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The latest urban planning gimmick is the '15-minute City' with its poster child being Paris and its godfather Carlos Moreno:
His 15-minute concept was developed primarily to reduce urban carbon emissions, reimagining our towns not as divided into discrete zones for living, working, and entertainment, but as mosaics of neighborhoods in which almost all residents’ needs can be met within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public transit. As workplaces, stores, and homes are brought into closer proximity, street space previously dedicated to cars is freed up, eliminating pollution and making way for gardens, bike lanes, and sports and leisure facilities.
The main driving force for this idea wasn't a dream of a better urbanism but a belief that we face a climate emergency and that people travelling about was a big factor behind the carbon emissions causing that emergency. But soon, as the youthful, hipster planners grasped the idea, it became the latest in a long line of anti-car, anti-suburb campaigns. Nobody, least of all the leaders of London, New York or Los Angeles, stopped to ask important questions about the programme in Paris, its scope and its impact. We gathered Moreno's PR as if it was the simple truth and believed that Paris was becoming a car-free city to the delight of its inhabitants.
The problem here is what Wendell Cox calls 'Louvre Café Syndrome':
This occurs when Americans sit at Paris cafes in view of the Louvre and imagine why it is that the United States does not look like this. In fact, most of Paris doesn't even look like this, nor do other European urban areas. Like their US counterparts, European urban areas rely principally on cars for mobility (though to a somewhat lesser degree) and their residents live in suburbs that have been built since World War II.
Most Parisians don't live in the central city but in sprawling suburbs surround that city. And, just like everywhere else, most of those Parisians don't spend their daily life skittling into and out of the city us visitors enjoy. The 15-minute city doesn't apply to this population and, were planners smitten by Moreno's ideas to introduce them, the results would be as unpopular as the introduction of 'Low Traffic Neighbourhoods' (LTNs) has been in London's inner suburbs. What the 15-minute City does is reduce the scope and choice of residents. It assumes that people prefer a more limited choice within strolling distance of a fourth floor town centre flat over a wide choice available within a fifteen minute drive or a suburban house in their car.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't have more walkable communities or that we shouldn't encourage what's know now as 'active travel', but all of these things are possible without the blunt and controlling ideas that come from Moreno's 'smart city' concepts. Moreover, Moreno's ideas respond to a very narrow demographic with a model that simply cannot work in a modern agglomerated metropolis.
The first thing we'll notice is how the '15-minute City' is popular in the grand arrondisements of Paris's wealthy centre. Such places already enjoy the benefits that come from being wealthy and situated in the heart of a city that, in normal circumstances, has millions of visitors adding to the extravagence of rich residents. Take a trip out of the city centre to some of the less salubrious banlieue with their unemployment, poverty and ethic tensions - how does containing these residents inside a '15-minute' cordon help with their social mobility, with the betterment of their lives? Will good jobs either on the urban fringe or in the city centre now migrate to places known now for bad policing, car burning, and sky-high levels of crime?
Some more radical folk no doubt consider that the '15-minute City' (or twenty minutes if you're in Victoria) represents a radical remake, not of the city, but of people's lives. In the authoritarian tradition of Le Corbusier, these urban planners see citizens as counters to be moved about within their smart cities - peons not people. Plebs who can be forced into using uncomfortable, inconvenient and expensive transport to access a range of choices (employment, leisure, lifestyle) deliberately limited by the preferences of planners. All of this washed over in gentle green watercolour.
Successful modern societies are diverse in many ways, in the people, in lives and in geography. Denying people the flexibilty of comfortable, efficient and relatively cheap private transport represents a huge backwards step in the betterment of our lives. Yet this is exactly the policy pursued by the wealthy authoritarians who now run big cities. Worse still, because decisions about the rest of us and our lives are being made in those cities by these green-tinted authoritarian planners, people living in Pennine Yorkshire or the Ardennes get told they shouldn't be driving that car, that they should be huddled into a 15-minute zone that barely allows them to reach the next village, let alone the towns tantalisingly beyond the approved limit.
Even in the suburbia where most of us live, the choice and flexibility granted us by the wonder that is the private car would, if removed, make such places less diverse and less appealing even ghost towns. The idea that, by car, we are within a few minutes of several choices for shopping, for leisure and for work is being sneered at by planners in big city centres pretending that the life of a well-paid, single young graduate is the ideal life. And that urban planning should be skewed entirely to the needs and preferences of such people. This, not saving the planet or a "new urban vision", is the reality of the '15-minute City'.
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5 comments:
Everywhere from my village is about 12-14 miles away. A car is a necessity.
«What the 15-minute City does is reduce the scope and choice of residents. It assumes that people prefer a more limited choice within strolling distance of a fourth floor town centre flat over a wide choice available within a fifteen minute drive or a suburban house in their car.»
As many arguments from well-meaning tories go, this is exemplary of their adopting of the point of view of people of independent means, who don't work and don't have young children and often live in idyllic out of town places they chose merely because they like them.
Because it is based on the assumption that people don't have to commute to work, and don't have to drive children to the nursery or school or events, and they can avoid rush hour slowdowns, and the cost of buying, keeping and fueling two cars (and the 3-bed semi with large garden) is a small part of their disposable income.
I am fairly persuaded that people who have no such issues love living in their 3-bedroom-with-large-garden micro-manor within 15-20 minutes driving distance of Waitrose/M&S and the local Conservative association club. Except that when become too old to drive things become a lot less idyllic. For the servant classes the situation is a bit less idyllic even before that.
«Everywhere from my village is about 12-14 miles away. A car is a necessity.»
This seems to me a very innocent point: I guess then that before cars that village simply did not exist, because living in that location was impossible without that "necessity".
A longer term view could be that once upon a time, when villages were "communities", that village had shops, post offices, doctors, bus services, etc., and these disappeared when enough people in the village had cars and drove to a Waitrose/M&S 12-14 miles away, thus everyone else "chose" to move to a town or buy cars too.
There is an excellent book about how "choice" really works, and many "libertarians" or "conservatives" should really read it: http://www.web.net/~tslee/
“Every week, millions of North Americans take advantage of their freedom of choice by shopping at Wal-Mart. Ironically, the cumulative effect of these actions may be to remove real choice by driving alternatives to Wal-Mart out of business. As a result, many who spend their money at a Wal-Mart store may nevertheless end up wishing that it had never been built.”
«Everywhere from my village is about 12-14 miles away. A car is a necessity.»
This seems to me a very innocent point: I guess then that before cars that village simply did not exist, because living in that location was impossible without that "necessity" :-).
A longer term view could be that once upon a time, when villages were "communities", that village had shops, post offices, doctors, bus services, etc., and these disappeared when enough people in the village had cars and drove to a Waitrose/M&S 12-14 miles away, thus everyone else "chose" to move to a town or buy cars too.
There is an excellent book about how "choice" really works, and many "libertarians" or "conservatives" should really read it: "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart"
“Every week, millions of North Americans take advantage of their freedom of choice by shopping at Wal-Mart. Ironically, the cumulative effect of these actions may be to remove real choice by driving alternatives to Wal-Mart out of business. As a result, many who spend their money at a Wal-Mart store may nevertheless end up wishing that it had never been built.”
I own a car, pretty much everything is within 15 minutes for me.
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