The 15-minute city is a dead end | Hacker News Reader

The 15-minute city is a dead end

blogs.lse.ac.uk

19 pointsAnon8435 comments

I think he completely misunderstood 15 minute cities as a concept.

15 min cities mean cities that are mixed use enough that you can get all your needs within 15 mins without a car. Cities like this can be large and typically are extremely well connected, not isolated into enclaves like this person suggests.

He's making a conservative ideological argument; that's exactly how conservatives describe mixed use, walkable city planning.

"15 minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, 'cities'".

This article is the most engineered rage bait I've seen so far. We've got 15 minute cities, COVID, work from home, "who pays for it" for public services, congestion pricing, somehow even NATO and the WHO got mentioned.

Add some outrage over bike paths (for or against) and this post will circulate reddit for weeks!

It's just conservative ideology

The weird thing is that it’s not. The author also touts congestion fees so that the wealthy subsidize public transit as a good thing.

It seems to just be a disorganized jumble of thoughts. He mentions hyperloop as an emerging transit technology for traveling around cities as if hyperloop is some kind of local bus alternative.

IDK about conservative, it'd paint it more closely as suburbanite idealogy. A lot of overlap, but not useful to confuse the two. It's the kind of quips I hear from people who only every drive into the city for a ball game or meetup.

But the article itself just seems confused about what a 15-minute city even is.

> The rise of autonomous vehicles and technologies like hyperloop may make a major difference to the way we travel around cities.

Harvard University Professor of Economics everyone. When discussing new modes of transport the _hyperloop_ is the exemplar. A technology that does not work, can not work, and will never work.

And, of course, no mention of e-bikes which are cheap, proven, and have seen large adoption in my neighborhood at the least. But of course that might have undermined his point.

Much like walking or living in a mixed use neighborhood, bikes don't make any money for Elon and friends, so they are useless and in fact bad.

And as if hyperloop was even proposed as a solution for transit within a city.

This whole article is just weird and rambling, like someone trying to use buzzwords without understanding what they are.

Such is the state of the educated class in the year 2026.

Such has been the state of Harvard Business types for a long time

Is the premise of 15-minute cities really that every final destination is walkable within 15 minutes or that you can reach everything you need within 15 minutes?

If I live in a big city with good public transport and have most daily need things walkable within 15 minutes and good public transport connections also within 15 minutes then I can benefit from opportunities that are farther away while also having the locality of the rest of the day to day things.

That's what I personally would consider a 15-minute city

Yeah, I don't understand why this person makes it sound like a 15-minute city is some sort of a jail, or an island you can't get in a car and drive out of should a need arise...

That's how conservatives criticize the concept. It's a conservative economist making a conservative ideological argument.

Except it's not really conservative. What often gets called "conservatism" is very much just a variation of some form of liberalism. (Republicans in the US aren't conservative either, not in any meaningful sense.)

Conservatism favors community life, not hyper-individualist atomism. New Urbanism and similar architectural movements[0] are heavily conservative in substance. This is actually an area where I suspect some of the Left and some of the Right can cooperate, and should, because there is enough agreement, at least where the need for sane urban planning is concerned. There is nothing conservative about sprawl and suburbs.

"15 minute city" is just a synonym for neighborhood, effectively. If you can't get most daily things done within a 15 min radius, then guess what? You don't have a neighborhood. You have an internment camp. Hyper-individualism has no need for neighborhoods or polities, because it conceives of human beings as atomized consumers.

[0] https://cdnc.heyzine.com/flip-book/pdf/44640c2c786250e3a426d...

> Transport is beginning to change: The rise of autonomous vehicles and technologies like hyperloop may make a major difference to the way we travel around cities

instant close

I’m currently living in a Northern European one and the income island thing was solved with city planning: the same area has mix of private and city owned apartment buildings. Some buildings are mix-owned too, so city owns like 50% of the apartments.

Here you’m find a person living on social security and someone with half a million apartment loan, having a neighbourly chat while their kids playtogether in the common courtyard.

moving around could be accomplished by traveling, in decreasing order by efficiency (by those who can, obviously):

1) cycling 2) walking 3) train 4) cars 5) airplanes

and the frequency could follow an exponential distribution.

Every instance of the word city in that article, and the title, should have been qualified with 'US'.

An curious example where an academic at full-time at Harvard is obviously less qualified than millions of people that live in 15-minute cities all around the world. Maybe he should spend less time researching urban planning, and more time doing field work.

Shanghai, Beijing, and other big Chinese cities are like that. People in places like that also think overnight delivery from AMZN is terribly slow.

> The rise of autonomous vehicles and technologies like hyperloop may make a major difference to the way we travel around cities.

Oh, got it.

How is it that people just utterly and completely refuse to even try to understand what a 15 minute city actually is lmao. It's not a city where you never leave a 15 minute radius! That's utter nonsense!

Guess what? Chicago and New York are basically already 15 minute cities. And despite having all my daily needs within 15 minutes of my house, I STILL GO ALL OVER THE CITY, ALL THE TIME! because having a grocery store and a school and a doctor in my neighborhood doesn't mean literally every single thing i want to do and every person i want to see is in my neighborhood, nor that I'm not allowed to leave!

I could not make the basic premise of this article... Is it that 15-minute cities would limit social mobility?? Is it that congestion pricing would limit social mobility? Am I just trying to make sense of an llm-generated word soup?

From 2021, so not an LLM.

The premise seems to be that making everything local means diversity will be inaccessible.

In reality economic diversity is heavily gatekept anyway - sometimes literally.

Forcing people to commute wastes time with no obvious upside.

The funny thing is that the page has a broken Google Tag Manager script

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no">
  j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-NZXZ6MK');</script><!-- End Google Tag Manager -->

Causing the top of the page show the script and nobody from that site noticing it.

Wow, I was 100% convinced this was written by AI.

I maintain that this article is eerily similar to something produced by an LLM, but maybe I need to reexamine my priors.

- The "contrastive negation" with em-dashes in: "But the basic concept of a 15-minute city is not really a city at all. It’s an enclave — a ghetto – a subdivision."

- The extended discussion of business regulations seemed out of place: "I also believe that cities should be freed from the business regulations that make it difficult..." This really read to me like someone directed an LLM to make sure to include these arguments rather than this naturally arising during the human writing process.

- The writing itself (as noted elsewhere in this thread) is vague and hard to follow.

Mainstream western economists are essentially LLMs that have been trained incorrectly as a joke

I don't know that I'd throw a whole field under the bus like that (I'm reminded of similar accusations against students of sociology and gender studies) but I acknowledge this author isn't doing his profession any favors.

I'm pretty confident that mainstream Western economists are all jokes, I'm even more confident that all of them at Harvard are

Well now you know what it was trained on.

The whole US societal model of judgment of anyone's wealth can't be maintained because anyone walking is supposedly poor.

So if you create cities where someone has to "walk", in their minds you're forcing them to be seen as poor.

That's what also included in the concept of valet parking, you're rich because you can go directly from your car to the hotel/restaurant entrance without walking among the poors.

Proof that humans can also generate low quality slop.

Yeah I'm sorry but I can't take someone seriously that believes that Hyperloop will be a viable form of transportation. It's nothing but an idiotic fantasy and that's all it will ever be

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