The 15 Minute City E-Book

Natalie Whittle

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

15-minute city, noun: 'a city that is designed so that everyone who lives there can reach everything they need within 15 minutes on foot or by bike' Cities define the lives of all those who call them home: where they go, how they get there, how they spend their time. But what if we structured the way we live in our cities differently? What if we travelled differently? What if we could get back the time we would have spent commuting and make it our own? In this carefully researched and readily accessible book, Natalie Whittle interrogates the notion of the 15-minute city: its pros, its cons and its potential to revolutionise modern living. With global warming at crisis point and Covid-19 responses bringing a previously unimaginable decline in commuting, Whittle's timely book serves as a call to reflect on the 'hows' and 'whys' of how we live our lives. Building her study around consideration of space and time, Whittle traverses both to collect models from ancient Athens to modern Paris and demonstrate how one idea could change our daily lives – and the world – for good.

Leseprobe

NATALIE WHITTLE is a writer and editor based in Glasgow. Born and raised in South Wales, she read English Literature at University College London, and lived in Paris for three years working as a Time Out Paris journalist. She worked for 15 years at the Financial Times in London, where she held editing roles across the magazine and arts sections of FT Weekend. She is the founder of Outwith Books, an independent bookshop and writing space in Govanhill, on Glasgow’s Southside.

For Jennie, a friend in any city

First published 2021

ISBN: 978-1-80425-002-0

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon by Lapiz

© Natalie Whittle 2021

Contents

Preface: What is a 15-minute city?

Introduction: The way we move forward

A tale of several Parises

Handlebar utopia

Cycling to what? Walking to what?

Live and die local

The new Victorians: undoing the past in Glasgow

Time and the city

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Selected References & Bibliography

Preface:

What is a 15-minute city?

‘One city will be in one place, and the citizens are those who share in that one city.’

Aristotle, Politics

THE CITIES WE live in today cannot see their edges. Citizens in the centre, the suburbs and the outskirts are out of sight to one another. When a city grows larger, busier, ever stranger over time, we accept it as a sign both of its prosperity and its potential. ‘London is illimitable’ said the writer Ford Madox Ford, and he meant it as a compliment.

The 15-minute city is a different kind of place. Instead of endless horizons, it presents compact neighbourhoods as the theatre for urban life. In these neighbourhoods, a quarter of an hour is the optimal time it would take to arrive from our doorsteps at essential stops for education, healthcare, work, shopping and culture, travelling by bicycle or on foot. Mindful of the environment, 15-minute city residents would seldom use the car to run short errands or commute to work. Instead, pathways for walking and cycling would be drawn and connected through the city.

A new age of local living would supposedly start to dawn, aided by more flexible thinking about what goes where on our streets: local councils in the UK, for example, could unlock their rigid ratios of retail and office units. And to limit urban sprawl, space for homes would be sought inside the existing city footprint or on derelict and disused land, rather than greenfield sites. The patterns of daily life would sketch themselves into smaller areas, and in the process, valuable hours of personal liberty would be clawed back from the working week.

This is the vision, in its simplest form, of the urbanists, town planners and city leaders who are invested in bringing the theoretical 15-minute city to life. From Melbourne to Paris and Vancouver to Shanghai, there has been great enthusiasm about the possibility of this smaller radius of living and working as a means to make the city a healthier, greener and perhaps more equitable place in which to dwell. It matters all the more acutely today, since the Covid-19 pandemic has created a palpable sense of ‘before and after’ in almost every arena of our lives. What comes next for our cities? The uneven experiences of the coronavirus period seem to demand that it be something different.

Though it is a subject in vogue, the 15-minute city is not the newest idea on the block. Analogous concepts have been devised before, across the centuries, to carve out pleasant pockets of a city that can function well inside a larger body. Georgian and Victorian London had its ‘garden squares’ to create little lungs of ‘rus in urbe’ amid the burgeoning industrial city, where plane, almond and sycamore trees were planted for their ability to inhale the smog. America in the 1920s proposed the ‘neighbourhood unit’, a regimented piece of urbanism that organised precise densities of people as the building blocks for a city. Conceived by the sociologist Clarence Perry, the neighbourhood unit placed schools at the topographical centre of neighbourhood life, and measured the desired distances between amenities in five-minute walks. Perry, who also was influential in the planning of New York, said: ‘In a sense every great city is a conglomeration of small communities.’ Contemporary Barcelona, meanwhile, has the car-limited ‘superblock’, in which traffic within a large designated block is restricted to promote active travel on foot and by bike. All of these ideas are part of the 15-minute city dialogue: it is not a rigid, inflexible formula.

