It is possible you might have been bemused by our former government adopting conspiracy theory-like assessments of the idea of 15-minute cities. After all, during the Covid lockdown, many people in Britain adapted to the 15-minute city idea very quickly – to serve their needs whilst engaged in remote working in greater numbers than ever before.
You might have also been perplexed at former UK health minister, Maria Caulfield, making false claims about 15-minute cities and shrugging off criticisms. But the loss of children’s centres, youth centres and the unregarded community spaces offered by pubs are only small parts of the neglect of the local that has been prevalent in British politics.
Bearing such considerations in mind, what really ought to be annoying you is the extent to which 15-minute cities have become mainstream thinking in many countries other than the UK, strongly promoted by C40 cities: an alliance of 96 cities led by the mayors of each city, concerned with both climate and transport policies. This is described on their website. A snapshot of their approach can be seen here. As is so often the case, much of our political culture and mainstream media seems behind the times.
The 15-minute revolution
Every revolution generates its key textbook, and Carlos Moreno has provided a global history of the development, spread and implications of 15-minute cities for city transport and climate. Active travel, public transport and environment campaigners and even planners may well find this thorough but very readable work highly relevant to their efforts.
Moreno’s first chapter strongly emphasises a climate framework for the development of policies for sustainability in cities with many different challenges in a wide range of countries. Suggesting contemporary cities are neither liveable nor healthy, he embeds what appears initially to be a transport policy into a much wider set of climate-related issues, not least air pollution.
This is an account directly and indirectly scathing about prior modernist approaches to the city and the extent to which vehicles dominate the space and air quality of urban settlements. However, parts of the book are devoted to examples of cities from around the world where 15-minute city ideas have been adopted: Paris, Milan, Cleveland, Melbourne amongst them.
Inequality in its various forms has afflicted cities for many decades in the past up to the present, leading in many countries to long processes of gentrification in which poorer areas were upgraded, but with wealthier residents in mind. The seriously neglected Islington South constituency I lived in for four years in the 1980s is an inconceivably different part of London now.
Facilities most needed for those either without cars or preferring walking and cycling were not generally provided as part of gentrification, at least not in the UK. The 15-minute city idea, in which the range of needs of communities is accommodated in smaller areas, challenges this type of failure. 30-minute territories are also referred to under this topic, allowing that larger facilities – hospitals, secondary schools, universities etc – will serve larger areas than those reachable within 15 minutes on foot, by bike, on wheels or using mobility scooters.
Cities like New York and Brasilia, capital of Brazil, shaped to accommodate large amounts of traffic, fail at the human scale when public access in many areas has been made more difficult by giving space to vehicles.
Regeneration of the local commons
Moreno considers how 15-minute neighbourhoods are about regaining time from the pressures of contemporary life. Clearly, the less commuting and the more emphasis there is on increasing proximate services and green spaces, the more people and indeed other species are likely to benefit. But greater freedom with time, and the objective of a four-day week here in the UK, combined with remote working and flexitime for more people, could give people more time for relationships, family, interests and spending in the local economy. It is easy to see this could be good for reducing stress, and therefore consequent forms of ill-health.
Clearly, there is a significant argument embedded here about enhancing local economies as well as discouraging short distance car journeys in urban areas. Moreno argues that increasing the attachment of people to where they live is likely to mean more public interest in the cultural, social and historical aspects of the community – to the benefit of all and even to the improvement of the planning system.
Moreno is cautious about how the recovery of cities for liveability may occur. He draws attention to the limited financial commitment made by states to the UN Sustainable Development Goals programme 2015-2030; similarly, he expresses concern about minimal evidence of progress on climate and biodiversity policies at an international level. We should note that countries committed to the Millennium Development Goals programme during 2000-2015 did increase their relevant spending in the later years of this programme so as not to appear to be sliding behind more diligent states, with potential implications for foreign direct investment, tourism potential, and more. This might well happen with the Sustainable Development Goals and assist the further development of 15-minute cities as one result.
‘Change you can see and participate in’
The problem with strategic level efforts by governments or international institutions, apart from overall underfunding, is that the community level may be sidelined in our often very centralised political systems. However, 15-minute neighbourhood enhancements of existing communities may make climate and biodiversity policies, as examples, real for the first time to people in comparatively neglected places.
The recent general election in the UK was marked by predictions of even lower turnout than before, and a general disenchantment with politics which seems synonymous with aversion to the two-party system. With exceptionally low turnouts in local elections in many areas, the UK could do worse than whole-heartedly adopting the 15-minute city idea. Moreno refers to this as a ‘proximity revolution’, meaning change that you can see and participate in. Other forms of system change suggested, like proportional representation for local and national elections throughout the UK – however essential they may be – can be seen as more abstract than the re-purposing of space within your own community.
A gradual social revolution
There is something missing in the global vision of Moreno’s book. Building a sense of engagement of people with their neighbourhood would entail ensuring more people can afford to carry on living in that area for longer periods. Right to Buy in the UK, and the expansion of a poorly regulated private rental housing sector, have combined with a deliberately shrunken public sector to make more people mobile in their search for work and in commuting to it.
In Oxford, with well over well over 40% of homes private rentals, the extraordinary numbers of ‘To Let’ signs show communities in which a section of the population appears to be itinerant as they search for better and cheaper homes – often well away from Oxford, it seems *. With this type of problem evident in many British cities, 15-minute neighbourhoods might well need a planned decline of private rentals as part of rebuilding community life. There is a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm in the larger UK parties for taking on private landlords, however. Moreno has offered a social revolution which could begin with very small increments, already achieved in some cities around the world. In the UK, such a process perhaps needs to begin with assertions about needed community facilities and far more low traffic neighbourhoods – like the over 100 already present in London.
- Oxford has a large number of students and a high turnover in properties, 25% per annum compared to 10% nationally
See Steve Dawe’s other recent transport-related writing here, and more extensively at the Cowley Area Transport Group.
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