The idea that cities should be designed around 15 minute hubs, where you should be able to walk to everything you need (job, grocery, school, hospital, restaurants, etc) within 15 minutes. From Paris's new plans to Barcelona's superblocks, it looks like cities across Europe at least are beginning to catch on to how appealing this way of living is. Thoughts on how to apply this to cities outside of Europe?
EDIT: The discussion going on here is fantastic and I love you all :heart-sickle:
The "15-minute city" concept actually seems like it might be a good idea if we actually invested in frequent fare-free public transit in this country (which is one such public program we could afford by defunding police at the local level and the military at the national level). Hell, even a "half-hour city" or "hour city" would be a massive improvement in metro areas with so much sprawl that longer than hour-long job commutes are typical.
I live only 12 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. It takes me over an hour to get to it.
Something like this would be huge in the SF Bay Area
Yeah in the United States particularly the 15 minute city concept doesn't work at all because everything is so spread out due to car culture. I'm thinking the 15 minute city can be put to better use in East Asia in particular. Cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, etc could all do this 15 minute city concept rather easily, because they already have the density to support it.
No doubt it'd be a Herculean task, but this concept should be possible at least in densely-settled metro areas that already have some existing public transportation infrastructure. Extending this concept beyond the major cities would take a massive Green New Deal level of public infrastructure investment and overhaul, a national project likely costing hundreds of billions of USD, a scale on par with that of (and possibly replacing/superseding) the Eisenhower interstate highway infrastructure project.
Yeah which is why in the United States it's never going to happen, sadly.
Fewer people in the US are driving cars than in previous decades. The country is getting more urban by the year. Demand for this sort of thing is going up.
Hong Kong and Singapore are already pretty close to this by default because they're so dense.
I would gladly eat a 20% hike (or like 5% a year for 5 years) increase to property taxes in Toronto for free public transit
It really wouldn't even be that much in many cities, more like 1% a year
Below 2% a year for us is sub inflation, so city services would shrink
A one time 20% increase would effectively add transit onto taxes instead of fares
And then of course inflationary increases after that
I reran the numbers, and it looks like it would be closer to what you stated. Phrasing is important with these things, and the income taxes that fund my transit district would go from .73% to .94%, a two-tenths of one percent increase (which is what I was trying to refer to by saying it'd be around 1 percent, although it's an increase of 20-something percent). Does that make more sense?
I was looking purely at property taxes
We don't have municipal income taxes in Toronto
<3
I see, I see, it would be a small amount nonetheless. Unfortunately the head of our county transportation department is on the record saying it won't go fareless on his watch, although activists have been working toward it.
on the record saying it won’t go fareless on his watch
It's fareless if you don't pay for it! 🚋 😉
The important part of the concept isn't a relative reduction in the travel time (quantity), but that if the time gets low enough the quality changes. Suddenly you can reach your quarter by food or bike easily, you are free to connect to people in your proximity.
The Soviet Union already did it. One of Khrushchev's good policies was the massive housing construction with tight urban design.
I've watched Youtube videos that were heavily anti-Soviet that reluctantly praised this policy 🥰
Inventing a time machine so I can go back to the turn of the century and murder Henry Ford
It looks very similar to the Soviet concept of "mikrorayon".
mikrorayon
Hit me up with some theory/reading on this, sounds great.
It's common to virtually every left urban planning plan from the 20th century. Interestingly there were both urban and suburban communist city planning theories going around. The socialist register this past year had a really good essay on the suburban communist planners, and arguing for a revival of them.
I wonder if there any studies on the efficacy of microdistricts. Like even just polls of people living and working in them versus those in conventional districts - it's nice to read about them and understand the logic but I'd like to get the general perspective of people having to live there 24/7.
I miss my time in college largely because it was the only time where my home, work, school, friends' homes, bars, restaurants, doctor, grocery store, basically almost everything I needed to go to was within a 15 minute walking range. Like that'll probably never happen again in my life. Everything's laid out so poorly in comparison.
You know I feel the same way, but never conceptualized it in those terms. Perfectly explains why I miss it as well. Felt like your whole world was there, and as a result the whole world was "right." What a shame we've fucked it up so poorly.
Gosh, living somewhere like this sounds incredible. I really think cycling-oriented cities are the future. I've been reading about Copenhagen's combination of cycling infrastructure and heavy rail and it sounds like a winner.
The perfect city is one in which a skateboard is the standard means of transportation, not even joking. Skateboard(electric, longboard, PEV, what have you) + robust public transportation is such a winning combo. Bikes are cool and all, but take up a ton of space on public transportation, so designing a city around the range of a skateboard would be such a good move! Additionally, it would make walking way way easier too. All around win. Fuck American cities, fuck driving
I bought an electric scooter back in March and it has been may favourite thing ever. Admittedly I have seen them destroy cities with the scooter sharing model (ever been to Nashville?), but they're so small, so fun, and make that annoying "last mile" distance easy.
I live somewhere organized this way, but the paying jobs are still concentrated in a couple neighborhoods. Also only like two of the urban villages have any sense of community. We do have a lot of parks and groceries though, so that's neat.
Yeah I think the jobs thing is the biggest sticking point, but in the age of remote work that problem might be less of a big one. Fostering a sense of community in these 15 minute cities should be a priority, and you'll probably need actual community centers/organizations/mutual aid groups to do it.
A lot of European cities and even rural areas are designed much denser than in America. Additionally, a lot of our cities and infrastructure is designed to cater to the car. A lot of our society and spacial systems are designed in a way that disincentivizes pedestrianism. We would have to make massive adjustments to how our communities are built and what’s allowed.
A better world is always possible, but maybe not probable in the United States.
It’s possible but it’s gonna require a shit load of public investment, private sector sacrifice, and cultural changes.
Never from the imperial core. At least as long as we're beholden to monied interests.
Singapore
It's so frustrating to me that one of the most ruthlessly capitalist countries in the world has truly incredible public housing and nobody has been like "hmmm, isn't it weird that a place that is extraordinarily committed to capitalism couldn't make housing work and instead just decided to say 'fuck it' and instituted massive public housing that has worked wonderfully? Nah, not weird that's just a quirk capitalism can totally do housing fine."
In the U.S., aren't most "walkable" neighborhoods increasingly white, PMC?
We'd have to put a cap on gentrification and turn surplus privately-owned housing in these areas into free or affordable public housing for this concept to work for the entire working class and not just the highly-paid PMC workers.
Yep. That is the problem. The most livable areas are for the better off.
The idea that cities should be designed around 15 minute hubs, where you should be able to walk to everything you need (job, grocery, school, hospital, restaurants, etc) within 15 minutes. From Paris’s new plans to Barcelona’s superblocks, it looks like cities across Europe at least are beginning to catch on to how appealing this way of living is. Thoughts on how to apply this to cities outside of Europe?
Holy shit this occurred to me once as a policy proposal.
Difference here being that these "15-minute cities" are usually considered as contiguous rather than isolated. Barcelona superblocks rather than towers in a park.
In America, you'd only see this as new construction aimed at PMC 20-somethings.
