Book review: The Nature of Our Cities

 

Nadina Galle (left) and Lieve Mertens,
with Dutch language editions of the book
(Source: nadinagalle.com)

Galle, Nadina. The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet. Mariner, 2024, 304 pp.

Anyone who wants to make healthy choices in America today knows how difficult it is. So many of us live in neighborhoods without green spaces to play in, without public transit or cycling infrastructure, or where temptations lurk in vending machines in every corner of our offices and schools. And suppose we manage to find the time to exercise in our stressful lives. In that case, the limitations of our outdoor spaces push us onto stationary bikes, where we either stare at news headlines that spike our cortisol levels, or "travel" through virtual landscapes from within a windowless basement gym. (2024: 194)

I finished reading Nadina Galle's book this morning on my back deck, enjoying what was an inexpressively lovely day in Cedar Rapids: the air was clear, the previous week's humidity had gone, a bee was investigating Jane's lilacs, and a variety of birds were making their presences known from high above me. It was the sort of morning where a person can revel in pure existence, regardless of personal problems or America's problems or natural disasters.

Much of the rest of the world is not as easily able to relax with a good book and a pad of paper. After the hottest-ever June in England and Spain, London experienced its hottest day of the year today. Heat deaths are reported in France, Spain and Portugal, and wildfires in Turkey have caused mass evacuations (Robins 2025, "Heatwave Across Europe" 2025). Wildfires across Canada earlier this summer produced smoke and haze even here in Iowa.  Many cities are experiencing increased rat populations as their climate warms (Simon 2025).

The Nature of Our Cities references other recent catastrophes: a record European heatwave in 2019 that was surpassed in 2022, a 2021 heat dome over the U.S. Pacific Northwest, a worldwide heatwave that began in the U.S. in 2023, the Camp Fire in California in 2018, heat wildfires and then massive flooding in British Columbia in 2021, and numerous urban tree die-offs and air quality alerts. Along the way she introduces us to a number of people working on improving their region's resilience to a climate gone haywire.

Even in Cedar Rapids (my backyard, specifically):
Trees tossed by derecho winds, August 2020

About halfway through the book, the focus switches to improving the public's opportunities to experience nature. The most willful climate change deniers cannot be reached, but surely there are a lot of people who already recognize the problem but don't fully realize their personal stakes. Besides, exposure to nature has many physical and mental health benefits (cf. pp. 160-161).

It's in this part of the book where we meet Menno Schilthuizen in the Dutch city of Leiden, teaching people about the enormous diversity of species in a single patch of lawn near the central train station (ch. 6); Blake Ellis, a California-based ecotherapist (ch. 7); Jared Hanley, a former financier who's developed an app that shows the extent of an area's ecosystem (ch. 8); and Richard Louv, who does public talks on the subject of Nature-Deficit Disorder, which term he himself coined (ch. 9). On each of the outdoor adventures during which these conversations occur, Galle lets her interviewees speak for themselves, with descriptions of the environs and additional amusing asides. She does not insist on herself, though it's clear she has a lot of expertise and experience in nature. (She holds a Ph.D. in ecological engineering.)

Her final chapter brings it home, because as the book neared completion, she also found out she was pregnant for the first time (ch. 9). She worries to us about bringing a child into a world that encourages screen time more than nature time. But along the way, as she discusses nature-based apps like AllTrails (p. 164), EarthSnap (pp. 149-151), iNaturalist, Park Rx America (pp. 186-188), Vira (p. 201), World Safari (pp. 234-237), and Giants of the North, a geolocated audio tour of Amsterdam (pp. 170-175), she argues that technology can help us experience nature as well as providing high-tech climate resilience tools.

