Thinking about a 15-minute city

In recent years there has been increasing discussion about the idea of the so-called 15-minute city. Developed by a French-Colombian urban planner called Carlos Moreno, it proposes that urban areas should be designed so that everyone can access places of work, shops, healthcare, schools and entertainment facilities within a 15 minute walk from wherever they live.

Based on research using mobile phone location data which shows that most people will use a car to drive if it is going to take more than 15 minutes to walk somewhere, advocates of the idea say that it will reduce pollution and energy consumption and will encourage people to take more exercise and improve their health. It will also reduce the amount of time that people spend commuting to their place of work and should strengthen the sense of community that people feel about where they live.

Of course, this is nothing new. Before the days of mass car ownership people’s lives were much more centred around their local communities, with easy access to all the facilities that they needed. However, driven by ideas originating from the highly car-centric United States of America, urban planning since the end of the 20th century has largely been based around the concept of individual car ownership, and this has meant that cities and their surrounding areas have been designed to make car driving easier. Urban areas have different zones for living, working, shopping and for being entertained, and to get from one to the other you have to drive.

As more and more people drive, public transport disappears, reinforcing the need to have a car. Roads become wider to cope with increasing volumes of traffic and in the process become barriers between different parts of the city, dividing communities. Urban areas have sprawled, people move to the suburbs, drive into and out of cities to their workplaces, large supermarkets have appeared on the edges of town, and services such as cinemas and hospitals have become larger and centralised, rather than being dispersed.

This has all been very good for car drivers, but not so good for people relying on public transport (which has withered away) and people running local shops and services (who see customers disappearing to the likes of Meadowhall). It is also been very bad for the environment, with vehicle emissions driving up greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and vehicle-driven pollution contributing to a wide range of health problems.

The 15-minute city therefore represents a radically different model for designing cities. It offers a number of benefits as described, but there are some problems. It could reinforce existing social divisions, making it less likely that people with different social backgrounds will interact and get to know each other. It could strengthen the process of gentrification, making some areas more desirable and pushing out people with less money. Implementing 15-minute city ideas will also be difficult in urban areas which have been based on traditional vehicle-centred models, although in time appropriate changes could be introduced slowly.

Interest in the15-minute city idea has been stimulated by various changes in modern life, including the significant contribution of urban driving to greenhouse gas emissions and the role of urban anonymity in the increasing problem of street crime. However, many people have become interested in online conspiracy theories which link 15-minute city ideas with other initiatives such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, pervasive CCTV, Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems, facial recognition software and Clean Air Zones, and claim that they are part of a plan to imprison people in specific areas. We have even had the Conservative MP for Don Valley, Nick Fletcher, standing up in Parliament describing 15-minute cities as an “international socialist conspiracy”.

It is important not to dismiss these concerns, even though some originate from conspiracy theorists accidentally or deliberately misrepresenting these ideas and how they actually work. Unfortunately there will always be tensions between such issues as the individual freedom to drive in a city and the collective freedom to breathe clean air. It is important that local media such as the Sheffield Telegraph continues to provide a forum for these issues to be discussed so that everyone can read about alternative perspectives and explanations. This is not necessarily easy to do on the Internet, where what we see and read is driven by the desire of Google, Facebook and the like to increase their advertising revenue by leading people into ever-narrowing rabbit-holes.

The idea of living in a city where we can easily walk to find whatever we need is an attractive one. And, as Oliver Coppard, the Mayor of South Yorkshire recently stated at the South Yorkshire Transport Summit, “This is not radical. This is the world our parents or our grandparents took for granted. This is the world our children and grandchildren deserve.” Driving freely around a city is not a fundamental human right but is something we have come to take for granted. Unfortunately it has costs such as congestion, pollution and increasing social division. 15-minute cities do provide pointers towards an alternative future.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in March 2023)