Cityscape

Could New York Be More Like Paris? Should we?

The allure of a 15-minute city

this is a season of envy for American cities, as Tokyo subways fill, Berlin museums reopen, and Aucklanders hold weddings. One image from Paris has inspired particular wistfulness: The Rue de Rivoli, until a few months ago a perpetual cloud of diesel and horn-honking, is now a whispering conduit for pedestrians and bicycles. Cutting through Paris’s expensive core from the Marais to Place de la Concorde, it’s an emblem of the future metropolis, what the newly reelected mayor Anne Hidalgo describes as the “15-minute city.” In her vision, no Parisian should need to travel more than a quarter-hour, on foot or by bike, to work or shop or see a doctor. Part of the plan involves prying streets away from cars, and the other involves seeding neighborhoods with options so that few people will want to drive.

Hidalgo’s guru, the Colombian-born urbanist Carlos Moreno, developed the concept of the 15-minute city as the key to a green and pleasant life, guided by data and aided by technology. Among Moreno’s gnomic pronouncements is “The mobility of the future is immobility”: Instead of letting hours leach away in traffic between residential areas and business districts, depleting resources and pumping out carbon monoxide, the virtuous city

will fragment into a collection of villages. After decades of road-building programs have gratified the desire to get into, out of, and around the center city quickly, at any time—wrecking and polluting neighborhoods, disproportionately those with residents of color—Hidalgo and Moreno’s crusade aims to hasten the advent of the post-automobile metropolis.

The idea of the 15-minute city is made for export; in theory, at least, it could transform highly centralized cities all over the world. But, like most concepts that become catchphrases, it glosses over complexity, combining the seductive with the potentially counterproductive. Adopting the mantra could, paradoxically, attack inequities and increase them at the same time, deepening the persistent de facto segregation of New York neighborhoods.

The desire for self-sufficient neighborhoods aligns perversely with the fashion for mixed-use, developer-branded enclaves where residents need never journey more than a quick 60-story elevator ride and a few horizontal steps from bed to conference room, then on to a bar, dinner, a show, and back to bed. Moreno has a democratic, egalitarian quilt of neighborhoods in mind, but translate that aspiration into realworld, big-budget development and you get Hudson Yards, the ultimate 15-minute—no, make that five-minute— city. Or it would be, except that now its offices are largely dormant, its shopping center shut, and its attractions dark, putting its entire business model at risk.

New York has long toggled between its status as a global magnet, powered by midtown and downtown Manhattan, and its identity as a cluster of self-contained villages distinguished by race, demographics, and real-estate prices. Its economy leans heavily on the financial sector and tourism, both of which draw millions to the belly of Manhattan. That’s why the de Blasio administration oversaw a rezoning of East Midtown as a way to spur construction of ever bigger new office towers to compete with the business districts of London and Hong Kong. But the pandemic has threatened to turn Skyscraper National Park into a high-rise ghost town. A scarcity of commuters has brought the MTA to the brink of fiscal meltdown, which could make the 2017 “Summer of Hell” look like a mild sunburn. If fewer people have places to go, it gets more difficult to go anywhere.

During these past months, we’ve all begun to notice our neighborhoods’ quirks and foibles: the variety of languages that remains even when the foreign tourists are gone, which sidewalks are too narrow for a restaurant table plus a wheelchair, the klatches that occupy the choice public benches, the guy who wanders around blasting cumbia numbers from his amp. Moreno’s vision celebrates this kind of localism, putting the basic ingredients of urban life close at hand for everyone. Within a few blocks of where I live, on the Upper West Side, I can get my shoes resoled, mail a package, pick up a prescription, see a doctor, borrow a library book, play tennis (if I played tennis), vote, drink from a public fountain, walk in a park, withdraw cash, work out, and buy rice or a ladder. A quick walk takes me past publichousing projects and single-family townhouses. I accompanied my son to his pre-, elementary, and middle schools on foot.

Everyone deserves some version of that experience, and other neighborhoods are less comfortably stocked. Using Google Maps, I dropped in on random corners in Melrose, Parkchester, Gravesend, Brownsville, Ridgewood, Flushing, East Harlem, and New Dorp and usually found myself within a 20-minute walk of a shoe repair, a post office, a school, a library, and a supermarket. But some of those excursions will take you down shaded blocks, and others mean fording a multilane artery. (And it’s one thing to go a mile to return a book, quite another with grocery bags.) Often, their community amenities are subpar. What looks like a park on a map turns out to be a patch of wavy asphalt surrounded by a chain-link fence. In some neighborhoods, the nearest large clusters of workplaces may be 90 minutes away.

So how does a city facing dire budgets expand public services? The developer Jed Walentas suggests that private builders should pay for them in exchange for the leeway to build an extra dollop of square footage. That trade, which now applies only to projects that go through a public review process, would become a citywide option.

Instead of letting hours leach away in traffic, the virtuous city fragments into a collection of villages.

“Every new building more than X square feet would have a school or a library or a senior center or a health clinic or a police station or—you get the point—on the second floor,” he writes. “And it would be free! Free to the taxpayer … The only cost would be that every new building would be two, three stories taller. In many of our neighborhoods, nobody would ever know the difference.” Codifying that exchange would weaken the forces of nimby, since opposing a new building would also mean resisting an essential service, and it would free up city money for neighborhoods real-estate developers ignore. But it also might concentrate public services in the city’s more effervescent real-estate markets, reinforcing inequities rather than healing them and giving developers too much power over fulfilling neighborhoods’ needs.

Unlike Paris, New York grows less dense and more car dependent as it spreads, from the thick sheaves of skyscrapers in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn to quasisuburban blocks at the city’s edge. The transportation network thins the farther you get from Times Square. That’s why the Rue de Rivoli–style bike-and-pedestrian makeover that intimates a new, more movable New York also reads as a strike against outer-borough drivers. Bridge tolls, bike lanes, and affordable housing, which seem so self-evidently excellent on paper, get thorny at the neighborhood-politics level. Even strong ideas for mobility—adding pedestrian and bike capacity to the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance—languish in a purgatory of perpetual studies.

The real insight of the 15-minute city is not just that everyone should live within walking distance of a library or a park (though that’s a noble goal) but that New York needs to think simultaneously on the scale of the region and the block. This means discarding encrusted assumptions: The zoning code, for example, chops the city into residential, industrial, and commercial uses, as if we still needed to keep tanneries and pig farms separated from homes. If there’s one lesson to be learned from the pandemic, it’s the benefits of flexibility. In a few months, we’ve converted parking spaces into cafés, restaurants into food pantries, closets into broadcast centers, parks into hospitals, hotels into homeless shelters, porches into concert stages, and laptops into schools. Surely, in the coming years, we can figure out how to recycle empty storefronts for needs we didn’t know we had. The idea of the 15-minute city, fortified by recent experience, suggests that the metropolis is not a rigid machine but a text we can rewrite when we need to. ■