A Review of `The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet’ by Carlos Moreno. Published by Wiley.
Background
Carlos Moreno, a Paris-based architecture professor, has put chrono-urbanism into the planning discourse. As an accessibility researcher, I take this as a win for Team Access, those of us trying to make accessibility the standard performance measure for transport-land use systems, displacing congestion, mobility, and level-of-service as the key metrics.
Overview
Moreno has recently written The 15-Minute City expanding on previous writings. The first chapter is a call to action centred on climate change, but basically rehashes what we have known for years, and more importantly, one has to assume the author would believe in 15-minute cities even if climate change were not an issue. The stats are trite and their repetition almost drives one to climate change denialism to escape. Chapters on the need for urban change, urban time's history and geography, and exploring past urban planning are presented. The book itself is published by a major publisher and intended for a wider audience. So much of the background history is the standard 20th century urban mythology (e.g. Corbusier vs. Jacobs) rather than anything academics are unfamiliar with. This might be worthwhile for someone new to planning, … for an academic or scholar, less so. Details on the development of the 15-Minute City concept, with a focus on specific projects like the Portes de Paris are provided. The remainder of the book is filled primarily with case studies, including Paris (France), Milan (Italy), Portland (Oregon, United States), Cleveland (United States), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Sousse (Tunisia), Melbourne (Australia), Busan (Korea), and small towns, which are informative if a bit wordy, and may inspire planners. There is some discussion on the role of digital technologies in urban planning. The book concludes with future prospects and the potential for happier, proximity-based living.
Access as a Standard
The ideas in the book differ from how the topic has been discussed in the transport/land use literature; he not only calls for the use of access as a positive analytical tool, but as a normative standard. Moreno argues that people should be able to walk or bike to their daily activities within 15 minutes. All of this is a bit hand-wavey – people can bike much faster than they walk, so those geographies are different.
Why Live in a City
But more importantly, it raises the question of why live in a city instead of a small town in the first place. If I can take care of all my activities, including work, school, and health in a 15-minute trip, my neighbourhood can be isolated from the rest of the city. Cities exist to enable access, so people can reach more places in less time. Public transport, and dare I say, automobiles, expand the area that can be covered in a given amount of time by being faster than walking. This means people have more opportunities. Those opportunities, as Adam Smith teaches, allow more specialisation. The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market. So by limiting the market to a smaller area, the division of labour is also constrained, and we have less diversity. Cities are where, as Matt Ridley puts it, “ideas have sex.” The dating pool for ideas is constrained by a 15-minute city.
Instead, we should be thinking about 15-minute neighbourhoods (and ~ 30-minute cities). Proximity is important, but so is transport. We want to be able to reach many things on foot within 15 minutes, but not necessarily our jobs, health, or education. Work-from-home is fine, some or most of the time, for many or a few jobs, but in-person collaborations with other highly skilled individuals expands the ability to create and innovate, compared with interactions with people only in your neighbourhood. Clearly we can argue about the importance of economies of agglomeration, and whether these economies are played out (I think at the margins in the developed countries, they are), but that doesn’t mean cities have exhausted their value. Cities are the manifestation of positive feedback loops in space, more people creates more wealth, the opportunity for wealth attracts more people. So long as people continue to want additional wealth, and for most of the human race, they do, and so long as cities continue to perform the function of creating above average wealth, and for the large part of the world that remains under-urbanised, they do, cities will continue to attract people.
None of this is to say that some activities, especially those without such significant economies (like corner stores and restaurants and what we think of as local services) should not be widely distributed. The tension then lies in activities like high schools, where specialisation clearly has value (children are not identical, and many may benefit from specialised high schools for science, or the arts, or sport, or with different learning styles), which cannot all be located within each neighbourhood. But travel across town comes at the cost of local community.
The Conspiracy
One also cannot talk about 15-minute cities these days without mentioning ‘The conspiracy’, wherein 15-minute cities are seen not as a means of freedom but as a planning tool (organised by the UN and the World Economic Forum) to imprison us. These protests need to be understood in the context of the (in Australia’s case, police helicopter-enforced) lockdowns associated with COVID, where people in many parts of the world were forcibly prevented from leaving their homes or neighbourhood in what in retrospect has to be seen as a misguided over-reaction driven by fear rather than risk-assessment. The use of the term “15-minute city” rather than “15-minute neighbourhood” is not helpful.
Use of Large Language Models
Finally, I will note that parts of the text have all the tell-tale signs of being enhanced by ChatGPT. Consider this sentence on p. 44 “In this chapter, we delved into the intricate relationship between cities and time, tracing how urban rhythms have evolved throughout history.” (Emphasis added) Use of ChatGPT is understandable, this is an English language book, and the author’s first languages were Spanish and French from what I can tell. As self-disclosed ChatGPT user myself, I am familiar with its verbal ticks. A number of these words that are used more by the Large Language Model (LLM) than by humans have been documented by researchers (Stokel-Walker, 2024). At this point in history, it is too late to put the cat back in the bag, and more and more tools are just building in AI so that writing is becoming a man-machine hybrid, but the cat should be acknowledged.
References
Ridley, Matt (2012) “What Happens When Ideas Have Sex?” TED Radio Hour on NPR.
Stokel-Walker, Chris. 2024. “AI Chatbots Have Thoroughly Infiltrated Scientific Publishing,” Scientific American, July 2024.
Baker, Nick and Weedon, Alan (2023) “What is the '15-minute city' conspiracy theory?” ABC
Meta-Review
I was initially invited to do this review by Adam Millard-Ball, a brilliant young scholar now at UCLA whose career I have been following, who serves as Book Review Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). APA is nominally a non-profit professional society, which I once belonged to but quit because of the high dues and lack of value. JAPA is now managed by Taylor & Francis, a unit of Informa, one of the big four for-profit academic publishers. He sent over the book (via Amazon), and I sent back an earlier version of the document you just read. He made some suggestions, which have been incorporated.
Unfortunately, the publisher was unwilling to make this review Open Access without demanding an Article Publication Charge, which obviously I am unwilling to pay for a volunteered Book Review, or insisting on an embargo period - which contradicts the idea of Open Access. So here we are.
This article, like everything on transportist.net, is CC-BY-NC 4.0.
FIN.
Update: This might be obvious, but to be clear, I am the author of The 30-Minute City: Designing for Access (2019).