sessions, a presentation by Brooklyn-based planner (and political scientist!) Jerome Barth on what makes public spaces successful, and a group report on a neighborhood-led investment plan for the West End area of St. Louis. Both have some things to say to Cedar Rapids, and I will probably return to them in future posts.

Jerome Barth

West End/Visitation Park project panel

Not only that, but I took a couple of quizzes created by Emerging New Urbanists, who obviously remember the good old days of Facebook quizzes. To the question of What kind of urbanist are you? I got the result history and cultural urbanist. To the question of Which transect zone are you? I got the result T6-Urban Core. Those may both be more aspirational than actual, but I maintain all such quizzes are inherently valid.

Carlos Moreno

Moreno started with natural disasters and other stressors caused by climate change--one estimate had $38 trillion in damages annually from extreme weather--but shifted to the broader question: What kind of city do we want to live in? Car dependency has, he said, led to living and working under constant stress, long daily trips, lost access to opportunities and social interactions, misused buildings, and overall lower quality of life. His alternative is "human-oriented urbanism" or "social circularity"--no wonder it's come to be called "the 15-minute city" although he gets frustrated with the focus on the number "15"--which includes proximity to essential services, organic density, mixed uses, quality public spaces, efficient public transport, and three other things I didn't get. Cities can promote design that delivers these goods while discouraging design that doesn't. I'll have more to say about Moreno when I read his book this summer!

Next year in Providence!: Board chair-elect Frank Starkey closes the conference

Evening entertainment: Cincinnati May Festival concert at the Music Hall in OTR

SEE ALSO: "CNU Diary 2023," 1 June 2023

 

"Charter Awards 2024" (Congress for the New Urbanism)

Addison Del Maestro, "New Urbanism and Urbanist Media," The Deleted Scenes, 21 May 2024

I never did see Michael Jackson...

We build community from the ground up

Source: eskipaper.com (Creative Commons)

My spirits have been trending low of late. Maybe I'm not getting enough Vitamin B, or maybe winter's gone on too long. Maybe I'm kind of a pessimist. Or maybe it has something to do with last week's Democratic presidential debate, an unprecedented display of obstreperousness that has me thinking that President Trump's reelection is increasingly likely. Mismanagement of government, personal corruption, foully abusive rhetoric, and cruel treatment of the most vulnerable among us have cost the President nothing, and have if anything solidified his base. Meanwhile, the viable alternatives are eating each other up like the gingham dog and calico cat. "O Scotland, Scotland!"

Three years ago, as Trump began his Presidency, I dared to hope that his performance would result in broad and decisive repudiation. Although his presidency has been even more relentlessly bad than I could have foreseen, at this point broad repudiation seems far from likely. If he is defeated for reelection, it will be narrowly, with the results in a few states decisive. The next Democratic president, for whom I can tell you right now I will surely vote, will have run based on unaffordable promises and sticking it to the billionaires, and will find themselves at the helm of a broken government of a riven, ungovernable country. Good luck with that.

We are, in short, more broken and more fearful than I'd thought. Putting the pieces back together is going to take a long time, the next President's first term at the very least. And the first thing we need to do--not what some President needs to do, but what we need to do, so Presidents can eventually do productive President stuff--is to learn how to live together.

That starts locally. (For an argument that this has already started in towns around the United States, see Studer 2020.)

Source: wuestenigel.com (Creative Commons)

One set of interesting ideas is floating around Paris, France. Anne Hidalgo, running for reelection as the Mayor of the City of Paris, wants to make it a "15-minute city" (O'Sullivan 2020). This means something different in a city with 21000 residents per square mile that has closed many streets to through auto traffic, than it would in a sprawling burg like Cedar Rapids, where most adults can get anywhere in 15 minutes by getting in their cars. The campaign's image...

Paris En Commun campaign image

...shows work, shopping, dining, recreation, culture and health care within walking distance of every residence ("chez moi"). This would involve sacrificing road space to pedestrians and cyclists, designing public spaces for multiple use throughout the day, and promoting small shops, clinics, and performance spaces. It would involve somehow comfortably accommodating the needs of hordes of tourists as well as those residents who couldn't afford rising rents driven by the new amenities. City Lab notes that Mayor Hidalgo's plan as yet has neither timetable nor budget.

Even so, similar approaches have been proposed in other cities, including Barcelona, London, Melbourne, and Portland. More important for our blogging purposes are the principles are at work here: these advocates are striving to build inclusive communities.

