AIBU to think 15-minute cities are a good thing?

[ForthegracegoI]

I live in a 15-minute city location and it's absolutely brilliant.

Within 15 minutes walk I have easy access to:

Multiple cafes, bars, pubs, restaurants.
Multiple hairdressers, salons, barbers etc.
Many, many shops.
Several gyms.
Cinema.
Two swimming pools.
My oldest's high school is literally across the road. My youngest's school is slightly further, probably 12 minutes walk.
My GP, gynaecologist, dentist, optician - all within 10 minutes walk.
Trauma centre: when my youngest fell and broke his arm on the way home from school, he was in the trauma centre and being treated straight away. We walked there, and walked home afterwards.
Hospital - DH is having an operation in a couple of weeks: he'll walk there, and probably walk home a few days later
Veterinary surgery.
Small supermarket and two different fresh produce markets, and loads of bakers / grocers / 'metro' type supermarkets.
Huge park, including a zoo and botanical garden.
Four smaller parks with play equipment and outdoor gyms - one literally across the road.
Bus stops, underground stops and the main city railway station is (just) within 15 minutes walk.

The 'price' I pay for this:
We live in an apartment, not a house.
We don't have off street parking (we do still have a car for holidays / weekend trips / trips to IKEA for big items) but we do have resident parking - it's never been a problem to get parked.

For work, DH and I both cycle - 25 minutes each way. It's a great way to build exercise into the daily routine. Our apartment building has a secure bike storage room in it.

So as not to drip feed; we don't live in the UK, we live in France. We aren't huge earners - DH is a teacher, I work in administration in a school. We are definitely in a 'naice' area, but it's not super-wealthy at all.

I can't understand why Rishi Sunak would actively campaign against making essential services easily accessible to people living in cities.

We had a fair bit of push back on LTN around here for the reasons you say

I think the line was clean air for all

If you like living in a 15 minute city, knock yourself out.

Forcing everyone to live a certain way is dystopian and immoral. The drive to "15 minute cities" isn't for the benefit of the people who want to live that way, it's about control. If someone wants a big piece of land and to live far away from a city, they have a human right to live their lives as they please without interference from government.

Were you successful in the pushback? I do hope so.

We have tried to make our voices heard that but it's falling on deaf ears, sadly. And this is a steadily labour council, who you'd hope would be more interested in equality of access to clean air. Its so sad, but it feels like whatever they do around here, they'll still be voted in.

No. I just looked up Twitter to check name and it hasn’t had much activity in last year

There was also a petition to stop free street parking becoming paid for meters. Loads of independent businesses who’d be hit. We did win on that one tg

I think one characteristic of my area that makes this possible is that it’s medium density in terms of population. Most of the buildings around here (and this is v common in France) are 5/6 stories high. And they are built to make apartment-living pleasant: lifts are standard, communal areas are well maintained, we have a cellar and a loft in addition to our apartment. I guess this means we can have a high enough population density to support lots of these services, without it feeling over developed. No more and miles of suburbs, but equally no high rises either.

@user1477391263

It’s really very easy and there is nothing weird or hard about it.

Except the billions, tens of billions, or hundreds of billions of pounds it would cost. Edinburgh trams cost a billion for a really small/simple system. Multiply that by all the larger towns and cities, then add in the costs of massively expanding the bus system everywhere else, including smaller towns and rural areas. It would bankrupt the country and cause decades of congestion/disruption.

no LTNs here, as such, but older diesel vehicles will be banned from the city centre as of next year.

Sorry to hear that. I do feel that they are unsustainable as a concept and at some point over the next few years that will become so glaringly obvious that they will have to be removed.

Glad you were successful on the parking front. It's hard enough for businesses these days as it is.

How does a 15 minute city exert control and how does it stop anyone buying land and living away from the city ?

It does neither of those things, it delivers town planning which ensures sufficient provision of local services.

There is a lot of talk in the states about the plan to create 15-minute cities and then force people into those city centers by removing gas powered vehicles and pricing private vehicle ownership out of reach of the middle class.

Concentrating everyone in urban centers allows the government to control people's movement, as well as makes it far easier for the government to say, turn off the power or quarantine people in certain areas.

There still exist a lot of Americans who do not want the government to tell us what to do. We're stubborn about it. So whenever someone says, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," we take a step back and treat it with the skepticism it deserves.

