The “15-minute city” is an approach to urban design that aims to improve quality of life by creating cities where everything a resident needs can be reached within 15 minutes by foot, bike or public transit.
This concept puts an emphasis on careful planning at the neighbourhood level, giving each district the features it needs to support a full life – including jobs, food, recreation, green space, housing, medical offices, small businesses and more. And importantly, it’s a full life that doesn’t require a car.
To understand the 15-minute city, consider two very different scenes from Paris.
In 1976, the film director Claude Lelouch strapped a gyro-stabilised camera to the front of his car and set off on a joyride across Paris. While running through 18 red lights and topping out at 142 miles per hour – Lelouch called the filming “an immoral act” – the filmmaker captured bumper-level views of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. Released as a nine-minute short, C’était un Rendez-vous, the stunt was a gearhead’s dream: a vision of a city that was made for cars.
Today, on the other hand, Parisian cyclists release videos showing crowds of teens stunting on bikes across the city’s grand boulevards in the summertime, popping their front wheels while executing intricate dance moves. It’s an electric display of community, creativity and city life – one that’s in direct conflict with Lelouch’s reckless thrills. It’s also an effective advertisement for the potential of a concept that’s gaining traction in urbanism.
A brief history of the 15-minute city
The overall idea of the 15-minute city isn’t new: it builds on principles of New Urbanism and transit-oriented development, and it finds its roots in the idea of the “neighbourhood unit” advanced by the American planner Clarence Perry in the early 1900s. Similar visions of 30 and 20-minute cities or neighbourhoods have also emerged in the past decade, notably in Australia.
But the 15-minute-city concept (la ville du quart d’heure) found new popularity in 2019 from Carlos Moreno, a French-Colombian professor who developed the idea in pursuit of amour des lieux, or attachment to place.
The quest to improve quality of life doesn’t require a city to “wage a war against cars” or “build a Louvre every 15 minutes,” Moreno says. Rather, it needs to decentralise by adding more options for walking, cycling and public transit, and focusing on economic development in every corner of the city. Moreno says the work of Jane Jacobs, the urbanist saint, figured into his plans.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo quickly became one of the most prominent champions of the 15-minute city. The idea was a centrepiece of her successful 2020 reelection campaign, and it served as a useful, colloquial packaging for work her administration has done since 2014 to pedestrianise, promote cycling, restrict cars and bring parks and people-first infrastructure to the City of Light.
It now stands as her central policy framework to improve quality of life and help the city live up to the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. As cities around the world strive to make similar transformations, Paris’s experience with the 15-minute philosophy will be closely watched for ideas that can be emulated elsewhere.
Can they work?
There’s already compelling evidence that the 15-minute city can work. Replacing long commutes and car-first transit with bikes and walking would slash vehicle emissions, increase resident health and free up roads and parking spaces for other uses.
Most trips taken in cities are pretty short. Research on U.S. households’ driving habits found that nearly 60% of their one-way trips are less than six miles (9.6km), and 75% of all trips are ten miles or less. It’s worth acknowledging that the 15-minute city seems so bold and transformative precisely because the way we design cities now is antithetical to its goals.
Replacing parking spots and roads for cars might seem like a counterintuitive way to improve traffic, but in fact, the other approach – adding more roads and other accommodations for cars – is what doesn’t work. It’s a central tenet of induced demand: more asphalt leads to more congestion, which leads to demand for more roads.
What’s more, there’s a market for building neighbourhoods that don’t require cars. A research report called “Foot Traffic Ahead”, compiled by a team of academics, advocates and commercial developers, found that so-called “walkable urban places” in the US demanded 75% higher rent over the metro average in the nation’s 30 largest cities, all while increasing equity and investment opportunities.
In many ways, Paris is an ideal proving ground for the 15-minute city: it’s a dense city that’s just six miles across, with a celebrated history as a place for beautiful strolls and street-front cafés.
[Read more: What are the top cities for commuting by bike?]Hidalgo’s embrace of the idea, and roll-out of concrete changes, has been swift, though not without controversy. Car owners have fought her at every turn, and extensive construction of bike lanes made parts of the city seem like a giant construction site. But by the spring 2020 election, her mobility overhaul was generally accepted by her competitors for the mayor’s office, having become an accepted term of the debate, not a radical idea to dismiss and demean.
The changes are palpable. Hidalgo has banned cars along a stretch of the River Seine – formerly a congested thoroughfare for car commuters – creating a new pedestrianised gathering spot where “cyclists mix with boozy sunbathers, tourists on electric scooters and giggling children.” She unleashed wave after wave of cycling infrastructure as part of an evolving Plan Velo and pledges the city will have 1,000km (621 miles) of finished cycle paths by 2020. The city also has subsidised certain businesses in targeted neighbourhoods, turned school playgrounds into parks, encouraged urban agriculture and even talked of creating urban forests.
The push has paid off. Some roads see triple the number of cyclists, and the Champs Elysées, where Lelouch zipped across, is now lined with segregated cycling lanes. Hidalgo has further promised to eliminate 60,000 parking spots for private cars by 2024 and to utilise smart-city technology to make the remaining cars and trucks on the road more efficient, speeding up package delivery and making it easier to find parking. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she fast-tracked the transformation of streets into emergency corona pistes cycle lanes. And while Paris wasn’t the first to adopt the concept, it has unquestionably done the most to put it into practice.
