About those 15 minutes
of fame or of walking
Andy Warhol famously said that in the future we will each get our 15 minutes of fame. He was right. Whether you are a TikToker or an urban fad, you’ll get your 15 minutes.
You may want to take that up a notch and call yourself a 15-minute something in the hopes of making your thing a self fulfilling prophecy, but I doubt it works that way.
So it is with the new(est) urban thing: the 15-minute city. This is a concept introduced by Carlos Moreno, a brilliant professor from France who is advising mayor Hidalgo of Paris.
The concept is not new but Professor Moreno has cleverly branded it and Mayor Hidalgo’s global 15 minutes of fame have viralized it. Not new. People have walked to places since the beginning of cities. Every city, town and hamlet was an organic 15 minute city until the advent of the railroad, probably.
I pick the railroad because that was the first major motorized transport revolution that allowed mass movement of people and thus changed the physiognomy of cities to adapt to a new typology: the train station, and had to deal with the first physical barrier since defensive walls came down: the railway.
Cars just made it all worse. Or, I should say, planners who listened to a crazy, bald Swiss dude who made sure everyone paid attention, and who wanted to change how cities worked and looked like, and create a new human that -of course- would shaped by his reflections and theories.
Le Corbusier was instrumental in the lucrative shift of cities from places for people to places for cars. No city has been exempt. Those that were not bombed by the Luftwaffe were razed by the Federal Government.
Even European cities, beyond the beautiful, quaint centers, are “highwayed to hell”, riddled with traffic, pollution, noise, lunar landscapes, bad public housing, sprawl and long commutes. But let’s focus on the quaint parts.
The 15 minute city is a theory that seeks to reimagine cities so everything will be accessible for kids, the elderly and anyone within a 15 minute walk. All good. Like I said, all the best cities were 15 minute cities. Most were organized around temples or markets, of which several existed in a given places, and even some administrative boundaries were drawn along organic borders that had emerged without planning.
Such cities are more dense, compact and well served than sprawling ones. They are more sustainable and cost less per resident. One thing they are not is designed.
We cannot design cities. Every attempt has been disastrous. Even the Haussmannian endeavor, as beautiful as we may find it, would not have worked if Paris did not explicitly renounce to have restrictive land uses, parking minimums, density maximums and predetermined lot sizes as our Euclidian municipalities do.
Cities are complex systems that cannot be designed. Alain Bertaud wrote what perhaps is the best treaty on the subject. Get a copy to read along Jane Jacobs’ to find the balance between things we can do from the Top down and those that will not work unless they are organic and grassroots.
The 15 minute city is one of those. It will work if it is a voluntary thing, that people have the choice of using the services they find within a 15 minute walk. That is good. No one in their right mind would oppose it. No one in their right mind does.
Those who do are scared of other things, and walking to the grocery store or to church is not one of them. Before dismissing them, the best strategy is understanding what it is that they fear. Then by all means, dismiss them.
The good news is that the voluntary, grassroots 15 minute city is very much within reach. here’s a list of things you can do to achieve it in your town or city. It takes a bit of skin in the game but, hey, we are urbanists, we should have more than a bit invested in this. Please feel free to add more to this list:
Start a cultural group that brings the arts, culture and entertainment to a venue within 15 minutes of your house. Micro theaters, galleries, movie halls, murals, art walks, seasonal stages, free backyard concerts and any number of similar initiatives can turn your neighborhood into a culture district and let people choose to go to events close by.
Start a business that serves basic needs of neighbors. Team up with a local tailor, cobbler, cook, wholesaler, hairdresser, barista and rent one of the vacant storefronts nearby. There’s bound to be at least a couple. Run a business that alleviates the need to make long trips and advocate for more neighbors to do the same. Caveat: your business must be sustainable and there’s gotta be a market for it.
Start a farmers market, an urban agriculture co-op, a crop exchange, or any similar way of leveraging local -or regional- production with a short supply chain, overcoming food deserts and making healthy food available to your community within a 15-minute walk. Help a partner open a farm-to-table restaurant as a bonus.
Start a local commercial real estate co-op, where people can list their spaces and entrepreneurs can lease them, and from where you can call upon business owners who may want to come and fill some service voids in your community. There’s always a dentist or an attorney or a bodega owner who may be looking and your 15-minute neighborhood may be great for their business and for the community.
Start an educational institution: music, science, art, sports, coding, or daycare, that can take care of neighborhood kids after school, while teaching them valuable skills that they may not otherwise get, such as civic values and useful stuff like how finance, taxes, homeownership or entrepreneurship work.
Start a grilling club, a knitting club, a chess club, a running club, a pub trivia club, a cooking club, a storytelling or slam poetry group, a garden club, a woodworking club… you get the idea. Bring skilled retired people to teach others and benefit from the company, to help folks age in place.
Start a landscaping, tree-planting, or medicinal herb collective to beautify the neighborhood, make walks shaded, comfortable, beautiful and throw in a few benches to invite people to sit and gather.
Start a community kitchen, business incubator, recording studio, maker space or a co-working space where people can grow businesses from and find a crowdfunding platform or any similar vehicle that may help neighbors to become local entrepreneurs and fulfill services within their neighborhood, making all sorts of services and products available within a 15 minute walk.
Start a PAC to lobby your local government to rescind the zoning code. Yes: rescind, cancel, delete, throw away. Zoning, Historic Preservation and other land use restrictions have taken away from organic urban evolution, despite any good intentions that they may have had. All those seemingly good concepts have been weaponized to thwart urban evolution, and have exacerbated problems like housing availability and cost, homelessness and the dearth of missing middle and workforce housing. Lobby for a Form-Based Code while you’re at it.
The key word is start. It is a prompt and a call to action, for things you can do now to create a 15-minute city without the need to impose it on your neighbors.
Many of the things on that list are now illegal. The organic, voluntary 15 minute city is more often than not illegal by design. They have been made illegal through regulation that, we hope, was made with good intentions but had disastrous consequences.
As it turns out, we are now advocating for a great concept (urban services and amenities reachable within 15 minutes) that was present in every single urban area and then made illegal, to be implemented from the Top down, by design. I fail to see how that is either efficient or desirable.
Alain Bertaud comments that even if it were elevated to public policy, the government has no means of making the 15-m city happen, since there will not be bakeries, playhouses and tailor shops opened, owned and run by the government to fill the voids in each 15-m sector. Only entrepreneurs and business owners who run their pro formas and find them viable to operate and turn a profit can do that.
The key issue is volition. People must have a choice. As Bertaud demonstrates here, Parisians live in a metropolitan region with 12 million residents and have at a given time, access to 56,000 jobs within that metro. Much, much less if they are only allowed to look within a 750 acre subset. Much to the detriment, too, of the complexity and resulting wealth that allows places like Paris’ Sixth Arondissement, NYC’s Greenwich Village, Boston’s South End, LA’s Westwood or Seattle’s Capitol Heights to exist.
Paris residents have 59 bakeries and 198 food shops within 15 minutes reach, according to the Atelier Parisian d’Urbanisme or City Urbanism Office. Kindergartens and primary schools are also broadly accessible within 15 minutes, according to APUR.
Cities are shaped by their dwellers’ choices. Life, urban vitality and economic development depend on their continuous ability to make new choices, amend existing ones, and leave room for bad ones. Top down initiatives hamper choice.