Interviewees:
Dan Luscher, San Francisco resident, strategic advisor and founder of the 15-Minute City Project
Lindsay Sturman, Los Angeles resident & co-founder of Liveable Communities Initiative
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Transcript:
Dan Luscher: "Rather than park and then walk to the grocery store, I did a rare move and decided to drive into the parking lot.
There's probably room for 35 cars or so in the front of the store. So I pull in and I pull up around a corner, right next to the front of the store where people are picking up their shopping carts. There's just barely enough room for the vehicle to pass through. And I'm trying to go through being very careful and there's cars coming from the other part of the parking lot.
And I just had this aha moment. It's just me in this vehicle that seats seven people. I'm trying to park my car so that I can walk into the store and buy maybe eight things that will fit into one grocery bag. I'm then going to put it in the back of this seven seater vehicle and drive three blocks home. And I just suddenly had this aha moment. I thought this is an absolutely ridiculous vehicle to be using for this purpose."
Meet Dan Luscher: Cyclist, drummer, engineer, San Francisco resident, trail runner and urban planning enthusiast.
Dan: "Starting in college, I was really interested in environmental issues. This was in the 1980s when climate change was slightly on the radar. Air pollution was incredibly bad in California where I grew up and I lived most of my life. I was very motivated to do something about creating environmental change. And I got more and more interested in the linkage between vehicles and air pollution and cities and finding ways to have our cities be less built around the car."
Neil: "I remember from the 90s, there used to be this computer game, Sim City. And one of the problems that you always encountered when I was building my city that after a while, if I built too many roads, there would be smog and my city would start shrinking then because people would start leaving it."
Dan: "I've read that they did a lot of research, they became sort of mini-urbanists when they developed that game, they read a lot of research."
Neil: "Did you play that by any chance?"
Dan: "I did. I did. I loved it. (Neil laughs) The difference of course is there's only one decision maker. You can effectively play God in that game. And real cities are much more complicated in terms of getting things done and making change."
Neil: Conflicting interests might always have played a role in shaping the face of modern urban development in some way or another, but in recent years, they've taken an unlikely and dark turn.
Dan: "I saw a few emails come in quick succession… you're awful and you're scum and I don't want you to dominate the world. Something along those lines. And I had no idea where that was coming from."
"So that's when I was first introduced to the conspiracy theories. And then of course I had to go down the rabbit hole to learn more."
Welcome to Living Planet. I'm Neil King and in this episode, we're going to be exploring what are known as 15-minute cities.
Dan: "I personally live in a 15 minute city in San Francisco, and I love it."
You might also know of them as walkable cities or even 20-minute cities. They all translate to pretty much the same concept and they're meeting a lot of unexpected pushback. So what exactly are they?
Dan: "To me, a 15-minute city is a city whose residents can access most of their needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their home. It's that simple."
Put like that, it does sound simple. Positively benign. Yet as we've just heard, this innocuous-sounding idea has faced backlash and unleashed conspiracy theories. We'll dig deeper into them in a little while, but first let's go back to the beginning.
The 15-minute city concept is the work of scientist Carlos Moreno. He’s a Colombian-born professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris and expert in complex systems. Over two decades ago, he starts exploring how to rethink car-based urban living.
Cities take up no more than 4% of the landmass on the planet. But... more than half the world’s population live in them. Urban areas are responsible for an estimated 70% of the global CO2 emissions. And those emissions are driving the climate change connected to increasing extreme weather events around the world.
Moreno sees the potential for reducing the carbon footprint of cities by addressing things like transport and infrastructure. Initially, he is just sharing with peers, but his ideas soon begin to ripple out further. And for some people, they are immediately relatable.
Dan: " In late 2019 I was looking for a way to become a more formal part of the conversation around walkable cities and making cities better and less car-dependent. I looked around for good concepts that I thought were aligned with how I wanted to see cities changed, and the 15-minute city. I wanted to look are people talking about 15-minute cities on social media and so I look at hashtag 15- minute city and there was very little activity. And I thought, well, here's an opportunity to start talking about walkable cities using this 15-minute city frame. So I set up a website. I set up an Instagram. I set up a Twitter account. And started using the 15- minutes hashtag."
Neil: "So you've got the domain 15 minutescity.com. You were the first to snag that. Were you surprised yourself that it hadn't been taken yet?"
Dan: "At the time not really, because it was a relatively obscure concept. I mean, Carlos Moreno had been using that particular phrase since 2016. But it was in with within pretty specific academic circles."
