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City planners say we have to rethink the way we build urban areas to make them more sustainable, healthy and just. The so-called 15-minute city is one idea. But are they viable?
As recently as a two decades ago, more people lived in the countryside than in urban areas. But that has since changed. Around 56% of the global population are now at home in cities, and the number continues to rise. According to the United Nations, two thirds of the roughly 10 billion people that will inhabit planet Earth by the year 2050 will live in built-up areas.
This consistent city spread has revealed serious cracks in their planning, shedding light on issues such as social injustice and exclusion, inadequate public transportation networks and smog-related health issues. One idea that has been gaining traction recently as a way towards more sustainable, livable and healthy futures are 15 minutes cities.
The idea behind the concept is to build cities in such a way that most daily necessities and services are located within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Carlos Moreno, urbanist and professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris first came up with the idea in 2016. He wanted everyone to have easy access to shops, schools, doctors, the gym, parks, restaurants and cultural institutions.
Many people who live in cities today can only dream of that, and instead have to deal with traffic jams or poor public transportation to get where they want to go.
Human-centered design
Benjamin Büttner, mobility expert at the Technical University Munich says that in order to create more sustainable cities, things like green spaces, places to do sport, cinemas and shops need to be moved to where people live, not vice versa.
And that doesn't mean they have to be demolished and rebuilt, but that already existing public space needs to be rearranged.
The 15-minute city also offers a mobility concept: fewer cars and more space for cyclists and pedestrians, safe paths for children, people with disabilities or the elderly and places for social interaction.
"Cars are a problem, at least in urban centers. They take up too much space and they can hamper active mobility," Büttner said.
From Paris to Shanghai: more and more cities are reconstructing
There are already 16 cities worldwide that have implemented the 15-minute city concept or similar ideas, or are working on doing so. The approaches vary, with some cities looking to implement 20-minute concepts, others 10-minute ones, and yet others focused on either individual urban districts or set on recreating the entire city.
Among the pioneers is the French capital. After Carlos Moreno introduced his concept in 2016, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, presented it in her reelection campaign and began implementing it during the pandemic.
The core of the Paris concept sees schools as "capitals," making them the center of each neighborhood. Schoolyards are being refurbished into parks to make them accessible for other activities after classes and at the weekend.
Paris also wants to repurpose half of its 140,000 car parking spaces, turning them into green areas, playgrounds, neighborhood meetups or bike parking spots. Streets right across Paris are due to be bike-friendly by 2026.
In 2016, Shanghai announced plans to introduce what it calls "15-minute community life circles," a plan that would ensure all day-to-day activities are within 15-minutes walking distance. Another 50 Chinese cities are looking to implement the concept.
An initiative in the UK is also aimed at achieving a better quality of life for city dwellers. As part of its countrywide renaturalization program, the British government announced plans to make it possible for everyone to reach green areas or open water within a 15-minute walk from their home.
The 'Superilles' or super districts of Barcelona
The Spanish city of Barcelona has been experimenting with so-called Superilles or super districts. The concept takes several housing blocks and puts them into a super block. Only residents or delivery services have access with cars and the maximum speed limit is 10 kilometers (6 miles) an hour.
Many streets are blocked for cars and are instead being used in different ways. Former parking lots have been given over to trees, vegetables and flowers, and are now places where children can play and people can while away their time on benches in the shade.
"Tactical urbanism" is what Büttner calls this approach. The concept is being tested for two to six months "in order to see whether the situation has gotten better or worse," he says. "In that case you can still say 'let's go back to the way things were before.' But if it's got better then you can make it a lasting measure."
Currently, 60% of public space in Barcelona and 85% of streets are used for traffic. More than half the city's residents are faced with noise and dangerous air pollution, which is considerably higher than World Health Organization limits. The new districts should reduce motorized traffic by 21%.
Will less traffic harm businesses?
Studies show that more bike and pedestrian traffic in cities saves money, as less is spent in the road maintenance and health sectors.
The positive effects of cycling are being estimated at more than €90 billion ($96 billion) in the EU alone. By comparison, mobilized traffic causes more than €800 billion in costs for health, environment and infrastructure every year.
Many shop owners are concerned that the 15-minute city idea will cause a collapse in sales since customers can no longer reach them by car. But in the western US city of Portland, the 20% drop in car traffic following the introduction of a 20-minute city concept, also led to an additional $1.2 billion (€1.14 billion) staying in the local economy.
15-mins city concept different for every place
In order for as many people as possible to benefit from changing cities, and to avoid any new imbalance and gentrification, experts highlight the need to roll out the concept across different districts and ensure those taking part have a good social mix. That also requires rethinking regulations and traditional planning categories, such as city centers, housing districts, suburbs and commercial areas which have led to inequality and exclusion in cities worldwide.
According to Büttner, political will and courage of politicians and administrations are vital, as well as the dialogue with citizens and all parties involved. Because there isn't a set solution for all cities.
Every place and every social, economic and ecological structure of a city is different, Büttner says. So deciding which measures are best, depends on the context.
The surprising stickiness of the "15-minute city"
Urbanism trends come and go but the "15-minute city" framing of walkable, mixed-use urban development is a lot more than a fad.
The historical roots of the 15-minute city are connected deeply with the current moment—one we will be living with for a long time to come.
As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.
Urbanism trends come and go: Broadacre City, Radiant City, EcoCity. Yet the "15-minute city" concept—which implies having all necessary amenities within a short walk, bike ride, or public transit trip from one's home—has demonstrated stickiness not just as an idea, but as a powerful tool for action – from Paris to Seoul, from Bogotá to Houston.
