The 15-minute city as marketing slogan

This post was originally published on 15 Minutes City

In less than two years, the 15-minute city concept has gone from a relatively obscure urban planning framework to a pervasive catchprase among city lovers, urban leaders, and property developers. The 15-minute city may now be overexposed while still being poorly understood.

Developers are almost universally hyping their adoption of 15-minute city principles in their promotional material. The proposed US$40 billion desert city of Telosa, announced with great fanfare and accompanied by fancy drawings from starchitect firm Bjarke Ingels Group, will use “a new 15-minute city design” and will create “a collective and active transportation system that is more enjoyable, greener and universally accessible.”

A 278-acre (113-hectare) greenfield development in New Cairo, Egypt called Il Bosco City promises that “your education, health, sports, shopping and entertainment needs are accessible either walking or cycling, only 15 minutes from your home.” The 36-acre (15-hectare) Island Quarter development in Nottingham, United Kingdom will allow “people who live on site to work there too, enjoying the ’15-minute city’ concept.”

It now seems mandatory for property developers to include a “15-minute city” reference in their marketing. It’s urbanist “virtue signaling.”

While it’s good that so many property developers are talking about and promoting proximity and convenience, we risk losing sight of what the 15-minute city is really about. It is NOT a marketing slogan. It is a framework for making our cities more inclusive, more equitable, and thereby more effective. Only time will tell whether new developments live up to these goals, or if project proponents throw in a few mixed-use elements and call it a day. It is up to all of us to insist that large new developments — and even more importantly, day-to-day incremental neighborhood changes — match the full ideals of the 15-minute city.

Because ultimately, the 15-minute city is not an updated instruction manual for top-down centralized planning, but rather a vision for creating an environment that empowers many thousands of city dwellers to remake their cities. As the ever-quotable Jane Jacobs wrote in Architectural Forum 66 years ago: “Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city and only they will rebuild the city.”