A mile from the Coe College campus, across the street
from Washington High School: Woodsy trail in Bever Park

Cedar Rapids has a rich array of parks, including two spacious parks (Bever and Ellis) with older-growth wooded areas. Going forward, ensuring access to parks and natural space is a key part of the "complete neighborhood" concept the city has announced, and is listed as an objective for 2050 in the 2023 revision of the city's climate action plan. Funding for any such initiatives is uncertain, or course, and thus far the city's biggest climate action has been (federally funded) construction of flood walls. Whatever we're doing, or say we're doing, is far from offsetting the impact of the two big data centers about which we're very excited.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has disparaged
military research into the impacts of climate change

Climate denial is in full control at the national and state levels (in this state, anyway). U.S. government websites have removed information on climate change impacts (Borenstein 2025). The Trump administration previously clawed back solar installation and climate research grants; withdrew from the Paris climate accord January 21, 2025; threatened Environmental Protection Agency employees studying climate change with firing at any time (Friedman 2025); announced plans to end Department of Transportation climate programs (Pierre-Louis 2025); and fired nearly 1000 employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including all staff at tsunami warning centers (Nilsen and Luhby 2025). This week they're showing off the new federal prison camp built with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds on environmentally sensitive land in Florida's Everglades. Far-sighted public policy is just not going to happen anytime soon; the most we can hope is that they would leave cities alone to do what they can.

The climate doesn't care about politics, of course, and will continue to evolve whether we are prepared or not. Galle's engaging book, and all the people in it, provide hope that the natural world will continue to be accessible, publicly valued, and conducive to human life.

SEE ALSO:

I first encountered Dr. Galle when she was a guest on Gil Penalosa's excellent "Cities for Everyone" webinar series in July 2024. Her talk (38:15) is here.

Nadina Galle blog page

Book review: On Tyranny

 

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan, 2017. 127 pp.

These are weird times in America. This month President Trump dusted off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in order to deport hundreds of immigrants to prisons in El Salvador; when federal district judge James E. Broasberg issued a temporary restraining order, Trump called Broasberg a "Radical Left Lunatic" and called for the judge's impeachment, while "border czar" Tom Homan said, "We're not stopping... I don't care what the judges think (Caputo 2025). Meanwhile, a number of American citizens as well as legal residents have been caught up in the administration's zeal for deportation and reckless disregard for due process (Foy 2025). At Trump's and/or Musk's behest, years of research data (Shendruk and Rampell 2025) and references to nonwhite troops (Warner 2025) are being removed from government websites. The Voice of America is gone, and the Federal Trade Commission disabled by (illegal) firings (cf. Mitchell 2025). And that's just this week. Congressional Republicans have approved everything Trump and Musk have done after the fact--including joining the effort to intimidate Judge Broasberg--while congressional Democrats seem baffled and helpless.

All this has been justified in the language of "emergency," against which Yale historian Timothy Snyder warns us in chapter 17 ("Watch for dangerous words"). Has America in 2025 become a tyranny? Is the elected President fomenting a coup? Whatever is going on, it's not the democratic constitutional system I taught about for decades. We need a new guidebook for a new regime.

Professor Snyder wrote On Tyranny after the presidential election of 2016, when no one knew what to expect of the newly elected President. Given Trump's petulant, hate-spewing campaign, and his disregard for either facts or norms, it wasn't unreasonable to expect him to try to do some very bad things once in office. And he certainly did try, but--thanks in large part to "babysitters" like Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Attorney General William Barr, and ultimately Vice President Mike Pence--he didn't get as far as some had feared. Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, and Trump lost his bid for reelection in 2020. The American constitutional system seemed to survive four years of Trump, and while the COVID epidemic kept threatening to spiral out of control, it too eventually subsided.

Now, after an improbable series of events, Trump is not only back, but with a plurality of the 2024 vote--an achievement that escaped him in 2016, and making him only the second Republican to do this since 1988. Trump brought the hate back with him, but not the "babysitters." The two months-plus of Trump's second term have been chaotic and destructive, with particular animus directed at political opponents, regulatory agencies, minority groups, and Ukraine. Public approval has dipped a little of late, but so far is nearly ten percentage points higher than during his first term. It seems quite a few of us like Trump's promises, or are entertained by his antics (though see Morris 2025 for the complicated polling picture).

So it seems timely to pick up Snyder's little volume of advice again. He suggests, from observing authoritarian regimes in Europe, several ways that ordinary citizens can respond to what's going on with maybe some degree of effectiveness.

