Posted on 06/12/2023 7:16:06 AM PDT by MtnClimber
A 15-minute neighborhood sounds like something out of a guidebook tour: how to see the highlights of Le Marais in Paris in 15 minutes or less. But it’s the newest flavor in urban planning: a city composed of small districts that include all the key services for residents within a short walk.
Though the concept, dubbed the “15-minute city,” is of recent vintage, it gained traction during the pandemic lockdowns, when advocates observed that the vast reduction in activity created more “human-centric” neighborhoods, with residents exploring their local streets and availing themselves of nearby services that they might once have ignored. “For the first time, people experienced the city without cars, and they understood we can live without cars and it’s better,” enthused David Belliard, deputy mayor of Paris, whose officials have promoted the idea.
Though the concept seems innocuous—who wouldn’t want everything you need nearby?—plans to adopt it have lately ignited street protests, press denunciations, and social-media warfare, especially in European cities. One spark has been a move by the city of Oxford in England to impose traffic restrictions, including closing off some neighborhoods to cars during the day, to encourage more biking and walking. Protesters hit the streets in February to fight the initiative, with signs reading “NO TO 15-MINUTE CITIES” and complaints that the traffic restrictions recalled the lockdowns. Marchers also objected to the traffic cameras being installed to scan license plates to see if a car had entered a no-go area—deeming it a troubling expansion of the surveillance state.
The local protests drew some notable outside reactions. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson observed that, while walkable neighborhoods were “lovely,” he rejected the idea that “tyrannical bureaucrats” should decide where one should drive. The former head of the U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, called the Oxford plan a preview of “climate change lockdowns.”
Advocates for the Oxford measures defended them as simple efforts to provide people with what they want nearby. One Guardian journalist described the 15-minute city as a “mundane theory of urbanism,” while others in the press were more combative, denouncing the protesters as “conspiracists” and “climate-change deniers.” A few American publications expressed outrage, too. USA Today even performed a “fact check,” quoting the originator of the 15-minute city idea, Sorbonne University professor Carlos Moreno, who insisted that it has nothing to do with climate-change lockdowns.
Reading these accounts, one would think that no one outside of right-wing conspiracy groups would find anything controversial about 15-minute cities. In fact, the idea has been criticized across the political spectrum—from left-leaning observers, who charge that it’s just a form of “champagne socialism,” to academics worried about the privacy issues involved in such micro-control of the design of every neighborhood. Harvard economist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Edward Glaeser, for instance, describes the 15-minute city as “not really a city at all. It’s an enclave—a ghetto—a subdivision.” He added that the idea is a “dead-end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true roles as engines of opportunity” because in practice, it would undermine one of the chief benefits of urban living: connecting people. Urbanist Alain Bertaud has written that the 15-minute city is an idea of mayors who “pretend that a city is a complex object that must be designed in advance by brilliant specialists. They would then impose their design on the city’s inhabitants who lack vision and genius.” Bertaud notes that the 15-minute city would necessitate direct “government intervention in the job and retail market” to ensure that all services are available locally and to minimize the kind of commuting for work that people in Western societies engage in to expand their employment opportunities.
The winners in this new urbanism scheme, critics argue, would be wealthier neighborhoods, where services already exist because providers, like retailers, value these locations. By the same token, 15-minute cities might further segregate poorer neighborhoods, with commuting restrictions making it harder for people there to get ahead. In a working paper, MIT and Harvard researchers contend that “15-minute cities may . . . exacerbate the social isolation of marginalized communities.” France’s Chroniques d’architecture expresses the same concern, arguing that the urban plan behind the concept amounts to “refusing progress, refusing real living together, refusing sharing, refusing openness, refusing embellishment, refusing consumption.”...
“But it’s the newest flavor in urban planning: a city composed of small districts that include all the key services for residents within a short walk.”
You don’t need no steekin cars. The government will supply all your needs. You just need to report to the nearest government owned government run factory seven days a week for your work assignments.
Yep. Have you seen Klaus Schwab dressed in Satanic black outfit looking like a Darth Vader without the mask? Watching some videos of him reminds me of watching a cult leader, with the celebrities and politicians just eat up the crap he’s spewing.
Look at China. They use surveillance cameras and it’s require that everyone has to report 10 things about their neighbors every week. You get reported and you can’t buy food or leave the house.
Bingo. The 15 minute city is a pretext for gulags. Very scary.