The 15-minute city is also work in progress. Many cities are starting with pilot schemes – and this will inevitably lead to refinements and iterations, perhaps an eventual discardment of the idea in favour of something else, when an evidence base is available for analysis, or even when another crisis arrives to reframe our priorities all over again. This book explores the hour of the 15-minute city in its broadest terms, to ask why its message is so resonant now – and to try to understand how it could truly make our urban lives better.

As this book goes to press, thousands of politicians, activists, indigenous leaders and climate scientists are preparing to descend on Glasgow, Scotland, for the UN Climate Change Conference. Though ‘COP’ is an annual gathering, its 26th edition feels more like an emergency summit convened hastily by crisis. Commitments pledged during previous conferences acknowledged that change cannot be magicked overnight – the crucial Paris Agreement in 2015 set a ‘long-term’ goal to limit global temperature rises to less than two degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. Yet perhaps in Glasgow there will be a more anxious edge to the discussions, expressing something of the fear, damage and volatility wrought by climate and coronavirus in the preceding 18 months.

The lockdown periods of 2020/21 also stand at the edge of the COP26 conference like trees casting strange shadows. Covid-19 restrictions on general social movements unwittingly mirrored many elements of 15-minute city living such as limited travel, neighbourhood self-sufficiency and the ability to work from home. Yet it also underlined how demanding an enclosed environment can be without the outrun of a park or garden, or the luxury of internal space, or the contrast of a train carriage or office building filled with other people’s problems and ideas as well as your own.

These contradictions, of which everyone had their own dose during lockdown, sparked my curiosity and prompted me to write an FT Weekend article on the subject, which set me on the path of writing this book. Wherever I’ve presented a bias for or against the 15-minute city idea, I have done so with no greater authority than informed personal opinion. My background is in journalism: I am not writing as an urbanist or an academic but as a city dweller who, like you, stands at the foot of a critical decade for the environment. These questions matter to us all but the answers, like our cities, do not have firm edges. Welcome, then, to the 15-minute city…

Introduction:

The way we move forward

ON THE STREET in Glasgow where I live, there is a car that never moves. Parked under a tree, winter to summer, it is a four-wheeled advertisement for decay. The tyres are cracked, the roof is powdered with tree dust, and the driver, if they ever turned up, would sit behind a windshield of green mould.

Walking past it day after day, I used to wonder if something serious had happened to the person who owned this vehicle. Why did they never return to it? Some bad luck beyond their control? Perhaps, more mysteriously, it was meant to be left there.

After a while, I added to the car’s abandonment and forgot about it, too; cities, after all, have unknowns at every corner. But in the course of writing this book, that car came back into my mind, and its forlorn state made me think about something else, the future.

Today, when we close our eyes and think of our home streets, we see lines of cars parked there. The same when we picture our city centres and neighbourhoods: cars, vans, motorbikes are there. They belong there. They are necessary to a fundamental urban logic which understands cities to be places that keep moving.

In a fully realised 15-minute city of the future, however, the organisation of movement would be different. Cars would still be present, but in a heavily demoted role, sidelined in the same way that bicycles and pedestrians were pushed aside in cities by the roar of the automobile industry following the Second World War. The acceleration of car culture in the economic recovery of the 1950s marked, after the earlier advent of the railways, a second critical shift in urban life, and we are still untangling the consequences. Railways laid the tracks for commuters to live further from their place of work, so unbuttoning the size of the average city, but cars made the cities themselves even busier. Pavements were narrowed, roads built and widened – all for the car to bestride the city. Even the Volkswagen factory, standing in ruins in postwar Germany, quickly resurrected itself amid a global boom in automobile production.

The 15-minute city would, arguably, herald the growth of industries associated with a new transport culture that would once again redraw the map of the road. Electric vehicles, yes, but also hydrogen power, micro mobility bike sharing and solutions for charging stations and parking facilities. Apps and services that streamline our transportation options into one smartphone thumb-swipe would also become more prominent.

The business of transport is critical to the wider, more imaginative mission of the 15-minute city, since first and foremost, this ‘new’ kind of city is one that tries its hardest to minimise the emission of greenhouse gases in the race against climate catastrophe.