The first is Do not obey in advance, acting in ways that accommodate the regime before they even give a specific order. For towns, educational and medical institutions, arts organizations, private firms, and anyone else who relies on federal funding for much of their income, this can be difficult, especially when the regime is erratic or vague in their demands. Anyone trying to keep up with the Trump administration's many and varied threats might understandably do whatever they can to minimize the uncertainty. Iowa's laws about "obscenity" in school libraries came with similar lack of clarity, probably in hopes the librarians would overcomply.

The second "lesson" is Defend institutions, which leads into the next lessons on elections, symbols, professional ethics, the military and police. Trump has replaced the leadership of the military and FBI, all inspectors general, and Justice and Homeland Security officials, while gagging or defunding regulatory agencies. Before hobbling the FCC, he fired Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, National Labor Relations Board, and Equal Opportunity Commission to bring those panels below the number needed to act. And on and on. Snyder calls actions like these flashing red warning lights, but so far they have not visibly alarmed many people who weren't already opposed to Trump. Someone in our book group asked "How could we support" those who are being sidelined or who are being ordered to carry out Trump's orders? Maybe pointing out the trend and its significance can be a start, but pretty much anything you can say about Trump has already been said.

Some of us have less power than others, but we also might be less exposed, and so in a position to take more risk. The middle chapters of the book deal with taking personal responsibility. We are responsible for how we use language, treat others, and process information (especially when Internet rumors are too delicious to check out). Particularly poignant was his urging those in law enforcement to "be reflective." It is important to remember that Trump in his first term didn't tear children away from refugee families (in some cases losing track of them), charge into Portland and Seattle to use violence against protestors, or deport COVID-infected immigrants to countries that were ill-prepared to treat them. He ordered those regrettable actions, but somebody--a lot of somebodies, really--had to agree to carry them out, putting their jobs ahead of their humanity.

Chapters 12-15 discuss everyday life, particularly using our time (ch. 13) and social skills (ch. 12) and money (ch. 15) to build strong communities that can support vulnerable people. He concludes chapter 12: Having old friends is the politics of last resort. And making new ones is the first step toward change. Be out in public, but maybe keep your electronic profile lower (ch. 14; see also Ingram 2025, cited below.) Chapter 15 also talks about building civil society by associating with people who share our interests. A group of amateur brewers or cyclists can sustain vulnerable members, while also softening the attitudes of those who now seem indifferent or even supportive of tyranny.

On Tyranny is brief and direct. Those who wish more comparative political context can hunt up Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018, and discussed here); those seeking more insight into the tyrannical mindset will be rewarded by Martha Nussbaum's The Monarchy of Fear (Oxford, 2018). But for a quick basic introduction to the inflection point that is 2025 in America, with pointers on how to respond, On Tyranny is an excellent start.

SEE ALSO: 

Anthony Faiola, "Autocrats Roll Back Rights and Rule of Law--And Cite Trump's Example," Washington Post, 24 March 2025

Matthew Ingram, "Be Careful What You Put on Social Media, They Are Listening," The Torment Nexus, 13 March 2025

"Constitution Day: Whatever Happened to the Separation of Powers?" Holy Mountain, 17 September 2020

Free online version: On Tyranny

Book Review: Doing Justice

Jacobsen, Dennis A. Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing. 

Minneapolis: Fortress, 2nd ed., 2017. xxx + 155 pp.

Doing Justice is a challenging book. Aimed principally at practicing Christians, it uses the words

of Jesus, prophets, apostles, and the author of the Book of Revelation to attack the status quo 

as ungodly and to provoke the readers into working to transform it in the direction of God’s 

justice. An epigram to chapter 1 concludes with Revelation 18:4: Then I heard another voice 

from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins.”

The test of this book is not so much how well it reads as much as how well it leads to 

constructive, collective social action. Its audience is rather niche: actively religious people who 

both are concerned about injustice and have a group with which they can join in acts of justice. 

For people who fit that description, Doing Justice is profoundly challenging (because my heart's 

in the right place but there are things I'd rather be doing), sympathetic (I'm also the quiet type at 

least in public), and encouraging (because wins are frustratingly few and far between).

