[Opinion] Fifteen Minute Cities?

[Xenophon]

We've all heard of Carlos Moreno's brainchild. Any thoughts?

Myself, I think that environmentally it's a great idea. (Were I subject to trauma, life in Texas would've done it, where cities have few sidewalks and the quickest way to reach the nearest supermarket is typically with field artillery.) Socially, I can see some arguments for it: imagine---neighbors whose names you know. Conversely it strikes me the notion is too likely to be abused in the name of social order. Passports to go from Queens to Manhattan, no doubt. Each neighborhood sealed off as a laboratory for the social engineering problem du jour. Heck, one can easily imagine proprietory rights: Manhattan belongs to the sociology & gender studies departments of Harvard; Queens belongs to NYU; Peoria is a virus-testing area for MIT... Imagine an unfunny take on the not-so-funny-to-begin-with "The Napoleon of Notting Hill."

Y'all?

 

[Tiana Silvermoon]

Well... can't say I live in 15 minutes city, but it's pretty close. The only two things you usually have that are farther than 15 minutes walk are work (there are some exceptions and people who work from home, but usually you're considered lucky if it's only half an hour on subway) and colleges/universities. Everything else you can easily walk to. It doesn't make you to know all your neighbors though, I don't even know all the people who live on the same floor as I.

 

[Xenophon]

Well... can't say I live in 15 minutes city, but it's pretty close. The only two things you usually have that are farther than 15 minutes walk are work (there are some exceptions and people who work from home, but usually you're considered lucky if it's only half an hour on subway) and colleges/universities. Everything else you can easily walk to. It doesn't make you to know all your neighbors though, I don't even know all the people who live on the same floor as I.

Yeah. The "community" aspect is over-touted. I live in China. Within 15 minutes bike ride (the touchstone for 15 min cities) there are probably 200,000 people. It takes one helluva of a semantic stretch to style that a village. Looks more like a chicken factory-farm.

 

[KjEno186]

Twenty years ago, I had just viewed a documentary called "The End of Suburbia" which predicted the demise of the oil-based growth paradigm. One solution presented was called New Urbanism. In other words, designing the human living arrangement in a way that does not require the use of the personal automobile. I live in a mid-sized town (2 Wal-Marts, a bypass, a run down shopping mall, and a barely navigable city center) in the middle of farm country USA. Abandoned strip malls dot the bypass while other construction projects put up new commercial buildings. It's the typical wasteful American landscape. The lumpenprole dream of owning their own manor-in-a-cul-de-sac with its manicured lawn, a cartoon of country living without the amenities of city life. If it can be exploited, packaged, and sold (financed), who gives a damn how it looks in 20 years? By then you'll have moved to a bigger house with a bigger television in a bigger subdivision further away from the place you work and shop...

Frankly I hate car culture, and I think that New Urbanism would be a step in the right direction. However, so-called 15 minute cities appear to be the globalist dream of creating a panopticon for managing their urban serfs.