The 15 Minute City
Everyone should be able to enjoy this level of convenience: grocery stores, restaurants, hardware stores, a dentist, a physical therapist, an emergency clinic, should all be within a 15 minute walk.
I enjoy a life of great convenience. I live in New York City, at 98th street and Broadway. Within 4 blocks of my home I have:
grocery stores
bakeries
hotels
pharmacies
dry cleaners
restaurants
liquor stores
hardware stores
First Aid clinics for medical emergencies
a book seller
a seafood store
a gym
a Krav Maga school that also hosts ping pong tournaments
a physical therapy clinic
a dentist office
Riverside Park
Whole Foods
a telephone store (Verizon)
a theater
I want everyone to be able to enjoy the convenience that I enjoy.
I live at the corner of Broadway and 98th St, so when I step outside, looking east I see Broadway:
But if I go 2 blocks west then I’m at the start of Riverside Drive, where I encounter the occasional wildlife:
(And to whoever threw away an untouched slice of pizza, New York’s wildlife would like to say a big “Thank you!”)
Some people, who don’t know my history, sometimes suggest that I’m missing out by spending so much time in the city — they suggest I’d be happier in the country. But I already had that life. I spent most of 6 years working at Mack’s Apples, an orchard just outside of Londonderry, New Hampshire:
The truth is, farm life is a rough life, and the risk of injury is high. It’s considered one of our nation’s most dangerous professions. It is easy to idealize farm life while you’re young and healthy, but as we grow older, living in a community that affords every kind of convenience is comfortable and a pleasant change of pace from the hard adventures some of us pushed ourselves through during our teens and twenties.
In the USA, we have a lot of regulations that make it weirdly expensive to build these 15 minute communities. By contrast, such easy-to-walk neighborhoods are the norm in Europe. Yet with a few tweaks to our Planning and Development regulations, we could make it cheap to develop an abundance of 15 Minute Cities here in the USA.
Some advice about how to do this: In the USA, the local planning board committees tend to be sensitive to whoever shows up to the meetings — yet few citizens do show up. In the town where I grew up, my mom served on the planning committee for many years, and, as a child, I went to many of these meetings. Sometimes as few as 3 or 4 citizens would show up, and they would end up having tremendous influence, because they were the only ones there. I found it amazing that a small handful of individuals could have so much influence on the future of the town, and it amazed me that 99.99% of the population preferred to stay home and engage in what whatever entertainment kept them happy at home, when they could have come out to that meeting where they would have had a great influence on the future of the town. But that is the democratic process: committees are formed and then hold hearings to solicit opinions from the public, but sometimes only a small handful of citizens show up to offer an opinion. If there is a failure of the democratic process, most of the blame should be on those citizens who decided to stay home and watch television, rather than come out and participate in the democratic construction of the future of their town. So my advice is simple: show up for the meetings and you'll get what you want from the democratic process, most of the time.
Of course, as I’ve described The 15 Minute City here, it may sound like the goal is simply about making consumption easier. I still commute to work: in the morning I take the subway downtown, from my apartment to the office is about 20 minutes. In the evening I often walk home, but that is a long walk, sometimes as much as 90 minutes. I do the walk for the sake of exercise. That I can get to work quickly in the morning and then walk home in the evening is one of the many things that I love about New York City. But again, we make this kind of city needlessly expensive in the USA. With a few tweaks to our regulations, we could increase the supply of this kind of density, and therefore we could make such communities inexpensive.
A few writers have suggested that jobs should be closer to where people live, but that goal gets in the way of other important goals, such as enabling people to seek the jobs that will pay them the best. I don’t think it will ever be easy to ensure that people live near their jobs. Especially given the complex chains of specialization needed to keep the modern economy alive, a person with rare skills will often find their best job offers are far from home. Nor is moving closer to the job always the practical option. I personally have been very lucky: I can get to work in 20 minutes. And with a good enough mass transit system, we can make this the norm for most workers. But there will always be some who need to travel long distances for their work.
Some people have an ambitious agenda when they talk about the 15 Minute City: what I’ve suggested here, while convenient, is only a small step towards the city of the future, the city that honestly addresses the needs of all people, including women with children, and also the disabled. I’ll briefly sketch the outlines of that debate.
Leslie Kern has written a very good book “Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World.” She saves some of her harshest criticism for the suburbs, as they took shape after World War II:
Page 32-36
Hayden puts it succinctly: “Developers argued that a particular kind of house would help the veteran change from an aggressive air ace to a commuting salesman who mowed the lawn. That house would also help a woman change from Rosie the Riveter to a stay-at-home mom.” Post-war propaganda was explicit about the need for women to relinquish their wartime factory jobs to returning men and the suburban home was the perfect “fix” for re-establishing normative gender roles. By providing a spatial solution to the temporary widening of women’s horizons, the public-private, paid-unpaid work divide could be “naturally” re-established between the sexes.