 

Jacobsen, a pastor in the (mainline) Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, who spent many 

years serving an inner-city Milwaukee, sees justice as a broad context in which people have 

access to the goods of life, both material (e.g. enough to eat) and intangible (e.g. dignity, 

freedom). 

The world as it should be is in direct opposition to the world as it is. The world as 

it should be is rooted in truth, love, and community…. People are able to trust 

each other sufficiently to be transparent and exposed…. In a world where forty-

thousand children die of hunger-related causes every day, the world as it should 

be has an abiding concern for children and their right to have a playful present 

and a human future…. The world as it should be is God’s dream engaging the 

nightmare that the world has become. (2017: 11, 12, 15)

Those of us who live in a middle-class milieu may have little awareness of the nightmare that 

people outside of that milieu live on a daily basis. Some of Jacobsen’s parishioners’ personal 

nightmares are mentioned in the opening chapter. Vulnerable people are easily derailed when

their lives’ loads get one brick too many, and then the bricks just keep on coming. We are 

admonished to be aware of others’ struggles, and not to get too comfortable or too 

accommodated to the world as it is (what he calls “pseudo-innocence” (p. 16), citing Martin 

Luther King’s statement that love without power is sentimentality).

Encampment, Greene Square, 2024

We know we are not the egregious bullies Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, sneering and 

mocking as Rev. Marianne Edgar Budde asked the administration to show mercy to gays 

and Lesbians in all families, and to vulnerable immigrant farmworkers. Yet we know we 

are not King, or Fr. Daniel Berrigan, or the Detroit pastor (Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman) who 

wrote the foreword to Doing Justice, ministering to the outcasts, and risking freedom and 

their very lives in the quest for justice. If working within the system is so accommodating 

as to give away the store, what then must we do?

Jacobsen argues churches and their members need to engage with the “harsh realities outside 

its walls” (p. 20). That requires more from the church than creating a peaceful sanctuary, or 

even engaging in charitable works if they don’t get at the people’s underlying (human) misery. 

“The Christians who are so generous with food baskets at Thanksgiving or with presents for 

the poor at Christmas often vote into office politicians whose policies ignore or crush those 

living in poverty. A kind of pseudo-innocence permeates this behavior” (p. 29). He turns to 

the example of Saul Alinksy (1909-1972), whose concept of community organizing sought to empower residents of impoverished neighborhoods to influence decisions that were being 

made elsewhere, like in company boardrooms and city governments. Congregation-based 

community organizing began in the Roman Catholic Church, but has spread throughout 

Christianity and even non-Christian faith communities. Six broad networks, profiled in 

chapter 4, provide leadership training as well as engagement in public action. Engaging in 

such action requires comfort with political power–Jacobsen notes dozens of references to 

“power” in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament–but also a willingness to share it 

(p. 67).

“Some fear the added responsibility that comes with power” (p. 61). Well, yeah.

Homeland Security Investigations office, southwest Cedar Rapids

As such, the first challenge, both for individuals contemplating their part in social justice 

and community organizers recruiting and challenging them (“agitation”), is to recognize their 

self-interest. This concept is at the core of modern social science, and a strong influence on

the worldview of pretty much everyone. Yet “[k]nowledge of one’s own self-interest interest also

cannot be presumed” (p. 75). Jacobsen argues in chapter 6 that for all manner of reasons, we

need an understanding of self-interest that lies between pure selfishness and utter self-abnegation (“selflessness”). The first leads us to “nearly soulless” (p. 78) transactional 

relationships with others, such as President Trump is supposed to have; the latter leads to 

getting taken advantage of, as in the cases of Christian women who stay in abusive 

marriages because they believe it's their duty.

The process of articulation might also involve distinguishing between short-term and long-

term interests (p. 75ff.). On any given day, I might prefer to relax and/or get things done around 

the house, and certainly to avoid confrontations. People like Jacobsen’s ex-con parishioner 

Jesse are so different from me that any contact is bound to be awkward. But over the long term 

I am better off living in “a liberative community in which people can live out their values, be 

connected to a network of significant relationships, and be agitated to summon forth their God-

given power and potential,” so it is in my self-interest actively to participate in the “weaving 

together” of such a community (p. 78). (If it sounds like urbanism, loyal reader–that’s because 

it is!)

