The ‘15-Minute City’: What They Are And How To Build Them
Source: Forbes | Laurie Winkless | Contributor
Focusing on making amenities more accessible to city dwellers comes with a host of benefits. 15-minute cities are focused on walkability. Can you meet your basic needs within a short distance ...
If you’re an urbanite, how long does it take you to get to a supermarket? What about a public park, pharmacist, or primary school? For proponents of the 15-Minute City planning concept, the answer to all of those questions should be “less than 15 minutes.”
On first glance, the concept is very simple: to create neighborhoods and cities where a person can meet a host of their basic needs via a short walk or bike ride; larger cities also tend to include public transit in the mix. Exactly what defines ‘short’ varies from place to place. Copenhagen, for example, adopted a ‘5 Minutes to Everything’ model back in 2016, “A maximum 5-minute walk to all amenities and public transport.” For Melbourne the goal was a 10-minute threshold (or more specifically, a “20-minute return trip to all amenities”). Other cities including Glasgow, Portland and Hamilton (New Zealand) aim for 20 minutes. And while the specific time period differs, the central tenet – enhancing the accessibility of neighborhoods through design and active transit – remains the same. The concept, which is increasingly being generalized to the ‘x-minute city’, is revolutionizing the way we think about our urban homes.
The planning model was formally proposed by French-Colombian scientist – and Sorbonne professor – Carlos Moreno in 2016. Elements of it have been around since at least the 1960s (Morena credits Jane Jacobs as a major source of inspiration), and it shares many of the same principles as walkable, mixed-used urban design. But, Moreno’s ’15-minute’ framing of it grabbed public attention. In French, it’s called “La Ville du quart d’Heure”, and it’s in France that it was first put into practice, thanks to the support of Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris.