The 15-minute city is a village of the damned
Lockdown forced all of us, in different ways, to reconsider where we want to live, work and socialise. But it has also empowered those who wish to impose a particular way of life on us.
The big idea of the moment is the “15-minute city”, coined by Professor Carlos Moreno, a Franco-Colombian urbanist based at the Sorbonne. The aim is for all the everyday necessities – work, shops, entertainment, education and health care – to be within 15 minutes on foot or by bike. La ville du quart d’heure was a key theme for Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, in her successful re-election campaign (Moreno is an adviser). Since lockdown, Hidalgo has hit the accelerator pedal on her “Paris Respire” programme, turning miles of road lanes into cyclist-friendly “corona pistes”. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that the population of inner Paris has over the past few years begun to decline.
Much the same has been happening here in Britain – particularly in London. Under the cover of the Covid “emergency”, cycle lanes have proliferated, side streets have been blocked off and even pedestrianised, and parking spaces have been closed. It’s no wonder that there have been protests. Islington council, for example, has used coronavirus emergency powers to shut off roads without consultation using “experimental traffic orders”. In turn, protestors have stopped traffic along one major route, Upper Street, and warned that demonstrations will continue until councillors perform an about-turn.
Other big cities such as Oxford, Manchester, Birmingham, York, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Derby and Cardiff are using these emergency powers, too, along with a Government fund of £225million to introduce “green” measures, including the installation of cycle lanes. All with the effect of making it next to impossible to travel much more than 15 minutes beyond your house, whether you’d like to or not.
This sort of thing might appeal to urban creatives who can cycle along to their local co-working space and crack open their MacBooks while enjoying filter coffee on tap. But the consequences of the 15-minute city for everyone else would be disastrous. It would undermine families, creating intolerable burdens for those who want to visit relatives in another part of town. It would end school choice: you would be stuck with the one up the road, since it would take too long to travel any distance, and it is harder in any case to cycle or take public transport with children. It would uproot working patterns, particularly for those who actually have to go to their workplace or who may work unsociable hours and therefore rely on their car.
But the 15-minute city cares for none of this. It aims to take civilisation back to a pre-industrial age, before mass mobility. Moreno might claim that “we don’t want to create a village. We want to create a better urban organisation.” But turning cities into a conglomeration of villages is exactly what his ideas entail.
The unique selling point of the city is the freedom it offers to do whatever you choose.
Trendy urbanist ideas like the 15-minute city are a way to take away that freedom, and we’re not being given a chance to say no.