Other places pursuing the 15 or 20-minute-city concept include:
- Melbourne, which adopted a long-term strategic plan for 20-minute neighbourhoods
- Detroit, which organised a 20-minute-city concept around its defunct streetcar grid
- Portland, whose Complete Neighborhood concept plans for 90% of the city to have “safe and convenient access to the goods and services needed in daily life”
- Ottawa, which launched a 15-minute-neighbourhood plan to have residents take half their trips by foot, bicycle, public transit or by carpooling.
- C40 Cities, a city-led coalition focused on fighting climate change, elevated the 15-minute city idea as a blueprint for post-Covid economic recovery.
Why are 15-minute cities controversial?
While 15-minute-cities appear to be a fairly innocuous urban planning strategy to most, they have attracted significant ire from some corners of political life. In fact, the idea has found its way neatly into an existing web of conspiracy theories.
The main ‘threat’ that 15-minute cities are perceived to pose is as a means of social control. Conspiracy theorists ranging from climate deniers to COVID-19 sceptics claim that the idea of easily accessible amenities is a step toward keeping people in allotted areas against their will. Proponents of these theories quickly slotted 15-minute cities into the ‘great reset’ meta-conspiracy, which argues that efforts are underway to create a new world order in the wake of the pandemic.
Opposition to the concept has even trickled up to the top rung of British politics. Nick Fletcher, Conservative MP for Don Valley, described 15-minute cities as an “international socialist concept” in the House of Commons on 9 February 2023.
Fletcher went on to say: “Ultra-low emission zones in their present form do untold economic damage to any city. The second step, after such zones, will take away personal freedoms as well… 15-minute cities will cost us our personal freedom, and that cannot be right.”
This opposition came to a head with a protest in Oxford on 19 February against proposed 15-minute and Low Traffic Neighbourhood plans. Many of these talking points appeared on placards, including some calling the plans a “dystopian hell” and likening them to enslavement.
Elements that took part in the protest also brandished signs with climate-denialist messages and banners that referred to British politicians and civil servants involved in the pandemic response as “globalist puppets”.
Why are Conservatives taking aim at 15-minute cities?
Over the course of 2023, the backlash to the concept of 15-minute cities has slowly swelled. While initially a fringe online theory, then crossing over into protest, it finally went mainstream at the annual Conservative Party conference.
Reeling from successive byelection losses earlier in the year, the government followed the example of the successfully defended Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency – ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former seat – in putting drivers at the heart of the public offering. The outer London borough was thought to have been retained on the basis of opposition to the expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to all areas of the city.
Now, ahead of a likely 2024 general election, a significant part of the Tory policy agenda mirrors Uxbridge by drivers in the headlights. This includes a rollback on the 2030 cutoff for sales of new non-electric cars, as well as limits on Low Traffic Neighborhoods and 20mph speed limits.
At the October conference, Transport Secretary Mark Harper addressed attendees with plans to enact this agenda.
“I am calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities”, Harper told conference. “There’s nothing wrong with making sure people can walk or cycle to the shops or school. That’s traditional town planning.
“But what is different, what is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV.
“So today, I am announcing that the Government will investigate what options we have in our toolbox to restrict over-zealous use of traffic management measures including cutting off councils from the DVLA database if they don’t follow the rules.”
How to make 15-minute cities a reality
Moreno says achieving the 15-minute city requires “deconstructing the city”, or, more specifically, mixing as many different uses as possible. Better understood as anti-zoning, this would undo decades of urban-planning orthodoxy and industrial-era economic development that focused on siloing different activities in distinct parts of a city. Moreno also champions the use of hybrid spaces: schoolyards as parks, civic facilities that have multiple uses and provide a range of services, and multi-use buildings and cultural spaces (such as a school that serves a different purpose on weekends).
Strong Towns, a US-based planning and advocacy group, made a list of actions US cities could take to achieve these goals, which serve as good advice for any metro. To build a 15-minute city, Strong Towns recommends:
- more neighbourhood schools
- better food access
- more “third places”
- better housing access and more housing
- improved walkability
- seeing density as more than just adding high-rises
- loosening regulations that stand in the way of more creative, community-centric urban design.
Turning planning and development inside out, as those steps would require, isn’t the only issue. How do cities with extensive tourism traffic maintain tight neighbourhoods with huge influxes of guests? Every metro region, including Paris, sees a daily tide of workers come downtown and leave, so it’s a significant challenge to decentralise corporate life by moving jobs to remote neighbourhoods.
While the transportation and mobility shifts Hidalgo has ushered in have been significant, they also may be the easy part of making the 15-minute city a reality. Truly dispersing employment and civic services in a useful way would be a real accomplishment. Doing so in an equitable manner – addressing the specific needs of disadvantaged areas as well as the rich ones – would be a marked and much-needed departure from historical patterns.
But during the Covid era, where lockdowns and transit shifts made urban dwellers reorient their lives and rediscover their immediate neighbourhoods, the 15-minute city may have caught its stride at the perfect time. For years, consumer megatrends have championed local shopping and food, supporting neighbourhood businesses as well as urbanisation and car-free lifestyles. Viewed in that light, the vision Hidalgo and others champion isn’t a radical departure as much as it’s creating a blueprint for a lifestyle many already aspire to have.
[Read more: Where are the most sustainable cities in the world?]
