The 15-minute city
By: J. David Chapman/September 8, 2022
The 15-minute city concept is one of the most popular ideas for making cities denser, healthier, lower-carbon-emitting, and more convenient to access services and amenities. When first theorized, the plan promised more pedestrian-friendly communities with bike lanes on every street and the elimination of parking spaces across cities. Well, best-laid plans. We use that term when things don’t turn out exactly how we had planned. Turns out, this 15-minute concept is easy to envision, makes sense, but is very difficult to implement.
The goal is to offer city dwellers easy walking or biking access to most of their daily activities, from shops and leisure activities to schools and even work. If you have heard the term “new urbanism,” you have probably heard these concepts mentioned as a movement to change mobility in the U.S. The new urbanism promotes towns and suburban cities that are built the way we used to build them back in the early 1900s, where we had corner stores, neighborhood schools, higher-density housing, and connected streets in a grid network.
As you vision this type of development, you may be thinking that it contrasts many cities around the U.S. today – you would be correct. Decades of city-planning policies have supported huge areas of urban sprawl and sparsely populated neighborhoods. This has created situations where we have lengthy car journeys to do almost everything in our daily life, leading to congestion, air pollution, long commutes, and a lack of fitness.
There is good news. Entire organizations like The Urban Land Institute, Strong Towns, Congress of New Urbanism, and Smart Growth America are dedicated to good land-use policy and education. We are beginning to undo some of these unsustainable land-use policies and understanding that the city may hold possible solutions to quality-of-life issues, inequalities, poverty, ecological matters, affordable housing, and economic development.
The U.S. is seeing a move away from urban sprawl. You will notice this in development patterns and redevelopment of old commercial areas for mixed use and new areas creating villages. Zoning code changes such as this are helping allow more compact development, cutting car trips in half. We’ve added the ability to mix land uses a la the 15-minute city, which wasn’t the case even a few years ago. How long does it take you to reach your most frequent destinations?
J. David Chapman is professor of finance and real estate at the University of Central Oklahoma (jchapman7@uco.edu).