36. Slowdown landscapes: One-Minute City—Fifteen-Minute City
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Mobility, Urban Planning, Sweden, Cities, Paris

All of those factors will have affected Hidalgo’s sense that there are votes in the 15-Minute City, as well as meaningful value. Yet few of those trends have actively been driven by urban planning. With honourable exceptions, planning has usually been in the passenger seat here, and sometimes even sitting on the handbrake.

This is not to lessen Paris’s achievement at all — whether Hidalogo or Moreno, or the teams around them — but to recognise it. Political courage is required, with strong ideas well-communicated, and technical competence can provide a useful platform for these ideas to stand on. Paris has recognised the spirit of the times and grasped it, and this was announced prior to the pandemic, remember. Hidalgo has been leading the transformation of Paris for years, previously announcing that every street will be bike-friendly by 2024 and that all cars with combustion engines will be banned from the city centre by 2030.

That background work means that Paris’s Ville du 1/4h can be relatively quickly invoked, as a variably dense, liveable and enjoyable city, “built around the lightweight non-grid tech of e-scooters, bikes, shared cars, transit, smartphones, and street corner gardens, threaded through super-green 19th century courtyard blocks that balance work and life, politique et plaisir.”

Beyond its form, the idea that these 15-minute bubbles of activity—I prefer ‘bubbles’ to ‘cells’, as if champagne—is defined around your own needs and desires, and then those of your neighbours, conjures the sensation of a rich, thick foam, moving with the neighbourhood’s instincts and interests. These are not static districts, or lines on a plan, but more like a fine-grained and ringed lattice, within which Parisians can thread culture, commerce, conviviality, community. This in-built variability enables a framework for public life that is as richly diverse as its inhabitants, rather than stuck in fixed zones.

This is not necessarily understood, as it is so far from traditional planning, or the mental models of cities enshrined by formal mapping (rather than, say, if Calvino had been cartographer.) Natalie Whittle, writing about the 15-minute city in the Financial Times, appears to think that you are stuck in these bubbles—perhaps subconsciously influenced by corona’s social distancing dynamics.

“On the basis of the lockdown experience, there are aspects of a “15-minute city” that I would struggle to welcome — not least an overfamiliarity with one landscape … Is the ability to move about and switch locations integral to advancement? Is staying in one place the same thing as being stuck in another sense? … Though Moreno and others do not prohibit movement beyond the 15-minute mark, the aspiration to contain work within this distance still seems potentially problematic.”—‘Welcome to the 15-minute city’, Natalie Whittle, Financial Times, 17 July 2020

Later, however, Whittle is right to point out that “not everyone will have the luxury of choosing a home close to their preferred industry, and not everyone will have a home that could double as a long-term office.” Yet this simply indicates how much rethinking we have to do. People should be able to live close to their work, absolutely. We will need that to be largely true, and it would be fairer for many if they could do so. Other people will need significant help—in the form of funding and advice—to be able to design, build and operate workspaces at home, in a way that suits a diversity of living and working patterns.

These are problems to resolve, certainly, yet to flip the point around, it may seem incredibly odd that we asked people to commute for large distances to work (which most hate), or that work could not be better carried out at a variety of workplaces, and in a variety of ways. Not everyone’s work can ‘float’ over space so easily, as many do have to go somewhere, physically, to work. But these occupations should probably be those we ask to commute the least, by better redistributing work in their favour. (For example, much healthcare can be better redistributed to small-scale community centres, rather than overly large hospitals. This same pattern applies to schools, as noted, and many other services, practices, and infrastructures that have been centralised for reasons of cost, profit and efficiency—rather than value.)

The 15-minute city is a way to move all these ideas forward, and thus the virus, for all of the pain it has wrought, may enable Paris to move more quickly and with greater resilience when facing the crises to come.

Either way, Paris has stolen a march here, leading by example. For much of my three-decade career working in and with cities, there had not been much reason to observe or discuss contemporary Paris. The place was lovely, of course, and fascinating, but for its history rather than its future. The Eurostar’s obligatory comparison of gleaming Kings Cross St Pancras with tatty Gare du Nord had allowed Londoners to settle into an uncomfortable and lazy arrogance about an old relationship. But these two old stagers now have reversed roles: London has all the problems, and Paris, somehow, a bright future.

In fact, these two old stations continue to embody the situation. St Pancras looks like a shopping mall rather than a station, at a time when the very idea of massed, generic shops and offices is at least somewhat questionable. Whereas Gare du Nord still looks like a station. The furore over Gare du Nord’s redevelopment, which started well before the pandemic, rests on precisely this question: should we be building vast amounts of office and retail space over a train station?