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.”...
P.S.: Google “Pullman State Historic Site” that pulls up its History as a Utopian planned workers community south of Chicago. Lots of pics and turn of the century (1880) history info at site. Most interesting (see my post on Pullman District above).
People keep repeating that as if it were some kind of universal explanation.
The fact is that by WWI the US was already the world's largest industrial power and in the 1920s American workers were already enjoying the fruits of mass production and high wages, something interrupted by the Great Depression and WWII. The comparative US position externally improved after WWII, and that comparative position declined over time. But by the late sixties American workers had reached an unparalleled standard of living.
The combination of going off the gold standard (which opened the flood gates to unlimited unfair imports) and regulatory and tax strangulation via the EPA and other agencies annihilated American heavy industry. For example, American steel was pilloried as old fashioned even as the billions needed for capital improvement were instead spent on meeting EPA requirements, burdens foreign competitors didn't need to meet. Shipbuilding collapsed as most seaborne trade converted to imports using foreign-built ships and container cargo. American car companies were pilloried for not building smaller, fuel efficient compact cars when the high gas prices due to stupid government policies (the oil embargoes are what you get switching from paying exporters in gold to paying in fiat dollars) are what created the market conditions for such vehicles. And then in the nineties we opened up the US market to the utterly rapacious mercantilism of China, losing even more industry.
The fiat money importers and financial speculators got the gold mine. Everyone else got the shaft.
It removes choices in employer, choices in association with other people, and elimination of your ability to retain your relationships with family. The state becomes your family. Your friends are decided for you by your government. Your employer, your shopping choices, your ability to start your own small or even large business.
Mining, logging, agriculture, trucking, manufacturing, computer server farms, shipbuilding, port operations, vehicle repair, commercial aviation, etc. are only a few major examples.
The bigger question is what can fit and function in a city? They're hostile to families, too expensive for higher level education, and too expensive for professional services.
Outside of entertainment, food, and health services, what else works? Government/ Law? The Grievance Industry? Urban Reservations?
Yes, of course. Just let me know where will you be then.
You’re supposed to be able to get food in the 15 minute city, so I don’t think the Ghetto quite qualified.
It won’t work. If you want variety, or low prices, or anything big, you either have to do without, or drive to a superstore, or have a van deliver it. Like so many of history’s utopian plans, it offers less than we already have now. But maybe that’s the whole point.
Don’t think so my FRiend. They will die trying to force me off
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