Why the ‘15-minute city’ is not a neighbourhood menace

The “15-minute city” is what used to be known, simply, as “a city”. And yet somehow this simple, familiar concept — the idea that residents might be able to reach most of their amenities and basic services, their shops, schools, health centres and parks within a 15-minute stroll — has been hijacked. Elements of the political right see evidence of a sinister plot to corral people, strip them of their liberty and, most importantly, the use of their cars.

The concept’s transformation from common sense to toxicity serves as a fascinating window into a moment of social media-induced hysteria and conspiracy theory, with a newly empowered right attacking moves towards equity or sustainability as “woke” propaganda.

The 15-minute city was outlined a couple of decades ago by Carlos Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne, as an ideal for urbanists and was inspired in part by Jane Jacobs’ writings about a socially, functionally and economically mixed (and successful) city based on her observations of Greenwich Village in the 1950s.

Moreno’s base, Paris, is exactly the prototype for the 15-minute city. Anne Hidalgo, its mayor, proved receptive and effective in using the French capital as a lab for reinforcing and reimagining the concept, removing traffic, planting trees and using new neighbourhoods as walkable models.

When Paris was expanded in the 19th century by Baron Haussmann, it was planned so that each few blocks should have their own bakery, café, school, health centre and so on. The density of the original walled city was maintained, but split into a vertically striated hierarchy, with workshops in the basement, shops at ground level, haute bourgeoisie on the first floor, petit bourgeois above that and servants up top. The Parisian planners created mixed-use buildings in which apartments coexisted with businesses and social infrastructure, laying the foundations for the self-contained quartier where everything is within easy reach.

Most US downtowns, built only a couple of decades after Haussmann’s Paris, started as something very similar: dense blocks of intense use. The Greenwich Village that survived into Jacobs’ era was a fine example (though it has become something different now and her ideas are sometimes blamed for its gentrification). But only a few years after US downtowns were completed, the introduction of the automobile changed everything.

First in the US and then elsewhere, the car opened up the land around cities and the far suburbs. This certainly allowed the working and lower middle classes more generous, cheaper property but the suburbs were built not under the strict controls of municipalities but by private developers more as commodity than community. Not compelled to provide infrastructure, they did not. People were first persuaded that they needed cars, then they migrated to places where cars became not a luxury but a necessity. Which is precisely why urban planning, seen by some on the political right as a state-imposed limit on freedom, is so necessary. The model was California, so recently ablaze, a victim of global warming.

The vilification of the 15-minute city aspiration over the past couple of years has been a bizarre episode in the culture wars which have a habit of breaking out in the unlikeliest of arenas. It was even attacked by Conservative MPs Andrew Bowie and Nick Fletcher, the latter of whom called it an “international socialist concept”. Covid rules were seen by some as a test-run for restrictive urbanism.

The weirdness of the shift derives in part from the 15-minute city being, effectively, a very conservative notion of urbanity. This is how historic walled cities with limited spaces worked. It has introduced a schism on the right, between conservative urbanists and planners, who believe in a historic model of towns with car-free centres and picturesque townscapes, and the suburban-sprawl boosters, who admire the US model of car dependency and the freedom it gives to live wherever you want. What is rarely acknowledged on the right is that freedom comes at a price: road subsidies; air-pollution; traffic; time wasted in jams; a decline in public transport, which hits the poorest hardest.

There should be nothing controversial about 15-minute cities, which are now seen by some as socialist ideology. If anything, it is a rare instance of the coming together of ideas from the left and right to create a more humane mode of living. Just look at which neighbourhoods, from Manhattan to Paris and London, are the most expensive — they will all be examples of the 15-minute city. The problem, which Moreno and Paris Mayor Hidalgo have been confronting, with considerable success, is not their imposition because they are unpopular but their gentrification because they are so successful.

The question is whether the 15-minute city might need rebranding. Is it now too tainted? Too French? If we call it a “traditional” city would that not alienate the left and the remaining radicals? The concept has become a victim of its own success. Now fully supported by the World Health Organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UN, its promotion by these bodies plays straight into the hands of the conspiracy theorists. 

Perhaps it just needs a new name. Maybe, just shorten it. How about: “a City”?