Once committed to action, doers of justice are further confronted with defining and reading 

the field of play. In chapter 9, Jacobsen articulates a metropolitan conception, adding declining 

first-ring suburbs and well-heeled exurbs to the mission field of inner city-based organizing. 

Citing law professor Myron Orfield (Metropolitics [Brookings, 1997]), he argues: 

To counter the ghettoization of poverty, Orfield proposes regional strategies such as tax-

based revenue sharing, fair distribution of low-income housing, convergence of school 

districts, and equitable spread of transportation dollars to create access to jobs (p. 105). 

Opposition to metro-wide approaches is likely to be “entrenched” (p. 106), but the strength of 

the opposition should not be exaggerated, nor should wealthy and powerful opponents be 

considered permanent enemies: Metropolitan organizing offers a chance to end the warfare

against the poor and to heal the divisions of class and race that separate this sick society 

(p. 114, emphasis mine). It’s like Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton (The Regional City:

Planning for the End of Sprawl [Island, 2001]) meet the authors of Numbers and Luke!

 

Succeeding at this level has a promising payoff but requires “meticulous organization, militant 

mass action, and, above all, the willingness to suffer and sacrifice” (p. 115, quoting Nelson 

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom [Little Brown, 1994], p. 104). “There’s drudgery in social 

change, and glory for the few,” sings Billy Bragg. The mess is huge, and that can be 

discouraging: Death claims urban America for itself…. The death of decaying neighborhoods. 

The death of decimated families. The death of joblessness. The death of dreams. (p. 133)

 

No wonder I quail at the struggle! Now, to “take part in her sins” may seem an attractive 

alternative. But many hands make light work, or at least make the workload lighter: Into 

the courtyard of such death, congregation-based community organizing proclaims the 

resurrection of Christ, the unbending hope in the power of life, the unyielding belief that 

God, not death, has the last word (still on p. 133). It is the "holy catholic church," discussed in chapter 11, that impacts the mess, not lone toilers. It is group action that not only says

“‘no’ to social injustice… but a prophetic ‘yes’ to life” (p. 139). In the face of oppression

and misery, the church not only engages the community with patches but with affirmation

and joy as well. And dancing–towards the end of the book he quotes Emma Goldman: If

I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution (p. 141).

 

In the same song quoted above, Billy Bragg also sings, “A poet with all the answers has never 

yet been built.” Apparently that goes for bloggers as well. My posts this year have been, I 

recognize, teeming with frustration and anger. All the MAGA pillaging (cf. Wilson 2025, 

Zipper 2025, or any day's post by the indefatigable Heather Cox Richardson) has certainly 

served to highlight the fragility of progress, and how much easier it is to break things than to 

build them. But there are people out there who carry on building, and they have room for me, 

and you. As long as they don’t mind that I dance like an arthritic cow.

10th anniversary post: Dark Age Ahead (And Maybe Closer?)

 

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead. New York: Random House, 2004, 241 pp.

Jane Jacobs wrote this "gloomy but a hopeful book" (p. 3) late in her life, and I read it ten years later. Now, ten more years later, I am reading it again. Not much seems to have changed: American society still seems poised at the fork in the road described by the passage I quoted back then:

Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true. (169-170)

I was probably more inclined to the hopeful option in 2014 than I am today. As a student of American politics, I've seen so many unforced errors and so much willful delusion in the last ten years that it's hard to be very hopeful. 

🌞

Dark Age takes its title from the name commonly given to the period of European history following the fall of the Roman Empire, but she points out the numerous cultures in human history have collapsed and "become literally lost" (4). Yes, the Middle Ages had Charlemagne and Thomas Aquinas, but 11th century French peasants were literally eating dirt and dying young.

So much had been forgotten in the forgetful centuries: the Romans' use of legumes in crop rotation to restore the soil; how to mine and smelt iron and make and transport picks for miners, and hammers and anvils for smiths... In districts where even slaves had been well clothed, most people wore filthy rags.... Citizenship gave way to serfdom; old Roman cities and towns were largely deserted and their underpopulated remnants sank into poverty and squalor; their former amenities, such as public baths and theatrical performances, became not even a memory. (7-8)

As challenges arise, feedback is ignored, and knowledge stabilizing forces is also ignored if not actively suppressed. "I have written this cautionary book in hopeful expectation that time remains for corrective actions," she concludes in the introductory chapter, and proceeds with a series of warnings about five "pillars of our culture" (24). Core problems, like racism, environmental destruction, crime, political alienation, and surging inequality, arguably flow from the decline of these pillars.

