Small Cities (15-Minute Cities)
Half-baked solutions to symptoms of population
I just got done reading an article by Mr. Money Mustache which was a nice plug for a trendy housing development in Phoenix called Culdesac.
I admit it is good to think about the way we live, work and move around the place. Here are my thoughts, they’re not right or wrong, they’re just ideas.
What Is a 15-Minute City?
The below is from Deloitte, a well-known global accounting and auditing firm. They’ve been involved in plenty of controversies…but I list them because they are one of the first results Google pushes which is not a news source.
The ‘15-minute’ city concept — developed primarily to reduce carbon emissions by decreasing the use of cars and motorised commuting time — is a decentralised urban planning model, in which each local neighbourhood contains all the basic social functions for living and working.
The guy that came up with the term ‘15-Minute City’, Carlos Moreno, describes what a 15-Minute City is in the video below:
Summarised in my own way, a 15-Minute City is a trendy place people live where they can get to wherever they need to go in 15-minutes or less by walking or biking and if we’re able to do this, it will reduce pollution and the dreaded world killing CO2 (except for the CO2 used to build these places) and this will, in turn, make us all happier and healthier.
Sorry to sound like a cynical jerk, but it’s just I see these things a little bit differently from my perspective, allow me to explain myself.
The first thing you need to know: 15-Minute Cities already exist
One of the first things you need to know when it comes to the 15-Minute City idea is that it’s admittedly not a new idea, in fact, many European cities have already been designed and built this way many hundreds of years ago before people had cars.
But of course, building and development companies don’t make money telling you about old cities and villages that already exist and that you can move to.
And of course, in these old cities that are most like the 15-Minute City idea, people still use cars, probably because cars are cool and fast and save us a lot of time.
The featured image used in this post is one of a city that I know really well. It is a picture of Dresden, Germany, it’s the city my wife comes from.
I’ve chosen Dresden, Germany to provide an example in this post of what a modern 15-Minute City looks like without all the mumbo-jumbo sales pitches of cafes and dog parks because it is a true 15-Minute City.
Dresden
In Dresden, we walk out of our apartment door, go downstairs, buy a loaf of bread from the baker that my wife has known since she was a little girl, walk to the local store to buy some cold cuts, take a tram to the big park (Großer Garten), have a picnic, and end it with ice cream and a leisurely walk back home.
Dresden is very walkable, you can’t get everywhere in 15 minutes, but they are not really saying that you can in the prospectus, unlike the small-city selling grifters.
In Dresden, you can probably walk to the inner parts of the old city within an hour or bike there in about 15 minutes from where my wife's family lives on the outskirts of the city. Alternatively, you can also drive there in about 5 minutes. Cars are cool as I keep saying.
My wife's family has mostly everything they need within walking distance. School, work, groceries, friends, family, and the local Doner Kebab stand.
The only reason people go into the large city center is mostly for solutions to problems that can’t be solved locally.
Shopping at the large malls where all the big name brands are, nightclubbing and bar hopping, or something else like perhaps going to your job in the city or University.
Dresden has one of the best tram networks of any city in the world. You can virtually get a tram to any part of the city and surrounding regions.
Below is a local transport network map of the inner city of Dresden in its current form:
As you can see it is a complex network of busses, and trams that shoot out up to an hour or more past the city center.
Below is an image showing mostly the same tram network area of central Dresden from 1974, almost half a century ago. This is not something that they set up yesterday to ‘save the planet’.
Dresden’s infrastructure has been around for a very long time, and it incorporates the entire city area, not just small districts within the city. Much of it had to be rebuilt after it was decimated in WW2.
Below is a map of Dresden from 1887.
You will notice from the above and below pictures that all of the main roads, intersections, and housing areas are almost exactly the same. Really, not much has changed, the city has grown a bit with new apartment buildings and things on the outskirts, but that is about it, all of the main components such as bridges, central buildings, roads, churches, hospitals, factories, and more have all been purpose-built a long time ago.
So now we get to the bit that no one pushing 15-Minute Cities wants to talk about.
Population
When I first met my wife in the early 2000’s Dresden's population was approximately 500,000, fast forward to today, and guess what, it's still about the same as it was then. And If we rewind to 1900 it was also around 500,000 back then too.
The only time Dresden's population changed dramatically in the last hundred years was during and after WW2!
They rarely build new roads, and simply instead just fix the ones that they already have. Dresden is not growing and hence neither is car ownership and the requirement for new roads. The reason I make note of this is that, in all of the 15-Minute City literature, cars are attacked constantly.
Now let's look at a city with a very stark contrast and one which is testing 15-Minute Cities, my city.
Melbourne, Australia.
Some quick stats about Melbourne.
- Greater Melbourne area: 9,993 km2.