But this is probably not the point of this particular discussion. 😉

Realistically a massive chunk of londons housing stock, particularly east, is still Victorian terraces or 1930s semis with no insulation. Short of bulldozing housing for flats bits not happening in the London suburbs. It can be a 10-15 minute walk to a bus stop to the GP
Also, London surburbs are waaaay ahead of many small towns for infrastructure. Unless they build new towns for this the UK just isn’t in a place to implement this.

I think this is a big thing on our local Facebook. There’s a 15 min bit the council laud….where your cafe workers, nurses etc travel 45min to to come and serve you.
To add to the fun they even cut some bus routes to the area.
Basically it’s a gentrified pocket which many people travel to for work on buses that crawl along (bus lanes ripped up for cycle lanes, plus LTN traffic)

Most people like this kind of concept, where you have affordable living within a close distance of many services, at least with regard to urban areas and towns.

It's not all that easy to achieve when many cities have been set up, or grown, with a different set of parameters. It's not just about adding a few schools, or public transport. It tends to be very dependent on the structure of the city, with down-towns and residential neighbourhoods with various price points within short distances of the areas where people are employed. In many cases, these three elements are integrated, rather than laid out as discrete areas. Much of the UK is not built this way any more, although it's often much better than North America.

So how do you convert these kinds of cities that have developed in a different model? This is where people start to object, because it can often mean policies that try and push people into making certain choices, or add costs they don't think they can afford. It's not at all straightforward, for example, to make people pay much more to come into cities to work, when often they have no real choice but to do so, and they certainly can't afford to live closer. Sometimes people resent this mainly because they feel the state shouldn't be telling them how to live, and in other cases because they don't have the resources to make the change the state wants, so it mainly impacts their QOL negatively.

The other issue is that many people associate this idea with people and organizations who they see as having suspect motives - corporate types or others who they don't think have their best interests at heart.

But that talk is conjecture and wild fantasy, it’s not rooted in any serious policies or proposed policies.

Eg it’s creating fear of a made-up issue. It’s a propaganda tool to ensure our continued dependence on fossil fuels at all costs allowing oil & gas companies to hold us to ransom for longer.

The op talks about flat living, and that is more common elsewhere

I think many prefer houses here though. I prefer it by a fair stint tbh

I keep seeing this advert and maybe this sort of thing is one of the reasons people are getting worried?

Well high density living was tried post war, huge numbers of terraces torn down and high rise flats built with a view that a community would grow up in those areas. The reality in some areas was isolation and high crime.

We're not europeans (in that sense), we're not Japanese in any sense, its pointless to compare because we have a completely different social set up and expectations.

Ive lived in a flat, the cost of the service charge and maintenance nearly bankrupted me, I would never live in leasehold again.

Agree. I'd never live in a flat again. Absolutely hated it.

Who is "forcing" anyone to do anything?

Honestly, these conspiracy theories are batshit.

Worried about a new office facility with extra amenities ? bike lanes ! schools ! argh no please !

Completely agree with this. It's the same in my part of London. LTN traffic in particular has caused chaos, and the result is it takes about twice as long to travel half the distance, including by bus.

To make 15 minute cities work will require an investment in infrastructure that hasn't been seen since the post war building boom. I have no idea where the money or appetite for that is going to come from.

🙄 And, there it is. "You must all live in pods in concentrated areas because energy is bad. It's a "conspiracy theory" to claim we're pushing this to limit people's freedom of movement. Now, own nothing and be happy. Or else."

It’s great this idea works in your part of France and no doubt in other parts of the world too. Need to bear in mind though that it will not work everywhere. There are areas where confining people to a 15 minute radius would leave them surrounded by high flats or other poor quality housing and no green space or amenities.

People need to realise that the whole world is not like their middle class bubble. The real world is a lot more complex. I get a little tired of reading about all these great ideas that seem to forget about all the people that would be left behind. We have a lot to fix before these types of ideas could even be feasible.

I don't think people having to pay to drive to certain areas is conjecture, it's happening increasingly.

Only if the council take action and enforce it. We've a couple of housing developments near us where provision of local shops and a school or GP surgery were conditions of the PP. Neither development has anything at all, just empty plots where they "may" be built at some future time. Council don't care.

Same with a huge student accommodation block - PP required them to provide a convenience store (it's not close to the shops). So, the ground floor is a big empty void, again apparently "waiting" for someone to lease it and use it as a shop.

Councils should start to actually enforce conditions of existing PPs before we all get carried away with potential future planning policies. Like, what powers do councils have to enforce the building of a GP surgery if no GPs want to practice there? Likewise with shops, you can't force Spar to take on the lease of an empty shop, can you?