Chapter 2 on families notes "Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities" (37). Families are stressed by car-dependency--which is as strong as ever in most of the country--as well as the price of housing. Twenty years ago, when the book was published, the median housing price-to-household income ratio in the U.S. exceeded 6.0 for the first time since the 1950s. It peaked at 6.81 two years later, and then resumed climbing in 2012. It is now 7.70 (longtermtrends.net; data are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the U.S. Census Bureau), which is scary.

Chapter 3 on higher education argues that it has become a matter of "credentialing, not educating... This is not in the interest of employers in the long run," but it provides hiring agents with a quick-and-dirty indicator of success (44-45). Remarkably, in my own career I have encountered dozens of students who come with their own thirst for knowledge, but alas, there are not enough of them to keep the college's doors open. If anything, the demographic cliff faced by colleges, along with the suspicion of independent knowledge fostered by powerful interests discussed in Chapter 4, have exacerbated the credentialing obsession. So good teachers are "despairing" (62), but more crucially, our culture loses the "critical capacities and depth of understanding" needed to make stabilizing corrections (63).

Chapter 4 on science talks about the widespread failure to study problems by observing, gathering and drawing conclusions from evidence, as opposed to fitting everything into accepted dogma. Happily for urbanists many of the examples have to do with automobile traffic. And of course, we're still arguing about climate change, with disasters crashing all around us.

Chapter 5 on taxation discusses how federalism in Canada as well as the U.S. has left cities without the autonomy to solve their own problems. In 2004 Toronto was getting slapped down by Ontario in the name of laissez-faire economics; these days the State of Iowa uses preemption against cities as blood sport for any reason at all. (We can't even prevent the sale of fireworks within the city limits.) And not just Iowa, of course, given the State of New York's last-minute veto against New York City's congestion pricing plan is still fresh in our minds. Most people, and most of the economy, lives in cities, but their residents can't negotiate the terms by which they will live together.

Chapter 6 on the failures of professional self-policing brings to mind the waste in federal anti-recession grants in 2008-10 and 2020-21. I remember commentary to the effect that President Obama was so naive to expect that corporate recipients of bailout money would use the largesse for the good of the economy rather than for the good of themselves, since of course businesses were supposed to focus on their own bottom lines rather than any public purpose. Today, nobody trusts anyone to handle artificial intelligence technology well. Of course, in politics, we've seen the repeated failures of the Republican Party to discipline or even restrain the egregious Donald Trump. (For the failures of both parties in this presidential election, see Levin 2024.)

🌞

Jacobs concludes with some advice on how to recognize and reverse Dark Age "spirals." Unwinding, the title of chapter 7, requires clear thinking, informed self-confidence, adequate capital, and "redundancy of mentors and examples" for broad diffusion of essential skills (159). Again, urbanists will be pleased to see her use housing as an example, as she traces the roots of our current difficulty from years of underinvestment during the Depression and war through exclusionary zoning to the waste of suburban sprawl (also exclusionary). She did not live to see the 2007 housing market collapse but clearly saw it coming. She also did not live to see Peter Calthorpe evangelizing for grand boulevards, but cites The Boulevard Book by Allen B. Jacobs and co-authors (MIT Press, 2002) as possessing insight into how to achieve the "densification" we still need (149ff.).

I am slowly steeling myself to the realization that cultural conservatives will dominate American politics in the near term (cf. Draeger 2024). Jacobs's perspective on the imminence of a cultural Dark Age shows that they are not wrong to fear the imminent loss of something essential in our country. Unfortunately, their nostalgia-fueled misperception of what that is has led them to espouse reaction and social control instead of imagining a "beneficient spiral" that corrects cultural weakness. That's going to be too bad. I hope I don't have to eat dirt.

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.