- Greater Melbourne population: 5 Million (and growing!).
- Victorian vehicle ownership: 5.1 Million. (Victoria is the state that Melbourne belongs to).
In comparison, Dresden has a fairly stable population of 550,000 in an area of 328.8 km2 and registered car ownerships sit at 240,000.
Melbourne's population in 1900 was the same as Dresden’s was for the last 100 years (about 500,000), and today Melbourne's population sits at approximately 5 Million people and is growing rapidly!
This 900% increase in population happened in just over 120 years.
We’ve rapidly tried to build houses, roads, schools, hospitals, and all sorts of other infrastructure during that time, with less of a focus on 15-Minute Utopias and more of a focus on ‘let's just get it done because we need to’.
The one other striking difference between the two cities is the population density.
Melbourne's population density is 492 people per km2 and Dresdens is 1,700 people per km2. What this means is that they fit a lot more people into the same square kilometer area — because they have to. They don’t have the space that we are blessed to have.
The elephant in the room.
European cities like Dresden were designed and built with roads, schools, hospitals, and housing built to match their population or their expected population, this is why even after the automobile ownership explosion that started in the 50s their roads did not change all that much and that is why even nowadays they are not clogged up like Melbourne roads are.
Below is what a random street looks like in Dresden on any given day.
And here is a common street in Melbourne.
I used streets within the city and not freeways or autobahns to tell this story. I have lived in both Melbourne and Dresden and can tell you Melbourne's streets are far more congested, far more of the time.
But don’t just take my word for it. Tomtom the location tech company tracks these metrics. Check out their city ranking index by traffic congestion here.
The lower the score the worse the traffic and congestion.
London currently takes the number 1 spot with 36 minutes and 20 seconds taken to travel 10 kilometers. Melbourne ranks 59 with 20 minutes per 10km and Dresden ranks 102 with 17 minutes per km.
Why? Population.
Dresden's population matches its city infrastructure, creating a beautiful balance that is easily managed and maintained and of course, more energy efficient.
Dresden's tram network was built in 1872, right before its population peaked, in fact, it was being built while its population was growing and peaking.
The Melbourne tram network began in 1884 and works continue until this day because they have to in order to try to keep up with the growing city. The bulk of the works happened throughout the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s up to the 1950s. In the 2010’s there were only 4 upgrades! You can see a timeline here. Yet Melbourne's population has continued to explode!
People can just fly in, but you can’t just fly trams and tracks in!
Growing populations are the problem, cars are the symptom.
When you look at who is screaming the most about 15-Minute Cities, it’s not places like Dresden, Germany, why would they, their city works, the population is pretty much stable, they have great transportation networks and it all just hums along nicely.
It’s places like Melbourne, Australia that are doing all sorts of small city planning and running all sorts of silly trials and programs to try to fix symptoms of population without ever even discussing population itself.
Part of it obviously also has to do with global agendas around climate change and CO2 reduction. The idea is that the world is warming and so we need to pull cars off roads so that they stop contributing. And the way you do that according to them is to build cities where you can walk, bike, or take public transport everywhere.
The issue is that if you continue stuffing people in, you’re not allowing enough time for the people already in the city to build things more efficiently!
It's like saying you need to make an omelet but you’re not allowed to break any eggs. Ugh, what?!
Melbourne
In my part of Melbourne, housing developments are speeding past critical arterial roads, and trams, trains, and busses are not even a thought! In fact, we are only just now building over and underpasses for our train network which was originally started in the 1850s and peaked in the 1940s!
Take a look at the image below. This is an area I live near, the red squares are all new housing developments, the yellow line and circles are where the major roads stop, there are not even roads let alone trains or trams to get to these places!
We are completely out of balance and are looking towards stupid made-up solutions like 15-Minute Cities when the problem is the speed at which the population is growing. And unlike China with its one-child policy, our population growth is not due to natural pregnancies, it's due to immigration. We are literally shooting ourselves in the foot and then blaming motor vehicles for the problems!
Just take a look at what our modern-day planners in Melbourne say, they subscribe to 15-minute cities, also known as ‘20-minute neighborhoods’, but then our nation's leaders say ‘were bringing in another 650k people’ which will likely go up to 1 million by 2025.
When you bring this many people in, without the pre-existing infrastructure to support it, you’re not really reducing the total volume of CO2 if you are honest, maybe you’re getting more efficient at managing it in the long term on a per capita basis, but you still need to spend more energy building homes, roads, and things for people to live and get around in, and without a network of pre-existing transport solutions, people will just buy cars because they need to.
Interestingly, as an aside, cars don’t really make Melbourne more polluted.
The air quality in Melbourne is almost always good. Whereas in Dresden, it’s almost always poorer than Melbourne. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why, Melbourne’s population is spread out and we are based around the water. Dresden’s population is stacked and they are inland.
