In a post from earlier this year, The Domestication of City Dwellers, Heather Heying expresses many of my doubts about the crazy new "15-minute cities" concept, along with some I hadn't thought of.
Fifteen minute cities are intended to reduce sprawl and traffic, facilitate social interactions with your neighbors, and give you your time back. If it took fifteen minutes or less to get to all the places that you need and want to go, imagine how much more possibility there could be in life.
You might well wonder how such remarkable results will be achieved. The answer is: through restricting automobile travel between neighborhoods, fining people who break the new travel restrictions, and keeping a tech-eye wide open, with surveillance cameras everywhere.
Apparently, say the promoters of fifteen minute cities, we need to promote access over mobility. In their world, the definitions are these: “Mobility is how far you can go in a given amount of time. Accessibility is how much you can get to in that time.” The same post further argues that “Mobility - speed - is merely a means to an end. The purpose of mobility is to get somewhere, to points B, C, D, and E, wherever they may be. It’s the 'getting somewhere' — the access to services and jobs — that matters.”
This is not just confusing, it’s a bait-and-switch. Speed is not the same thing as mobility. Being able to “get somewhere” is mobility. Mobility means freedom to move. This freedom has been undermined for the last three years, in many countries, under the guise of protecting public health.
Fifteen-minute cities would further restrict your freedom to move. Your ability to get anywhere will be restricted under the pretense of making it easier and faster to get everywhere that you really need or want to go.
Dr. Heying goes on to explain several of the problems with this reasoning, and the whole article is worth reading. Including the footnotes. But a few of her points immediately jumped out at me.
First of all, who decides what exactly it is that comprises "everywhere that I really need or want to go"? One dentist is just as good as any another, right? Once upon a time, one church (Catholic) was all that any town needed; who really needs churches of different Christian denominations, not to mention mosques and Hindu temples?
If there's a public school within 15 minutes of my house, certainly I don't need to send my kids to a private school that may be located outside my neighborhood? In fact, this 15-minute city idea has a strong odor of our American public school system—in which children must attend the nearest school, and parental choice in education is strongly opposed—writ large.
And how will these convenient services for "everything we need and want" be set up? Who gets to open a grocery store in which neighborhood? What if no one wants to open a store there? Will some neighborhoods have only government-run facilities? Will we have mega-stores with every variety of foodstuffs instead of family-run ethnic markets? Or maybe no stores at all, just Amazon Prime? Do we really want thousands of tiny libraries, art museums, and concert venues, each offering a tiny fraction of what is now available? Or will we be told that we should get all our culture and information online?
And worst of all: Granted, it would be wonderful if all our loved ones lived within 15 minutes of our homes. Imagine having all our friends so close, and grandchildren just down the street! But how will that be accomplished? Our friends and family are spread all over the globe. Of course I'd like them to be closer—but not at the cost of imprisoning them! Even if they were all forced to move into the same 15-minute neighborhood, how long could such a situation be sustainable? Population control on a massive and tyrannical scale?
Besides, anyone who has grown up in a small town knows not only how wonderful they are, but also how insular, parochial, and restrictive they can be. If our COVID lockdowns produced a massive increase in suicide and other mental health problems, just wait till we've lived in 15-minute cities for a generation.
And if in that one generation people have come to believe that living under such tyranny is normal and good—the only word for that is tragedy.
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This post has not let go of me. Indeed, if the 15-minute city was the large-scale confinement described, it would be an awful idea.
But that's not what it is. If you want to spend eight minutes listening to Carlos Moreno, who first popularized the idea, explain the 15-minute city, that might help, but I'll summarize it.
Dr. Heying's first paragraph is a good start. The idea is to minimize the travel time necessary for basic necessities: living, working, commerce, healthcare, education, and entertainment, thus saving resources on a daily basis.
However, Dr. Heying seems to have grossly misunderstood both the motivation and the implementation of the concept. People will not live like dogs chained to a post in the yard. They will live like cats that don't leave the neighborhood because it contains plenty of mice, birds, trees, and kindly people. And the idea is not to have individual little self-contained 15-minute (circular?) pockets, but simply a good distribution of services across the city so that, no matter where you touch down (or ascend from the metro), none of the services mentioned are far away.
Obviously, this concept best works in sufficiently densely populated areas. (That's why it's the 15-minute city.) It is a marked departure from the concept of having a central business district that welcomes crowds in the morning and is empty by dinner. It faces challenges in dealing with existing built structures wisely and economically and particularly attractive areas may well price out many people in the way upscale neighborhoods do. There are unsolved issues that will have to be dealt with.
But the following are not issues I anticipate in 15-minute cities:
travel restrictions
close tesselation of houses of worship, operas, sports stadiums and similar large facilities
splitting up of large central facilities into lots of little parts
forced relocation of inhabitants
forced assignation of medical providers
Let me briefly explain why.
There will be no travel restrictions because it's not necessary. If you want to leave your neighborhood, you do that. You can commute cross-town if you like: it's your choice to spend your time like that. The city planners are in the meantime working on making your neighborhood more attractive. What might feel like travel restriction are roadways with more space allotted to bicycles and pedestrians and less space allotted to cars and parking.
Large facilities will not be duplicated every fifteen walking minutes. A short consideration of their size alone should make it obvious that if that was done, they would fill the city all by themselves.
The concept does call for smaller-size neighborhood entertainment options, which I assume are restaurants, community centers, small parks, boutique theaters, and the like. Again, as you rightly point out, it makes no sense to divide a municipal museum into two dozen hole-in-the-wall tiny museums that each house a different subset of the original museum. Paris, in its attempt to pursue the 15-minute city concept, will not place bits and pieces of the Notre Dame in a hexagonal grid across the city. This is an unfounded fear.
And people will still get to decide where they live, under very similar constraints as today. Any forced relocation to bring family members closer would soon result in the entire world living in a single city, given just how closely I am related to a Japanese rice farmer or a Nigerian businessman.
Finally, the whole concept is there to offer useful services nearby, but if you prefer other services, you are free to travel farther. No GP will have a monopoly on all the people that live closer to him than any other GP.
All these fears are of a concept that is nightmarish indeed--outlandishly so. I wish Oxford had simply set up a retractable bollard on those roads they wanted to limit traffic on. They could have given taxi drivers and emergency vehicles a remote to lower the bollards. However, as good stewards of public funds, they opted for the cheaper approach of setting up a few signs and cameras—thus fuelling fears of total surveillance. But many of the nightmarish conclusions mentioned don't even justifiably derive from Oxford's cameras. For instance, what was prohibited was using a selection of roads, not traveling to another part of Oxford. You could get to the other end of Oxford, just not using those select roads. Using the cameras to fine people isn't much different from using cameras to catch speeders.
You ask a good question: Who dreams up these nightmares?
Well, cui bono? Who benefits from scaring Sursumcorda and her readership?
Maybe the highly intelligent person who misrepresents facts and misunderstands ideas and thus shows that she can see past the simple beginnings of nefarious schemes? Whose article garners attention and gets shared online? Who can thus burnish her reputation as an intellectual maverick, free and independent, questioning everything?
Let me finish by sharing this link to a world map of proximity indices for most larger cities. (In the US, they seem to have mapped counties, like this.) And I'd encourage readers to entertain new ideas like the 15-minute city instead of dismissing them with dreamed-up nightmares. Perhaps more walkable cities would help make America healthy again?
And maybe people scaring you don't have your best interests at heart.