Neil:" When you first started blogging, was there a lot of interest?"
Dan: "It was a relatively small audience at the beginning."
It's 2020 and Dan's biking and walking about San Francisco writing and posting about the potential benefits of others getting around in the same way. He's excited about the ideas he's found via Carlos Moreno; about the potential climate benefits of reducing car traffic within cites; of offering residents greater choice. In fact, he's just happy to be part of the conversation. And it's all pretty quiet and easy-going. But then something changes.
The mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo is re-elected following a campaign to turn the French capital into a 15min city.
She wants to make each little district or arrondissement more self-sufficient. She wants them to have public green space, grocery shops, restaurants and cafes, education, sporting and health facilities. In short, she wants to transform Paris into a place where everything locals need can be found within 15 minutes of their home -- all accessible within a short bike ride or walk.
The plan is celebrated by some as a win for Paris and the climate. But it also coincides with controversial COVID lockdowns. Frustrated about restrictions on personal freedoms some interpret the 15-minute city idea as another way of controlling movement.
Dan: "So there was legitimate concern over the lockdowns. And there was harm to economic livelihoods. And I think that got conflated."
Given that the last thing most people want during the COVID era is further restriction, the misinformation doing the rounds hits a nerve. And it spreads. It's around that time that Dan starts to receive negative remarks in response to what he is posting about 15-minute cities.
Messages to Dan / read out
Dan: "There'd be just sort of random comments. Somebody would say, 'oh, this is a great idea, I hope 15-minute cities come to my town.' And the next comment would be something like '15-minute prison' or 'no-one would just walk in a cattle car willingly' and things like that.
But then there were some that got more personal. Like there was one person that posted on Instagram 'nice plans, we are all hoping you will die before it gets realized.'"
Neil: Is that something you just shrug off or does it start to get under your skin?
Dan: "Honestly, I disregarded the whole thing or tried to for a few months until I saw that it was actually changing the discourse. I would say, that's where it started to get me mad. Not when they were attacking me. And to be clear, what I experienced was nothing compared to what professor Carlos Marino has had to face. He's received hundreds of death threats."
Even years after the lockdowns, the conversation around 15-minute cities is still rife with misinformation. So what else is driving the negative narrative? One thing that gets emotions flowing is…cars. That great tin can beacon of personal freedom. One common falsehood doing the rounds is that a 15-minute city mean zero cars. But does it?
Dan: "It does not. Cars play a valuable role. I own a car. I love cars. They are not good for being the primary mode of transportation inside cities, particularly dense cities. Inside cities, they can be a mix in certain circumstances. But the problem we have, particularly in America -- but many other places as well -- is people being in a position where using a car is their only choice. And that's really what the 15-minute city is about. Not eliminating cars, but making sure that people have choices on how they can get around."
Not all city-dwellers even want their own car. The reasons vary, but research has found US citizens who rely on a car for more than 50% of "out-of-home activities" experience lower life satisfaction. Also that 40% of Americans would rather live in denser communities with walking distance of amenities.
Then, there's the money… Because cars aren't cheap. In fact, they cost an average of between 9,000 and 12,000 dollars a year to run. So it's not about forcing people out of their vehicles, but about making cities enjoyable to walk and bike around – for those who want to. Emphasis on those who want to.
Dan: "The 15-minute city is a new label on a very old concept. I would argue that before the invention of the car almost all cities were 15-minute cities because people had to access what they needed, mostly on foot. So, this is a new way to describe an old way of living."
Neil: "Is that maybe also one of the reasons why it triggers such emotion in certain people? The fact that the message that they might hear is, it goes back to times before. Not progress, but regressing?
Dan: I don't know, that's possible. I think most of the pushback has really been framed around these conspiracy theories, which have got it all wrong and seem to believe that the 15-minutes city is about removing choice when in fact it's about expanding choice. It's not about taking cars away from people. It's about enabling people to get around using different modes of transportation, depending on what they're doing.
But beyond the conspiracy theories, there are also some legitimate concerns about the potential downsides. One is that if you encourage people to spend their time in their own neighbourhood, it can impact their ability to move up the socioeconomic ladder.
Dan: "People in poor neighbourhoods need access to wealthier neighbourhoods to find opportunities etc. That's why the 15-minute city within neighbourhoods really needs to be supplemented by strong public transit and other ways for people to get between neighbourhoods.