CO2 on the other hand is a metric that is flipped, we produce more of it in Melbourne per capita than Dresden does. Again, no genius is required, we own bigger homes, we own more cars, we drive bigger cars, and we drive further distances.
This in my opinion is an organic problem, we have a lot more land and so we develop our living spaces out as opposed to up because it is cheaper, easier and there is less red tape and regulations.
This is exactly what is happening in Australia, our population explodes almost entirely due to immigration, and what happens then is that builders and developers very quickly build houses and infrastructure to support this.
And here is the thing, are you ready for it. It kind of works. I mean outside of traffic congestion and evil CO2, we’re able to very quickly build places for people to live, work, go to school and continue thriving for the most part.
There is a hierarchy of needs in this country and unfortunately, efficient cities sit below the economy. Its just the way it is at this point in time.
The idea of solving big world problems with 15-Minute Cities is lip service.
Our country is filling in as much space as they can, as fast as they can, and consuming as much energy as possible to build out these new spaces with little time and effort to think about how to actually move people around efficiently outside of car use.
The problems when you live in one of these areas are varied which I can’t get into here because it’ll simply take too long. One striking example is that if you have children, there are simply not enough good public schools, which is one thing I noted was missing from Mr. Money Mustaches' promotion of the building and development company Culdesac in his article.
In the Culdesac model, there aren’t even any schools! I suppose that’s one way to solve that problem!
I digress.
There are also not enough hospitals or large medical centers in my part of the world. There are only three main public hospitals, the last small public hospital was built in 2004, and before that 1941 and 1942 respectively for the others.
That’s not because we don’t want and need hospitals, it’s because we don’t have the time and resources to build them or even fill them with competent people.
Forget 15-Minute walks to dog parks, how about heart surgeons and old folks' homes?
In Money’s Culdesac model, there are zero hospitals, another brilliant way to solve that problem.
But enough of making fun of the ideological grifters.
Let's cut to the point of what I am saying.
15-Minute Cities are a nice idea, and they will likely work in small communities filled with people that have no kids and who kind of just want to sit around and chill out for most of the day without really going anywhere or doing anything.
Large functioning societies however look completely different.
Look at the world’s fastest-growing cities like Delhi, India. These folks are not concerned with 15-minute cities and being able to walk to their nearest cafe…they have bigger issues like smog and water quality.
Melbourne is the same, it is a burgeoning metropolis where growth outpaces efficiency 10:1.
Big places need lots of stuff and lots of room. And when you have lots of distance you need good quality transport, and cars have to be a part of that transport solution, especially when you don’t allow enough time for infrastructure to be properly built to support the population.
In large functioning societies, people don’t just work as software engineers with no children and no need for medicine.
Heavy industries and manufacturing have to be part of the mix.
Same as schools, large hospitals that can offer all kinds of services and procedures, manufacturing facilities, office spaces, and transportation networks for ourselves but also the things we grow and build, import and export, farms to grow and raise vegetation, and cattle, entertainment spaces for sports and activities that are more specialized than just dog parks (go-kart racing, water parks, and football stadiums).
Even in the Culdesac example that Mr. Money Mustache gives us, they too admit that cars have to be part of the solution with their offer of ‘FREE’ car sharing and Lyft, which of course is not actually free, it's part of your rent…
Balance
What I think will eventually happen in Melbourne once population growth eases is that we will become more efficient at getting people from point A to point B. We will expand our train, tram, and bus network and we will continue to build up, as opposed to out, just like other nations do.
15-Minute Cities will come about naturally, and not because some city planner was told to do it in order to save the planet, but of course, they will undoubtedly take the credit for it when the time comes. Save this article!
As humans, we are both lazy and efficient, we don't want to sit in cars for longer than we have to and we do not want to pay for more fuel if we don't have to. This is just common sense and is evidenced by Australia’s solar uptake which leads the world on a per capita basis. The uptake is filled mostly by homeowners and small businesses instead of state-based solar farms.
If you want 15-Minute Cities, with less pollution and evil CO2 you need to manage population and immigration better or just understand that is the way that it is for now.
There are no amount of dog parks and walkable city cafes that will solve the problems that are brought on by exploding populations. The interesting thing is that we estimate that the global population will peak around 2100 which is 73 years away and likely it won't all happen at once, but gradually.
Summary
In summary, I think 15-Minute Cities are nothing new, this is how villages and cities were always designed in the old world before we had cars or other transportation solutions. New cities in new and developing countries will continue to grow and eventually as global population slows, these same cities will naturally begin to incorporate efficiencies and reduce their pollution, not because it’s cool but because it saves money, and time and because we all want to be happier and healthier.
