“What is the 15-Minute City?” rhetorically asks urban planner Steve Mouzon. His answer: “It’s every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name.”
A 15-minute city in the 1920s. Click image for a larger view.
In other words, a 15-minute city is crowded. It is noisy. Living quarters are cramped. Grocery stores are small and high priced. Crime and contagious disease are continuing worries. Income inequality is high and only the wealthy enjoy true mobility; most people are confined to walking.
If 15-minute cities were so great, we would still be living in them. But as soon as people got cars, they moved out of them and used their new-found mobility to get better housing, better jobs, and a wider variety of low-cost consumer goods.
Every city in America is a 15-minute city if you take automobiles into account. Thanks to automobiles, the typical U.S. urban resident lives within 15 minutes of more than 100,000 jobs, several different supermarkets that compete hard for their business, one or two shopping malls, parks and other recreation facilities, a variety of health care facilities, friends and relatives, and many other potential destinations and activities. Even the densest cities in the world can’t provide that kind of variety and opportunity within 15 minutes on foot.
The key words in Mouzon’s description are “a catchy new name.” Planners are good at dressing up terrible ideas in catchy new names to make them sound attractive. But a catchy new name won’t make people want to go back and live in the 1920s.
“It’s every city ever built by humans on this planet until a century ago, but with a catchy new name.”
For all of human history, up until just a generation ago, the majority of humans lived in rural settings, not cities.
BTW Target is closing their small store in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood. From what they told the Star Tribune, it’s being closed because it doesn’t have enough foot traffic.
Rumor for quite some time is the store from day one has never had anything near the sales needed to break even.
Why does this matter? The 15-minute city folk are focused, arguably hyper focused, on consumption. Despite living in a time when everything you need can be delivered to your door ( recently had a car battery delivered, free delivery; well, that cost rolled into the price, really ). Note a key part of the 15 minutes are the stores. What can you walk to.
Target’s Uptown store was an experiment. It’s Target looking to see if they can figure out how to make money is a low sales, low volume environment. They can’t. Or at least they haven’t figured out how to do it.
The root flaw of the 15 minute city ( and the Strongtown folks, et al. ) is at the core, it’s not a productive city. You have to have mom and pop store owners willing to work long hours, day in, day out, 6 or 7 days a week, for very little money. You can’t have a store with 30 employees making a living wage. The traffic ( and hence sales ) just ain’t there.
Think about it. HOw many $5 coffees does one have to sell to afford a $800 / month health insurance plan? How about to cover $1500 / store rent on top of that? And $2k / month for a mortgage on top of all of that?
It smacks of the age old pining for “those good ol’ days”, just wrapped up in a way that plays to their anti-auto feelings.
“The 15-minute city folk are focused, arguably hyper focused, on consumption. Despite living in a time when everything you need can be delivered to your door”
This is an amazingly valuable point.
Lets use extremely liberal small college town Oberlin, Ohio as an example.
For the students, staff and faculty that live on campus/in town there are a number of small local businesses inside what appears to be a perfect 15 minute city. Walk everywhere, no cars needed. However, it seems like every time I visit, one or two in-town businesses have closed or been replaced.
A few years ago, Walmart built a store outside of town — more than a 15 minute walk outside of town — with a large parking lot, gas station, and nearby Great Clips, Pizza Hut, Oberlin Laser Wash, Dollar Tree, Goodwill Thrift Store and Advence Auto Parts.
If the 15-minute city doesn’t work in Oberlin, Ohio, it’s not likely to work anywhere else.
https://goo.gl/maps/nbsmPqvRy7dmjwsq8
What’s wrong with the 15 minute city? I tell ya short and sweet….15 minutes.
To do ONE fukin chore.
That means everything takes 10 to 15 minutes and stuck with options available to you.
Distance between two destinations to do daily chores means even 4 minor errands can take an hour…..
I said while back cities viewed as food deserts…do not suffer those issues by design.
Cities can have grocery stores with abundant choices on minimal land. Just do what Guggemheim museum in New York did. Incorporate a spiral ramp…. this in a 3 story building increases surface area. And we can build it out of wood avoiding need for expensive concrete, steel.
New building material of Cross laminated timber allows exceptionally tall wooden buildings to be built relatively quickly.
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If the 15-minute city doesn’t work in Oberlin, Ohio, it’s not likely to work anywhere else.
” ~ rovingbroker
i live in 100k pop roanoke va. i cant recall all the 15 minute city criteria exactly. anyway, where i am near the county border….grocers by bike, 2 are within 10 minute’s ride. drug stores…8 minutes by bike. various (maybe 6 total, mexi, waffle, fish, deli) restaurants….5 minutes or less by bike, doc in a box…10 minutes by bike, less by car. hospital…near 10 minutes by car. home improvement store…less than 5 by car maybe 8 to 10 by bike. library, practically useless, about 2 minutes by bike. and i don’t think roanke va was ever planned for 15 minute-ness at all.
I live in a suburb of an upper midwest US city and have for my whole life. As a child and adult I’ve always had access to or owned an automobile.
I’ve never been more than 15 minutes (by car or bus) from pretty much everything I’ve ever needed. It’s amazing — products and services seem to cluster around where the people are.