Some informative details first from a number of sources:
"Living in a city means accepting a certain level of dysfunction: long commutes, noisy streets, underutilized spaces. Carlos Moreno wants to change that. In this eight minute TED talk he makes the case for the ‘15-minute city,’ where inhabitants have access to all the services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity - and shares ideas for making urban areas adapt to humans, not the other way around.
Carlos Moreno is a driving force behind Paris’s 15-minute city plan.
This TED talk is part of
Countdown, a global initiative championing solutions to the climate crisis. It was one of many presented at the virtual TED Countdown event in October 2020. We have gathered the most city-relevant talks from that event on the Knowledge Hub
here.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: One thing would-be 15-minute cities everywhere will have to reckon with is social equity—and affordable housing in particular
Moreno recognizes that large segments of the population might never enjoy the slower-paced, localized life he envisions. “Of course we need to adapt this concept for different realities,” he says. “Not all people have the possibility of having jobs within 15 minutes.” But he emphasizes that many people’s circumstances could be profoundly changed—something he believes we’re already seeing because of the pandemic’s canceled commutes. In his view, centralized corporate offices are a thing of the past; telework and constellations of coworking hubs are the future.
The 15-minute city could also be seen as what writer Dan Hill identified as a form of “post-traumatic urbanism”—a way to recover from the onslaughts of such things as property speculation, overtourism, and now the pandemic.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
". . .“The 15-minute city represents the possibility of a decentralized city,” says Carlos Moreno, a scientific director and professor specializing in complex systems and innovation at University of Paris 1. “At its heart is the concept of mixing urban social functions to create a vibrant vicinity”—replicated, like fractals, across an entire urban expanse.
Named Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s
special envoy for smart cities, Moreno has become a kind of deputy philosopher at City Hall as it endeavors to turn the French capital into what he calls a “city of proximities.” His 15-minute concept was developed primarily to reduce urban carbon emissions, reimagining our towns not as divided into discrete zones for living, working, and entertainment, but as mosaics of neighborhoods in which almost all residents’ needs can be met within 15 minutes of their homes on foot, by bike, or on public transit. . . neighborhoods and villages were the norm long before automobiles and zoning codes spread out and divided up cities in the 20th century. Yet the 15-minute city represents a major departure from the recent past, and in a growing number of other cities it’s become a powerful brand for planners and politicians desperate to sell residents on a carbon-lite existence. Leaders in Barcelona, Detroit, London, Melbourne, Milan, and Portland, Ore., are all working toward similar visions. They’ve been further emboldened by the pandemic, with global mayors touting the model in a July report from the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group as central to their recovery road maps.
With climate change, Covid-19, and political upheaval all challenging the ideals of globalism, the hope is to refashion cities as places primarily for people to walk, bike, and linger in, rather than commute to. The 15-minute city calls for a return to a more local and somewhat slower way of life, where commuting time is instead invested in richer relationships with what’s nearby. “These crises show us the possibility for rediscovering proximity,” Moreno says. “Because we now have the possibility to stay closer to home, people have rediscovered useful time—another pace for living.”
It’s a utopian vision in an era of deep social distress—but one that might, if carried out piecemeal, without an eye to equality, exacerbate existing inequities. Skeptics also wonder whether a city that’s no longer organized around getting to work is really a city at all.
Dreams of breaking down the segmented urban planning that dominated the 20th century—with industry on the outskirts, residential areas ringing the city, commerce in the core, and auto networks connecting long distances—of course aren’t new. Urban thinkers have been advocating for the preservation or return of walkable, socially mixed neighborhoods at least since the 1961 publication of Jane Jacobs’s paean to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
This advocacy has slowly filtered into mainstream planning orthodoxy. . .The 15-minute city seeks to protect the vitality that made diverse, locally oriented neighborhoods attractive in the first place. . . The challenge is far greater in the kinds of younger, sprawling cities found in North America or Australia, where cars remain the dominant form of transit.
(...Adie Tomer, a fellow at Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program and co-author of the report, says the 15-minute concept falls flat in America because “people in the U.S. already live in a 15-minute city, it’s just that they’re covering vast distances in a car.” Planners concerned with urban livability and rising carbon emissions might do well to focus on distance rather than time, he says. He suggests that the “3-mile city” might resonate better.)
>
Welcome to the 15-minute city | Financial Times
Source
The Financial Times is an international daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs.This is a search result, not an ad. Only ads are paid, and they'll always be labeled with "Sponsored" or "Ad."
Send feedback on this info