Climate change is radicalising our weather in ways that are impossible to ignore: wildfires, flash floods and record-breaking heat waves. Zhengzhou is flooded at the time of writing, while Barcelona scorches in 39 degree heat, and wildfires burn through Greece. The march of urbanisation, in which around 68 per cent of the global population is forecast to live in cities by 2050, makes it acutely important that cities acknowledge their role in the crisis. A more localised experience of urban life, in which we use fossil fuels less, and move around by bike or on foot where possible, would in theory help to bring carbon emissions down and brake the pace of rising temperatures. Cities are not permanent; they are fragile and vulnerable to the effects of climate – they need to build resilience against change, as well as take responsibility for it.

The neatness of the 15-minute city slogan creates a temptation to think that the environmental benefits can be modelled to equally neat proportions. But there is a another reasoning for the quarter-hour framework. Researchers have found that 20 minutes is about the maximum length of time people are willing to walk in order to complete a daily task or chore. (This so-called ‘pedestrian shed’ before people opt to use a car or other transportation varies depending on social geography – in America, for example, it is sometimes capped at five minutes.) Since pedestrians and other active travellers are lead actors in the compact city neighbourhood, their known behaviours shape the outline of the urbanists’ thinking. In the 15-minute city, services and shops need to be close to one another so that a short walk or bicycle ride can achieve something in people’s lives, be it useful or educational or recreational. Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne professor of innovation who helped to pitch the concept to the city of Paris, calls the 15-minute city a ‘ville du proximité’.

Experiments to test the limits of pedestrian behaviour have already been trialled in cities all over the world. In 1963, a seedy strip of downtown Santa Monica in California took the then-radical decision to curb traffic in a designated block to try to lift the shopping experience. It has been tweaked with improved pavement designs in later decades, but today Third Street Promenade is a popular upscale destination, where the absence of the car is a value not a hindrance to trade. There are other environments where a density and exclusivity of foot traffic is known to lift retail performance – just think of the airport, for example, or the corralling of hungry and thirsty people in a Disneyworld.

Melbourne, Australia, where pilot 20-minute neighbourhoods are in place, has stressed the importance of walking as an enhancer of economic activity. This mercantile reality is a necessary part of the conversation, since the 15-minute city has to be able to offer thriving small high streets in order to meet its promise of enriched local living. Not everything about the 15-minute city is utopian glamour, either. Houston, Texas adopted a ‘complete streets’ policy in 2013, to improve the walkability and cyclability of its cityscape. There is a rigour that accompanies the city’s long-term commitment to the project; one of the newer features, for example, is a website where residents can report potholes.

Parallel to these considerations is another apparently hardwired phenomenon called ‘the Marchetti constant’, named for the Italian physicist Cesare Machetti. In this argument, Marchetti posited that 30 minutes is the near-universal time that commuters throughout history have been willing to sacrifice on a single leg of their journey. As transport technology advanced, this 30-minute tolerance did not alter, Marchetti argued. It simply allowed people to travel greater distances within half an hour, enabling their homes to be further apart from their workplace.

So whether on foot in ancient Rome or aboard a steam train in Victorian Manchester, on a tram in post-war Glasgow or an Underground train in modern London, half an hour is the duration we feel equal to, Marchetti’s theory suggests. But this doesn’t mean that the resultant sprawling cities accommodate our wishes. Indeed, to many long-suffering commuters, a half-hour trip each way would seem like wishful fancy, disconnected from the reality of watching as minutes and hours of life pass through the frame of train and bus windows.

Another valid response to the question ‘what is a 15-minute city?’ is that it is a self-aware city, where we use time, space and energy with an acknowledgment of their impact on our planet. Many of our travel behaviours are unconscious, but the 15-minute city is a splash of water on our faces – reminding us that time is in acute relation to the environment.

If we have travelled a great distance in a short period, for example, there is usually a punishment to the planet. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, has repeatedly made this point by going the long way round, slowly, to all her global speaking engagements. She travelled for 32 hours by train to the World Economic Forum in Davos, in order to give a keynote address. She sailed for two weeks across the Atlantic in a carbon fibre yacht to speak at the United Nations in New York. As Thunberg said to the assembled world leaders in Davos: ‘I want you to act as if the world is on fire, because it is.’

For change to be meaningful, however, we need to think differently before we can act differently, and raising this consciousness of how time, travel and energy connect is at the heart of the 15-minute conversation. Above all, the 15-minute city asks us to turn away from the perceived convenience of the fossil fuel car – the machine that enables us to gain the greatest control over the relationship between time and distance, by being a personal speed servant, driving us wherever and whenever we please.