Dan: "The second legitimate point of contention is gentrification and displacement. So right now, the demand for walkable neighbourhoods in the United States exceeds the actual supply of those neighbourhoods by about a factor of four to one. So when you change a neighbourhood and make it more walkable and bike-able, that right now, under the current circumstances of supply demand imbalance, almost invariably causes land and real estate prices to increase in that neighbourhood. And that can lead to displacement."
The solution as far as Dan is concerned is not to skimp on redevelopment, but to go big. To build hundreds of walkable neighbourhoods that would absorb the demand and prevent the gentrification and scarcity effect. But it's easier said than done. Because in many parts of the US at least, tight zoning restrictions are hampering grand-scale transformation.
Dan: "Broadly speaking, 75-80 percent of land in cities is zoned in a way that the property owner can only build a single-family detached home, which in the land of the free is quite curious that we have restricted things in such a way."
Neil: "Yeah. I was just going ask what's the reasoning behind that?"
Dan: "Zoning in general, started out as a way to make sure people didn't live next to smoky factories. That was the idea originally to separate incompatible uses. But it pretty quickly, in the US context, began to be used to separate people along socio- economic and racial lines. So you would have neighbourhoods that could have additional requirements, for example, you had to spend a certain amount of money on your home. And so that effectively excluded people who didn't have certain socioeconomic means. So that's how zoning quickly came to be an instrument of division and exclusion in the United States."
Dan says other side-effects have been a mix of very tall buildings in condensed downtown areas that can be built on, urban sprawl that can see housing pushed out into fire-risk areas, and an erosion of walkable communities.
Dan: "People build out because they can't build up. The high-rises are there because if you are only allowed to build above one or two or three stories in a certain small area, the law of supply and demand will say, those are going to be very, very high. Whereas if you're able to build mid-rise buildings, you're going to see a more gentle kind of density like you see in many cities in Europe. Berlin, Milan, many other cities are amazing at having these sort of mid-rise buildings and you don't see the need for these 50-story buildings like you do in the US."
So is it time to introduce Paris, Barcelona or Munich-style mid-rise blocks with retail on the ground floor and maybe 10 residential units above into certain areas of certain willing US cities?
An LA-based grassroots group that Dan advises is working along those lines.
Dan: "It's my favourite example of a bottom-up 15-minute city effort. It's a group of activists in Los Angeles that are wanting to create change, that are wanting to make very car-oriented Los Angeles more pleasant, more walkable, safer for pedestrians and so on."
Lindsay Sturman: " It's very aspirational to live where you can walk. Our bodies crave 30 to 60 minutes of exercise every day. As you age, you really need to stay active. I'm learning this. Biking is the magic pill. It cuts cancer and heart disease in half, but you don't even need to think about biking. You just think about walking."
Avid cyclist Lindsay Sturman grew up in what she describes as a tiny shoebox apartment in New York. Her street had shops at ground level and housing on the upper floors. So, to all intents and purposes, a 15-minute city. And when she moves to LA to pursue a career as a TV writer, she can still get anywhere within 20 minutes.
But over time, like many places, the city changes. And when COVID strikes, one shift in particular becomes too visible to ignore. She starts noticing tents and encampments.
Lindsay: " We call it the crisis of our unhoused neighbours. The homeless crisis."
She gets together with other locals seeking to understand how things have got so bad and what it will take to fix them.
Lindsay: "Why do we have this homeless crisis when so many other cities don't?"
And as the largely voluntary group, which calls itself the Liveable Communities Initiative or LCI starts to peel back the layers of the problem, something unexpected comes to light.
Lindsay: "It's just the cars actually."
Cars again. For context, there are more than 6 million cars registered in LA county. Which is home to around 10 million people.
Lindsay:" Los Angeles is over capacity for cars for hours every day. We're just, we're sort of almost in gridlock at this point. Think of a road as a tube, but it's a metal tube. It's not rubber. It's not going to stretch. Cars just don't fit geometrically and the math doesn't work for cars in cities. So you just end up with traffic."
But it's not only about keeping cars moving – a side-effect of which are the planet-heating emissions that make them a major contributor to cities' overall CO2 footprint. It's also about where to put them when they're stationary.
Lindsay: "Here's where it all connects. Parking ruins housing. Parking makes housing expensive. Parking distorts the architecture and it raises rent, it also raises the cost of building. So that's where we got our housing crisis; forcing parking into buildings."
To recap, if residents of a city can only do their grocery shopping by car, they need a car. If they need car, they need somewhere to put it. If that need has to be included in architectural design, it greatly impacts what can be built.