Carlos Moreno, who teaches at the Sorbonne as well as serving as an adviser to Hidalgo's campaign, articulates six "things that make an urbanite happy,” including “Dwelling in dignity, working in proper conditions, [being able to gain] provisions, well-being, education and leisure. To improve quality of life, you need to reduce the access radius for these functions” (Belaich 2020, translated and quoted at O'Sullivan 2020). I will argue that these six are also opportunities that ought to be available to everyone--to be clear, not to make the state the employer, educator or entertainer of last resort, but to design the city such that all of these are attainable to everyone.

So, how to translate this to a contemporary American city, a typical one where, as O'Sullivan of City Lab reminds us, "Car-centric suburban-style zoning [has led] to an era of giant consolidated schools, big-box retail strips, and massive industrial and office parks, all isolated from each other and serviced by networks of roads and parking infrastructure (O'Sullivan 2020)?" That's my town, all right, and probably yours, too. Most people here are used to it, and content enough with it that they fear changes more than either such traffic as there is or the externalities it produces (pollution, isolation, lack of exercise, &c.).

Collins Road Square on Black Friday

We need the city government, not to make our choices for us, but to make choices possible. That means recognizing that not everyone has a car; while usually around here that is for economic reasons, going car free might be a commendable environmental or lifestyle choice, were it possible. Whether or not you actually have a car in Cedar Rapids, they are a necessity. They should at least be a choice.

Our transit system could and should continue to evolve, and ditto our bike infrastructure. But it's darned near impossible to design bus or bike routes for a sprawled city, where even bus riders live far apart from each other. So we need to point towards at least some parts of the city becoming denser, allowing granny flats and even small apartment buildings. Strong Towns argues that the next level of development in any neighborhood ought to be automatically legal (Marohn 2016); let it be so. While affordable housing is a different issue here than in a boomtown like Seattle or San Francisco, my friend Eric tells me it's impossible to build a $100,000 house. So let's have ordinances that encourage preservation and sale of existing housing stock, and that require landowners to keep older housing stock in reasonable shape so it continues to be livable. Pass a land value tax: It should not be possible to hold onto valuable property, letting it lie fallow or degrade, without paying for the privilege (Siskoff 2020).

Protesting demolition of the Hach Building in New Bohemia, 2014.
This property, in primo location by the Bridge of Lions, is currently fallow with no prospect of development.

Same goes for commercial buildings. We do have a yen for the shiny and new, and back it up with tax increment financing. But shiny new rents are hard to afford for local businesses, so the shiny new building down the street from me houses a Jimmy John's franchise, a Scooter's Coffee franchise, a Clean Laundry franchise, and an H & R Block tax franchise. Given that local businesses do better at job creation and at keeping money in the community, we should do better by them (Studer 2019).

We need to support public institutions, in particular public schools, but also libraries, parks, and so forth. When they suffer, middle-class people can always find alternatives. This is less true for people of lower incomes. A city with good neighborhood schools is a strong city. A city where the well-off have created housing and educational enclaves for themselves, and the heck with everyone else, is not a strong city.

Finally, we need to make life better--safer and more comfortable--for pedestrians and cyclists. Narrow the streets to slow the cars, build sidewalks where they haven't been built already, and maintain them where they are. The city could look into helping people concerned about upkeep of sidewalks, if it weren't already gasping to keep up with maintaining our ever-expanding street network. Sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails are not only important for getting around, they're important places for the public to meet each other. A walkable city provides thousands of incidental contacts every day, which is the basis for trust across lines of difference.

Neighborhood connections are not popular with everyone.

I wish this resonated with people. But we are a country of individualists, for whom community is often defined narrowly or even viewed with suspicion. We spend a lot of money and effort keeping the wrong people away, because they're inconvenient--they might park where we're used to parking, they might get in our way when we're in a hurry, their stuff might fill a view we've become accustomed to--or because we've been taught to fear them. Ownership and security are powerful motivators.

President Trump knows this. Despite multiple profound flaws, he's built a resilient presidency by appealing to people's fears, often in the most grotesque but apparently crowd-pleasing ways--the atrocious handling of refugees stands out.  Here in Cedar Rapids, any attempt to improve access to housing or non-car transportation runs up against a wall of fear and anger.  Just ask the developers of affordable housing on Edgewood Road, or live work units off Johnson Avenue. The residents of Chandler Street SW and Grande Avenue SE successfully fended off the spectre of sidewalks. Now Cottage Grove Place is weighing in against a proposed trail development between Washington High School and the Cemar Trail.

The 21st century demands an alternative to our dominant paradigms of development: market forces looking for short-term profits, political leaders listening to whatever song a big developer sings, and individuals protecting their patch of ground from children walking to school. We need something no law can provide: a cultural change that favors community, recognizing individual autonomy not as an absolute value but as the fantasy it is.

We need to conduct ourselves as if other people mattered.