The owner of Outwith Books, Natalie Whittle has written a book about the Fifteen Minute City, the idea of how having all amenities within a 15 min cycle or walk of your home benefits the economy, wellbeing and the climate.

By Natalie Whittle

On the street in Glasgow where I live, there is a car that never moves. Parked under a tree, winter to summer, it is a four-wheeled advertisement for decay. The tyres are cracked, the roof is powdered with tree dust, and the driver, if they ever turned up, would sit behind a windshield of green mould.

Walking past it day after day, I used to wonder if something serious had happened to the person who owned this vehicle. Why did they never return to it? Some bad luck beyond their control? Perhaps, more mysteriously, it was meant to be left there.

After a while, I added to the car’s abandonment and forgot about it, too; cities, after all, have unknowns at every corner. But in the course of writing about the '15-minute' city, that car came back into my mind, and its forlorn state made me think about something else, the future.

Today, when we close our eyes and think of our home streets, we see lines of cars parked there. The same when we picture our city centres and neighbourhoods: cars, vans, motorbikes are there. They belong there. They are necessary to a fundamental urban logic which understands cities to be places that keep moving.

In a fully realised 15-minute city of the future, however, the organisation of movement would be different. Cars would still be present, but in a heavily demoted role, sidelined in the same way that bicycles and pedestrians were pushed aside in cities by the roar of the automobile industry following the Second World War. The acceleration of car culture in the economic recovery of the 1950s marked, after the earlier advent of the railways, a second critical shift in urban life, and we are still untangling the consequences. Railways laid the tracks for commuters to live further from their place of work, so unbuttoning the size of the average city, but cars made the cities themselves even busier. Pavements were narrowed, roads built and widened – all for the car to bestride the city. Even the Volkswagen factory, standing in ruins in postwar Germany, quickly resurrected itself amid a global boom in automobile production.

The 15-minute city would, arguably, herald the growth of industries associated with a new transport culture that would once again redraw the map of the road. Electric vehicles, yes, but also hydrogen power, micro mobility bike sharing and solutions for charging stations and parking facilities. Apps and services that streamline our transportation options into one smartphone thumb-swipe would also become more prominent.

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The business of transport is critical to the wider, more imaginative mission of the 15-minute city, since first and foremost, this ‘new’ kind of city is one that tries its hardest to minimise the emission of greenhouse gases in the race against climate catastrophe.The march of urbanisation, in which around 68 per cent of the global population is forecast to live in cities by 2050, makes it acutely important that cities acknowledge their role in the crisis. A more localised experience of urban life, in which we use fossil fuels less, and move around by bike or on foot where possible, would in theory help to bring carbon emissions down and brake the pace of rising temperatures. Cities are not permanent; they are fragile and vulnerable to the effects of climate – they need to build resilience against change, as well as take responsibility for it.

The neatness of the 15-minute city slogan creates a temptation to think that the environmental benefits can be modelled to equally neat proportions. But there is another reasoning for the quarter-hour framework. Researchers have found that 20 minutes is about the maximum length of time people are willing to walk in order to complete a daily task or chore. (This so-called ‘pedestrian shed’ before people opt to use a car or other transportation varies depending on social geography – in America, for example, it is sometimes capped at five minutes.) Since pedestrians and other active travellers are lead actors in the compact city neighbourhood, their known behaviours shape the outline of the urbanists’ thinking. In the 15-minute city, services and shops need to be close to one another so that a short walk or bicycle ride can achieve something in people’s lives, be it useful or educational or recreational. Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne professor of innovation who helped to pitch the concept to the city of Paris, calls the 15-minute city a ‘ville du proximité’.

Natalie Whittle, the author of The 15 Minute City

Melbourne, Australia, where pilot 20-minute neighbourhoods are in place, has stressed the importance of walking as an enhancer of economic activity. This mercantile reality is a necessary part of the conversation, since the 15-minute city has to be able to offer thriving small high streets in order to meet its promise of enriched local living. Not everything about the 15-minute city is utopian glamour, either. Houston, Texas adopted a ‘complete streets’ policy in 2013, to improve the walkability and cyclability of its cityscape. There is a rigour that accompanies the city’s long-term commitment to the project; one of the newer features, for example, is a website where residents can report potholes.

Parallel to these considerations is another apparently hardwired phenomenon called ‘the Marchetti constant’, named for the Italian physicist Cesare Machetti. In this argument, Marchetti posited that 30 minutes is the near-universal time that commuters throughout history have been willing to sacrifice on a single leg of their journey. As transport technology advanced, this 30-minute tolerance did not alter, Marchetti argued. It simply allowed people to travel greater distances within half an hour, enabling their homes to be further apart from their workplace.

So whether on foot in ancient Rome or aboard a steam train in Victorian Manchester, on a tram in post-war Glasgow or an Underground train in modern London, half an hour is the duration we feel equal to, Marchetti’s theory suggests. But this doesn’t mean that the resultant sprawling cities accommodate our wishes. Indeed, to many long-suffering commuters, a half-hour trip each way would seem like wishful fancy, disconnected from the reality of watching as minutes and hours of life pass through the frame of train and bus windows.

Another valid response to the question ‘what is a 15-minute city?’ is that it is a self-aware city, where we use time, space and energy with an acknowledgment of their impact on our planet. Many of our travel behaviours are unconscious, but the 15-minute city is a splash of water on our faces – reminding us that time is in acute relation to the environment.

If we have travelled a great distance in a short period, for example, there is usually a punishment to the planet. Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, has repeatedly made this point by going the long way round, slowly, to all her global speaking engagements. As Thunberg said to assembled world leaders in Davos: ‘I want you to act as if the world is on fire, because it is.’

For change to be meaningful, however, we need to think differently before we can act differently, and raising this consciousness of how time, travel and energy connect is at the heart of the 15-minute conversation. Above all, the 15-minute city asks us to turn away from the perceived convenience of the fossil fuel car – the machine that enables us to gain the greatest control over the relationship between time and distance, by being a personal speed servant, driving us wherever and whenever we please.

This is an extract taken from a new book written by Natalie Whittle and published by Luath Press. Natalie Whittle is a writer and editor, who worked for 15 years at the Financial Times. She is the founder of Outwith Books, an independent bookshop and writing space in Govanhill.

This was first published as part of the Housing Issue of Greater Govanhill Magazine. To buy yourself a paper copy, please follow the link at the top of this article.