As proposed, Moreno’s 15-minute city has no chance of implementation, because economic and financial realities constrain the location of jobs, commerce, and community facilities. No planner can redesign a city by locating shops and jobs according to their own whims.
This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.
The 15-minute city is a concept first advocated by Carlos Moreno, the urban planning adviser to Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo. In any metropolis as congested as Paris or São Paulo, getting from one part of the city to another in less than fifteen minutes would be wonderful. Measured from east to west, São Paulo’s built-up area spans 85 kilometers (53 miles). Traveling this distance in fifteen minutes would require a vehicle to run at an average speed of 340 kmph (211 mph). Some public transport already attains these speeds. The Shanghai Maglev, the world’s fastest operational train, has an average speed of 244 kmph (152 mph) and a peak speed of 431 kmph (268 mph). So, commuting less than fifteen minutes between urban stations is not a technological impossibility, but it might not yet be a financially viable transport solution.
But introducing cutting-edge urban transport is not what Moreno had in mind when he called for redesigning Paris as a 15-minute city. On the contrary, he wishes Parisians to forsake the existing network of Metro trains and buses and limit their means of transportation to walking or bicycling. Moreno advocates subdividing cities into small, self-contained villages covering about 300 hectares (741 acres), corresponding to the area that a pedestrian can cover in fifteen minutes.
Moreno defines the 15-minute city in his video:
“The idea is to design or redesign cities so that in a maximum of fifteen minutes, on foot or by bicycle, city dwellers can enjoy most of what constitutes urban life: access to their jobs, their homes, food, health, education, culture, and recreation.”
Moreno further explains how to implement his idea:
“How can we accomplish this? Mayor Anne Hidalgo suggested a ‘big bang of proximity’ that includes, for example, massive decentralization, the development of new services for each borough.”
He implies that clever urban planners could bring desirable jobs, grocery stores, health, education, and cultural facilities within a 15-minute walking radius of every home.
Strangely, mayors and the press have taken the possibility of creating 15-minute walking cities very seriously. It has become the declared vision of many cities and the topic of numerous articles in prestigious publications like New York Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Financial Times.
However, the concept of dividing metropolises into self-contained enclaves contradicts everything we know about the economy of large cities.
Economic data from cities worldwide demonstrate that large labor markets are more productive and innovative than smaller ones. Increased productivity and a wide choice of employment draw new people toward São Paulo despite high rents and long commutes. If São Paulo’s labor market were divided into self-sufficient boroughs limited to a 15-minute radius, the city’s productivity would rapidly drop, and people would soon leave the fragmented metropolis for a more productive city.
As proposed, Moreno’s 15-minute city has no chance of implementation, because economic and financial realities constrain the location of jobs, commerce, and community facilities. No planner can redesign a city by locating shops and jobs according to their own whims.
Then why devote an article to the subject? Because this recent planning fad is a costly distraction from tackling the real transport problems confronting metropolises. If everybody should walk to work, then there is no need to make the significant investment required to improve the speed and efficiency of transport.
City leaders and their staff should instead promote a 30-minute city, where mechanized vehicles are so efficient that a worker can reach any job in a metropolitan area in less than thirty minutes from door to door. The objective is feasible as it doesn’t involve a complete “redesign” of the city, as Moreno proposes, but an improvement of public transport that is precisely the role of a municipalities.