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I wish I could afford the rent.
There is a big problem
with air pollution.
The city is growing
without any kind of order
or any kind of planning.
Half the world's population
live in them,
and by the end of the century
it will be more like 90%.
Over the last sort of 20 years,
we've been talking about
urbanisation is
the way forward,
but we've seen during Covid,
people's dynamics
and priorities
are really changing
so this is a real moment in
time where we have to rethink
and almost get behind
a new vision of the city.
ARCHIVE NARRATOR: Ever watch
the morning traffic
when people are going to work?
Mostly it's one car,
one person,
a tonne or two of metal
that takes up 130 square feet
of space, more or less.
The main issue of cities
is that they are suffering
from too many cars.
Excessive traffic, the noise...
It's very difficult
to stay calm
in such a stressful
environment
as a big city.
So often we design the city
with a view to optimising
the city
for the paid daytime
labour market.
So we think about, how many
people can we get into the city
in the morning and out of
the city in the evening?
Rather than travelling in
from the suburbs to the centre
to work, shop and socialise,
the 15-minute city
takes a different approach.
The 15-minute city
is a really simple concept,
in many ways.
It's really just saying that
every urban citizen should be
able to meet their basic needs
within a 15-minute walk
or cycle ride from their house.
The concept of the 15-minute
city was proposed by
French-Colombian scientist
Carlos Moreno,
and aspects of it
are starting to be adopted
in cities like Paris,
Barcelona and Bogotá.
It's been described as a
return to a local way of life.
New technologies creates
a lot of opportunities
to work from home,
to do more things
in the neighbourhood,
to get rid of this separation
of work and living.
That also would reduce
the pollution
that goes with traffic.
The 15-minute city revolves
around three basic principles.
Before the Covid pandemic,
the average UK worker
spent 400 days of their lives
commuting.
That's enough time to read
the entire Harry Potter series
159 times.
When we foreground
infrastructure
or we foreground cars,
we strip out
the thing that makes the city
the city,
which is the interaction of
people and creation of culture.
When we get rid of all those
parked cars in the roads
and all the traffic,
we create lots of space
for greening the city
with trees
and this also creates
lots of opportunities
to meet your friends
in the street.
My favourite thing
about living in the city -
the quality of public space,
which encourage you of
spending a lot of time outside
and meeting with other people.
Implementing
the 15-minute city
would mean a significant
redesign of our infrastructure.
Is that feasible?
In many cities across the
world,
we've had kind of 50 years
of planning policy
that is about zoning,
which is about separating
different types of activity
in the city where you would go
for shopping
or for work or for home life.
And so to be able to make that
kind of pivot into a 15-minute
or a localised neighbourhood is
a huge stretch for some places.
The concept of the 15-minute
city also has its critics.
Some fear it could ghettoise
poorer people
whose neighbourhoods don't have
the jobs and amenities
found in more affluent
communities.
A lot of places do not have
enough infrastructure,
especially places
where low-income groups live.
And it's a major, major wealth
and economic gap there.
It's clear that there are
different levels
of liberty and freedom
to access public space,
depending on all sorts of
categories
of identity, including gender,
but also race,
also levels of poverty.
We have an imbalance about who
gets to shape public spaces,
who gets to make those
decisions.
So if we can democratise that
and if we can open up
and have more participation
about what kind of spaces
do we want to live in,
then we have more likelihood
that our spaces
are going to suit more people.
TON VONEHOVEN:
Currently we have
a very strong decline
of biodiversity,
partially due to
agriculture practices,
but also because of
urbanisation.
If we green the city, we create
more opportunity for rainwater
infiltrating in the soil.
That will also enhance
a healthy ecosystem
and I think if we look into the
future, the next generations,
what do we want to have
those people experience -
a rich biodiversity
or a poor biodiversity?
This is the choice
that we have to make,
and with the 15-minute city,
this is a way to solve
this crisis.
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