Lindsay: "The answer to how do you build affordable housing is that you build a small apartment above a shop, behind a shop. And there's no parking… But then you need mobility. The real solution is to go back to what the city was historically. The modern city of LA was little neighbourhoods, little villages with little main streets. And these villages were connected by the world's biggest trolley system. That's our history. The neighbourhoods are still there and we actually have a metro system connecting a lot of them. So the pitch we give for LA is let's just build a lot of housing in these little walkable neighbourhoods and you can actually solve a ton of things at the same time."
Things, Lindsay says, such as boosting health by getting people moving. Promoting human interaction and community-building, which is linked to a reduction in loneliness and dementia. AND responding to the climate crisis.
Lindsay: "The climate emergency is at our door. It's come, right? And, and I think a lot of people understand that."
So for Lindsay and her colleagues, it's not only about reducing traffic, it's also about building climate-friendly homes.
Lindsay: "They're courtyard buildings. They're residential over retail. And you have an elevator with a staircase that wraps around it usually, and you have four apartments on each floor. So that's your classic building. You can build to not need AC. And we of course know this because we've been building housing for hundreds of years before AC. So we know it's possible."
Only where to begin in a city so dependent on cars? Contrary to some conspiracy theories that have emerged in the wake of the LA fires, the idea is not to build new neighbourhoods from scratch. But to transform existing currently unwalkable multi-lane streets with low-rise building on either side into areas with both residential and retail appeal
Neil: "Okay, Lindsay, I'm just going to pull up your website, the livablecommunitiesinitiative.com. And just right at the top, you've got the sentence saying, imagine this, and you've got a picture of a well, it's a very depressing street. Single story sort of little shops. It is quite bleak. And on the right hand side, it's like a design picture. What are these pictures?"
Lindsay: "So we reimagined a street because it was really hard for us to imagine. Well, what could it look like? And the biggest change, other than there's housing, and the trees, that's what catches your eye. But it's a street has gone from six or seven lanes to one lane of cars in each direction."
Neil: "So you're suggesting, away from single story buildings, build a bit higher, maybe three or four stories, have the shops at the bottom, create a nice little pedestrian area, a bike lane and reduce the number of lanes for the cars and a bit of greenery."
Lindsay: "Yes, that's the recipe. Lots of little restaurants and coffee shops and grocery stores that's what gives you walkability. So we have found over 20 streets with small retail that touch a high-quality transit stop, which is key, and that are near jobs. So our advocacy is to say 'let's make it really easy to build housing along these streets. LA, to their credit, has created a step by step off-the-shelf plan to do LCI. It's part of our city's plans to build housing."
Moving the project from the planning to implementation phase will require a positive vote from the city council. Lindsay is hopeful that will happen. If she is right, she says the next challenge, which will involve convincing current lot owners to build on their land will be "unique".
Lindsay: " Most streets, commercial streets in LA have 20 parcels, 10 on one side, 10 on the other, and you might have 17 different owners. And to get them to get organize or sell… they won't sell and they're not going to get organized. So what you really need to do is persuade them to build, but you ask them to build stuff that's affordable."
What is in it for the lot owners? According to the LCI team, low-risk and profit. And they have come up with standard architectural plans to minimize complications and help convince them to get on-board. So far, Lindsay and her colleagues have presented the concept to more than 5,000 people, many of whom she says come along with a not-in-my-backyard attitude. But once they hear the idea, the resistance drops.
Lindsay: "I can count on two hands the number of people who did not come on side. People understand it, they want it, they want walkability. The number one request to the city of Beverly Hills is more walkable streets. The number one driver of a real estate value and how much people want to buy into a neighbourhood is walkability. It's called the walk score. We've all been to cities or neighbourhoods that were walkable. We love them. So I think it's a deep desire for people."
For all the red tape and misinformation, there is momentum in the 15-minute movement. Cleveland's mayor Justin Bibb is embracing the framework for his city. He says it meets many of his goals, including improving air quality, public health and housing options and decarbonizing as a response to climate change.
Other cities around the world are working on similar concepts. Barcelona has introduced a large low-emissions zone and Melbourne is aiming for a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions through increased walkability and cyclability. Having this kind of choice remains pivotal for Dan in the context of US cities and the American dream of freedom.
Dan: "The American dream is not driving two blocks to the grocery store. We need a lot of people to be walking and biking. If the American dream leads us into some sort of environmental catastrophe and unliveable cities, that's not very dreamlike to me."
Outro