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The 15-minute city is a dead end — cities must be places of opportunity for everyone - LSE COVID-19
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LSE COVID-19<br>From research to global policy response
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#LSEThinks
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Edward Glaeser
May 28th, 2021
The 15-minute city is a dead end — cities must be places of opportunity for everyone
8 comments<br>| 278 shares
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
LSE COVID-19
From research to global policy response
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#LSEThinks
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Edward Glaeser
May 28th, 2021
The 15-minute city is a dead end — cities must be places of opportunity for everyone
8 comments<br>| 278 shares
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
278<br>Shares
The notion of the 15-minute city, in which people can work, shop, play and go to school within a small radius of their home, has attracted some urban planners. But now more than ever, argues Edward Glaeser (Harvard) , it should be recognised as a dead end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true role as engines of opportunity.
Aspects of the 15-minute city are praiseworthy. I yield to no one in my embrace of the pedestrian city. I have long believed that walking as the best of all possible modes.
I also believe that cities should be freed from the business regulations that make it difficult to start small shops and cosy cafes in residential neighbourhoods. An exciting mixed-use neighbourhood can be one of the best gifts of urban entrepreneurship. In the US, we regulate the entrepreneurship of the poor far more than we regular the entrepreneurship of the rich. The rich innovate in cyberspace, which is largely a regulation free zone. The poor innovate on the ground, in real things, and local government rules micromanage the physical.
But the basic concept of a 15-minute city is not really a city at all. It’s an enclave — a ghetto – a subdivision. All cities should be archipelagos of neighbourhoods, but these neighbourhoods must be connected. Cities should be machines for connecting humans – rich and poor, black and white, young and old. Otherwise, they fail in their most basic mission and they fail to be places of opportunity.
While modern American cities are engines of opportunity for adults, they are dead ends for children. Adults who come to the city – rich and poor alike – see their wages rise as they spending more time there. But as Raj Chetty’s work on upward mobility has shown, children who grow up in cities end up doing much worse as adults than children who grew up outside them. One explanation for this difference is that an adult doesn’t live in a 15-minute city. A lower income adult may wake up in her tenement apartment, but then she goes to her job somewhere else. She finds opportunity with people who are wealthier and better educated. The child, however, lives in a 15-minute city. Perhaps, he wakes in a low-income housing project and then goes to a highly segregated school. That child live in a 15-minute city that is no more integrated than a poor rural village. In that world, the rich have isolated themselves from the poor, and the poor are cut off.
The view that we can duplicate real movement with virtual movement is a fantasy for less well-educated people. In May 2020, 70% of Americans were doing their work virtually, but only 5% of Americans without a high school degree were telecommuting. If we allow this virtual world to persist, our world is going to become even more catastrophically unequal.
The view that we are improving accessibility for everyone by enabling people to work virtually is completely wrong
We should embrace the good aspects of the 15-minute city— the idea of accessibility, perhaps driving less, and embracing congestion pricing — ultimately, we should bury the idea of a city that is chopped up into 15-minute bits. Post-COVID, we must embrace the idea of the whole city that is connected with the whole of our metropole and with the whole of the world. Ultimately, we should learnt from this terrible pandemic that all of us are in this together. We must ensure this never happens again, and we must particular enable those people who start with less to connect to the rest of the city.
Transport is beginning to change
The rise of autonomous vehicles and technologies like hyperloop may make a major difference to the way we travel around cities. I’m 54, and the transportation I take is not very different from the kind I took 50 years ago. After a very slow period of change, it now makes sense to keep flexibility to allow the future to catch up with us. It makes sense to keep our options open so that our cities can embrace the...