The escalation of the “15 minute city” from a dull urban design and planning principle to a controversial flashpoint is spectacular. Literally, a spectacle.
Quick recap. The basic concept of the 15 minute city is over a century old: neighborhoods should be planned, designed and animated so that all basic necessities (like groceries and health care) are within a 15 minute walk or bike ride. It was branded and pseudo-formalized by professor Carlos Moreno circa 2016. Urban planning theorists and practitioners have spent the intervening years going back and forth on the minutiae of implementation and the societal implications and the academic this-and-that of the 15 minute city. Dozens of mayors have vaguely endorsed it.
Then the pandemic and the increasing pressure for climate action shifted the 15 minute city from concept to reality. During lock down, the importance of having necessities close by became apparent—and the pandemic even afforded some opportunities to test out temporary alternatives, as Sara Hendren pointed out in the New York Times. The mayor of Paris made the 15 minute city a core part of her successful 2020 re-election campaign.
Anti-lockdown (read: anti-government-overreach) sentiment soon took a small step from rejecting masks and vaccines to rejecting neighborhood planning. The 15 minute city was recast as a “climate lockdown,” or a tool for government surveillance, or the first step toward an insidious car ban or some other version of left-wing fascism. Moreno, the main protagonist of the 15 minute city, has allegedly received death threats. Now it’s hard to find a news outlet across the international stage that hasn’t run some version of this story: far right conspiracy theorists are coming after urban planners.
Here is Moreno responding in the Times of London. “People can be totally crazy,” he said. “But I am not affected. I will carry on spreading the message to improve the structure of urban life. This insane campaign of hate won’t win,” (emphasis added). His statement has a very stable genius ring to it—not the kind of language that diffuses a situation, and certainly not what we’ve come to expect in discussions of zoning and land use.
He’s more vocal, perhaps, but Moreno isn’t alone in feeling this way. There is a lot of far-left hand-wringing (urban design and planning are very left) about the far-right threatening their pet project, and maybe eroding their whole discipline. And it’s completely missing the point.
Hostile controversy is inevitable when the thinkers and doers of an entire field spend many, many years getting together to speak in abstractions and quibble about minutiae and generally agree about a thing they find agreeable, then suddenly put it out into the world (with government’s help). Of course it rubbed people the wrong way.
My wife, Kim Smith Claudel, is part of a cooperative gallery called Carnation and an artist collective called WAVE. Carnation is one of a pair of small, artist-run galleries that are physically connected to a larger and more formal institution called Oregon Contemporary, none of which have entry fees. Together, they animate a vibrant block in North Portland, providing a habitat for several intersecting groups and collectives (this nested configuration is important, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute).
From what I can see as a non-member / curious observer, this ecosystem has three main purposes:
running gallery spaces and programs cooperatively
helping each other with various aspects of showing, like installation and de-installation
meeting regularly to share and critique each other’s work (finished or in-progress)
Together, these practices and spaces form an armature for taking risks and working in community: provoking and encouraging and critiquing and celebrating each other. The ecosystem gives and takes energy from its members, and it’s steered by its members, which gives them freedom to explore without red tape. It’s not about circling around a single idea—much the opposite. It’s about colliding very different ideas, taking them seriously, pushing them further, and making them public.1 All of this is anchored in a place that is open and welcoming.
The art community has a vital unit. And, like a good painting, it’s something you can’t un-see. Glancing back over at urban design, the field looks like a limp filter bubble, wheezing the stale air of a concept after a pinprick of controversy.
Urban design has been so concerned with creating a goldilocks-sized unit for cities that it’s completely ignored the scalar unit of the field itself.
Imagine what urban design would look like if it looked a little more like art. There would be a lot more trying things out, with all of the friction and exuberance that inevitably comes with temporarily modifying public space.2 Ideas like the 15 minute city would be tested and contested and iterated at a small scale, in a very public way. Established institutions would support smaller, more experimental spaces and groups. Practitioners—and anyone can be a practitioner—might help each other build the work itself, and always offer critique. We would gather into groups, not in spite of our different ideas, but because of them.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the 15 minute city is A Good Thing or Left-wing Fascism or choose-your-conspiracy-theory. What matters is that we have a way of trying ideas like it, observing and discussing what we like or don’t like about the outcomes, and embracing micro-friction before it becomes an international controversy.
A double reference here. One, to the New England Foundation for the Arts’ program called, Making it Public, (about “equipping artists to develop their public art practice and create more vibrant and equitable public spaces through public artmaking in Massachusetts”). The second, to Bruno Latour’s brilliant editorial project Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (about “the challenge of renewing politics by applying to it the spirit of art and science”).
This is one of the things Hendren was getting at in her brilliant piece about time as a powerful tool for urban design.