One being considered in the UK will have a rule that you can only leave your designated zone 100 times a year. After that you get fined and I bet if you kept doing it or left and didn’t come back, finances frozen like a Canadian trucker.
I’ve always liked the concept. When I worked in NYC, I live in Hoboken. About 20 minutes to my office in the WTC. In Tulsa, I lived just off Cherry Street. The coffee house on the corner was my ‘office’. 8 really good restaurants, four of them local owned. Health club less than a mile away. But I chose this location. The Rats really don’t believe in choice.
I and millions of others do just fine with rural life and prefer it.
Viewed from the present, I would say it's a function of falling living standards. As soon as workers had enough money to bolt to the suburbs after WWII, they did. Only from the standpoint of the oligarchy is forcing Americans back to 19th century wages and living standards an improvement in "efficiency." Think of the hourly productivity of a slave plantation: apart from a small fixed cost for a modicum of food, minimal clothing and housing, the cost of labor is nothing.
I would add clean water is readily available in rural areas via wells as is fire protection through self-organized volunteer fire companies. Medical resources are obviously scarcer, but you also get cleaner air, less crime, etc..
Given the size of the American market and natural resources available, there isn't any reason for housing and transportation to be so expensive except for the deliberate policies of the oligarchic managerial class in both government and business.
And yet I would contend that suburban migration in the post-WW2 period was only possible because the U.S. government had implemented two of the biggest pieces of socialist legislation in our country's history: the G.I. Bill and the Interstate Highway Act.
It's also worth noting that the post-WW2 period was an anomaly in that the U.S. was the only major industrial power in the world to emerge from the war with its industrial assets and infrastructure unscathed. As the rest of the world caught up to us over the next 20+ years, the U.S. lost a lot of its competitive edge in the industries that played such a big role in this suburban migration.
That’s fine. Could 330 million Americans all live the same way you and I do? I’m not so sure about that.
Community-sized prisons.
The 15 minute city sounds horrid.
The Warsaw Ghetto was a “15-Minute City”.
AND it takes 15 minutes from one side of a prison to the other.
What would Jane Jacobs have thought of this? She might like the idea of liveable communities within cities where people could access things by walking, but dislike the idea of central planners imposing it on people. People don't want to be "assigned" one grocery store, one pharmacy, one doctor's office. Monopolies stifle healthy competition.
A question for all the urban planners. Do economies of scale exist? Is specialization of the production of some things an exception or do they really believe in the 15 minute town having everything. Does a small market destroy competition?
For example, should electric power plants only be sized for a small population within 15 minutes of the neighborhoods they serve? Not in my back yard syndrome would need to be stamped out.
How about farms, should the only food eaten in a neighborhood have to be grown within 15 minutes of that area?
How about lumber to build and remodel homes? Must it be grown and milled near the town?
“There’s nothing new about this design. Before workers could afford cars or transportation to work in the 19th and early 20th centuries, neighborhoods would be built around the factories and warehouses where people worked”
A perfect example of this concept is the Pullman District, a community on the far south side of Chicago that was built around a turn of the century factory owned by the Pullman family (George Pullman) that made railroad cars.
The neighborhood still exists in its entirety and is a tourist spot now. I used to go there when I worked and/or lived in Chicago when young (I live in FL now, thank goodness). It is a fascinating time piece neighborhood.
The company would gouge its citizen workers living in the hood for their food expenses, rent etc, A little socialist Utopia that was really a dictatorship run by the Company. Now the little homes/apts (each section of housing was different depending how much the worker made) are still inhabited and probably worth a lot of money if sold, as the whole area there is now a historic district.
There remains a large Victorian hotel there that you could eat wonderful brunches/lunches at; Todd Lincoln, Abraham’s son, frequented it (or maybe lived there awhile). I forget his tie-in to the Pullman area.
I’m going to Wiki “Pullman District in Chicago, IL” to refresh my memory. You history buffs might want to do the same. I used to love to go down to the Southside Pullman District to explore and eat lunch at the Florence Hotel. It’s a real time capsule in itself with its historic old Victorian charm. You can get the history of the area by touring the area and by info available to tourists at the hotel. It’s been years since I visited there though, so who knows what the status/use of the Hotel is now.
You will not!
To “save our planet” you will be forcibly relocated to some ghetto. If you refuse, it would be a concentration camp!
Save me a piece of moldy bread when you get to the camp.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.