The suburban lifestyle both assumed and required, in order to function properly, a heterosexual nuclear family with one adult working outside the home and one inside. Large houses, isolated from transit and other services, meant the stay-at-home wife and mother was required to perform a full-time domestic caretaker role, overseeing the home and managing the needs of the breadwinner and children. As feminst planner Sherilyn MacGregor states, this built form has “created a lasting infrastructure for the [gendered] division of labour,” one that pre-supposes the traditional heterosexual nuclear family.
Hayden contends that only a small fraction of households includes the sole male breadwinner/unemployed housewife with minor children. Indeed, this model has likely always been a small proportion of households and it rarely represented the lives of Black and working class women. And yet the predominant residential landscape is designed with this ideal. Because the built environment is durable over long time spans, we’re stuck with spaces that reflect outdated and inaccurate social realities. This in turn, shapes how people live their lives and the range of choices and possibilities that are open to them.
During one of my not-infrequent rants about this, a friend accused me of giving the suburbs “too much agency” in this example. So let me clarify: the suburbs are not consciously trying to keep women in the kitchen and out of the workplace, but given the assumptions they rest upon, the suburbs will actively (if not agentically) stymie attempts to manage different family shapes and working lives. The isolation, size of the family home, need for multiple vehicles, and demands of child care continue to push women either out of the workplace or into lower-paying, part-time jobs that mostly allow them to juggle the responsibilities of suburban life. It’s rarely the male breadwinner’s career that is sacrificed or downsized. After all, given the long-standing gender pay gap, it makes no sense to limit the man’s earning potential. In this way, the suburbs continue to support and naturalize certain kinds of gender roles in the heterosexual family and in the labour market.
Kern then acknowledges that cities can be convenient in ways that make life easier for women. However, we still have a lot of work to do to make the city that addresses everyone’s needs:
THE CITY FIX
Gerda Wekerle and many others argued that relative to the suburbs, cities offered much better prospects for women working outside the home who needed to juggle multiple conflicting roles. For families headed by women, “their very survival,” argues Wekerle, is dependent “on a wide network of social services frequently found only in central city areas.” Research in the 1970s and 1980s found women use the city more intensively than men, are “more involved in work, neighborhood and cultural activities than suburban women and most of these opportunities are lost when they move to the suburbs.” In the early 1960s, famed urban planning critic Jane Jacobs challenged the prevailing idea that the suburbs were good places for women and children. She noted isolation, lack of people on the streets, and car dependency as concerns that particularly affected women while also contributing to the decline of the public realm in general.
The city, however, isn’t a magic fix for these concerns. Leaving aside the question of whether making it easier for women to take on disproportionate household burdens is the end goal, cities still contain multiple barriers. Cities are based around the same kinds of assumed social norms and institutions as the suburbs. Geographer Kim England writes that gender roles are “fossilized into the concrete appearance of space. Hence the location of residential areas, work-places, transportation networks, and the overall layout of cities in general reflect a patriarchal capitalist society’s expectations of what types of activities take place where, when and by whom.” All forms of urban planning draw on a cluster of assumptions about the “typical” urban citizen: their daily travel plans, needs, desires, and values. Shockingly, this citizen is a man. A breadwinning husband and father, able-bodied, heterosexual, white, and cis-gender. This has meant that even though cities have a lot of advantages relative to the suburbs, they’re certainly not built with the aim of making women’s “double shifts” of paid and unpaid work easier to manage.
We can see this in the way that public transit has been set up, particularly since the rise of suburbia. Most urban public transportation systems are designed to accommodate the typical rush hour commute of a nine-to-five office worker. What little transit that does exist in the suburbs is designed to carry this commuter in a specific direction at a specific time. The whole system assumes a linear trip without detours or multiple stops. And this has worked pretty well for the usual male commuter.
However, research shows that women’s commutes are often more complex, reflecting the layered and sometimes conflicting duties of paid and unpaid work. A mother with two small children uses the local bus to drop off one child at day care when it opens at eight, then doubles back on her journey to leave the other child at school at eight-thirty. She gets on the train, rushing to work for nine. On the way home the journey is reversed, with an extra stop to pick up missing ingredients for dinner and a pack of diapers. Now laden with packages, a stroller, and a child, she fights her way back onto the crowded bus to finally head home. Many transit systems will force her to pay multiple times for this trip and for the children, too. If she lives in the suburbs, she might even have to pay to access different municipal systems. Recent research has found that transportation is yet another area where women pay a “pink tax” (paying more for similar services than men). Women are more likely to rely on public transportation than men, although they’re more poorly served by it. Sarah Kaufman’s research showed that in New York City for example, women who are primary caregivers for children may be paying up to seventy-six dollars extra per month on transportation costs.
I think we can summarize the whole debate this way: the 15 Minute City is a fantastic goal for making life easy and convenient for most communities in the USA. Some of our regulations make it needlessly difficult to build these kinds of convenient neighborhoods. But it would only take a few tweaks to the regulations to make such developments less expensive. So aiming for the 15 Minute City is a reasonable goal that we can achieve in the next 20 years. But then, having achieved that, we should remember there is more work to do, if we are to build neighborhoods that are friendly to all kinds of people, with all of their complex and diverse needs.