Posted Nov 14, 2020, 3:32 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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The 15-Minute City—No Cars Required—Is Urban Planning’s New Utopia
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...-area-near-you
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- Taken together, the new trees and cycleways, community facilities and social housing, homes and workplaces all reflect a potentially transformative vision for urban planners: the 15-minute city. “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.
- As workplaces, stores, and homes are brought into closer proximity, street space previously dedicated to cars is freed up, eliminating pollution and making way for gardens, bike lanes, and sports and leisure facilities. All of this allows residents to bring their daily activities out of their homes (which in Paris tend to be small) and into welcoming, safe streets and squares. — Similar ideas have been around for a long time, including in Paris itself. Walkable 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.
- Paris is far from alone in attempting this sort of transformation. London’s new “Mini-Hollands” import Dutch planning ideas that seek to reduce or block car access to neighborhood shopping hubs. Barcelona has been turning 400-by-400-meter chunks of road in areas dominated by apartment towers into mostly car-free “superblocks.” Madrid has declared plans to copy that approach, in keeping with its goal to be a “city of 15 minutes” as it recovers from the pandemic. Milan has said the same, with hopes to turn Covid-19 bike lanes and sidewalks permanent as its economy restabilizes. But turning the 15-minute city into a truly global movement will require a big battle over a core urban tension: the primacy of the car. — It’s one thing to turn a Paris or a Barcelona, cities that were almost completely shaped before the automobile was invented, into a neighborhood-centric utopia. Transforming them is rather like giving a supermodel a makeover. 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.
- U.S. cities holding similarly optimistic blueprints are also struggling to strike a balance between vision and reality. In 2016, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan laid out a plan to turn high-density corridors outside the central business district in his sprawling, 140-square-mile city into 20-minute neighborhoods. Its leading edge thus far is a $17 million pedestrian upgrade in the Livernois-McNichols area, 9 miles northeast of downtown. The project concluded in early 2020 with an emphasis on narrower streets, wider sidewalks for cafe seating, and new lighting. Residents and business owners have been largely pleased with the improvements; a walk to the supermarket is now a much more pleasant ambition. But that basic urban function is out of reach for the vast majority of the city. — So far, most of Detroit’s achievements under the 20-minute rubric have been modest, including moves toward a comprehensive transportation plan and ongoing investments in lighting and resurfacing.
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Place de la Nation, one of seven transformed squares. -- Photographer: Dmitry Kostyukov for Bloomberg Businessweek
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