For longtime urbanists, the 15-minute city seemed to merely repackage the historic urban pattern of development: walkable, mixed-used districts. Old wine, new bottle, as the saying goes. But for a new framing to ignite a global urbanism movement, clearly there’s more going on.
The obvious, yet incomplete, answer is the pandemic. Would Paris's Mayor Anne Hidalgo have pushed for progressive urban design without this framing? Undoubtedly. But with COVID-19 and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a "nice-to-have" to a rallying cry. Meeting all of one's needs within a walking, biking or transit distance was suddenly a matter of life and death. The pandemic created an urgency around equitable urbanism that sidelined arguments about bike lanes and other "amenities" that have roiled communities for years.
The term was coined in 2016 by Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, who was given an Obel Award in 2021 for developing the idea. A Google Trend search of worldwide usage of the term; the peak is approximately November 15, 2020.
When a new framing meets its moment, something more than a fad is emerging. Prior to the pandemic, few planners would have taken seriously the idea that "home" become the central organizing factor of all urban planning. Despite predictions of increased "telecommuting," working from home remained an outlier. Indeed, work and commerce have always been the central organizing factors of urbanism, from the post-agricultural revolution to the industrial and technological ones.
Historically, most cities grew up around trade, which then developed into more permanent places of commerce. Cities reduced transportation costs for goods and people by bringing them closer together. By reducing these costs, cities increased productivity and thus further evolved the city as a multiplier of culture and innovation. (As Aristotle said, "The city-state comes into being for the sake of living, but it exists for the sake of living well.") More than a century after the adoption of automobiles as the dominant mode of transportation, work still dictated urban geography, with increasingly longer commutes. Suburbia, the antithesis of the 15-minute city, couldn't exist without proximity to an economic urban engine.
The creative destruction of cities
COVID-19 may now be flipping this on its head, which is why the 15-minute city concept is taking hold in a way that it would not have before the pandemic. As demonstrated by the illustration below, the 15-minute city puts home at the center of urban spatial relationships. The point is not to have every cultural amenity and human desire within immediate reach of one's doorstep. New York can only have one Broadway theater district. But there's no question that Midtown Manhattan will have to follow a similar recovery pattern that Lower Manhattan did in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack: diversification. And that is true of the suburbs as well, significantly beyond the extent to which they've already diversified.
Indeed, the decentralization of work is not going to kill the city, it’s going to save it. There will be a lot of creative destruction along the way, but that is how the city renews itself: from within. The cities that don't decentralize work will struggle mightily in ways both known and unimaginable.
As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical. Anyone who has followed Erik Klinenberg's work knows that resilience is rooted in place. Specifically, communities that foster and maintain social and economic relationships don't have to be wealthy, but they do need to be walkable and safe, with both residential and commercial buildings intact. And, I would add, for 15-Minute Cities to thrive, not just survive crises—and this cannot be stressed enough—they must also have plenty of mixed-income and equitable housing, as well as digital access.
This is how neighbors can know and understand each other: as local store owners and workers, colleagues, caregivers, educators, and friends. These are the people who come together when it matters most. The mutual-aid groups that appeared during the pandemic exemplify the importance of social cohesion in a crisis, which only works if necessities are within a reasonable distance of where people live.
And yet, 15-minute cities are not just a collection of autonomous medieval villages living in a constant state of crisis. The fractal nature of cities is what makes them dynamic places as a collection of connected neighborhoods with their own cultural histories that evolve over time and contribute to the identity of the larger city (such as the Harlem Renaissance, or the Latin jazz and hip-hop cultures of the South Bronx).
The word "connected" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, people need mass transit and other citywide services. But cities are as much an identity as a place. As historian Yuval Noah Harari might say, cities are a "fiction," a shared concept that organizes society around cooperation (however tenuous that may seem at times). While Harari focused on nation-states and religion as primary human fictions, I would argue that cities are the most innovative human fiction of all.
Dystopia, utopia, eutopia
In stark contrast to the 15-minute city is the predominant urban trend of the 20th century that continues into the current one: namely, rapid urbanization, both dystopian and utopian. An estimated 1 billion urban poor (1 of every 8 people on the planet) live in informal settlements. Then there's the dystopian ghost towns of China, where 130 million properties are vacant, which could house about 340 million people, surpassing the current U.S. population. The opposing trend is the ground-up construction of "smart city" utopias, such as Songdo City in South Korea and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, among others. Even though they're largely considered soulless failures, hope springs eternal: Toyota's Woven City is now under construction in Japan.
Between dystopia (bad place) and utopia (no place) is "eutopia," a town planning term coined by 19th century Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes. It comes from the Greek origin of eu, meaning good, and topos, meaning place. Comprising "folk, work, and place," eutopia is the best possible manifestation of a city.
To better quantify and plan eutopias, Geddes developed the concept of a "vital budget." He argued that "society must transition from 'money wages'—which tend to dissipate energies toward individual gains at the expense of both natural and cultural qualities—to a 'vital budget' which facilitates 'conserving energies and organizing [the] environment towards the maintenance and evolution of life – social, individual, civic.'"
This sounds a lot like a 15-minute city, including the circumstances under which it emerged: through the cracks of creative destruction brought on by a technological revolution.
So, what’s new about the 15-minute city, then?
As a concept, not much, which is why I initially dismissed it as a fad. But as the "old wine, new bottle" framing went viral (pardon the pun) and began to spark real change, it became clear the historical roots of the 15-minute city connected deeply with the current moment—one that we’ll be living with for a long time to come.
"There is no such thing as a new idea," Mark Twain once said. "It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages."
