{"id":86916,"date":"2025-04-13T01:00:26","date_gmt":"2025-04-13T05:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=86916"},"modified":"2025-04-12T08:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T12:41:13","slug":"qotd-the-15-minute-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/04\/13\/qotd-the-15-minute-city\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The 15-minute city"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>Take, for example, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/15-minute_city\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the 15-minute city<\/a>, which is a radical proposal that people should be able to get pretty much anywhere they need to go within fifteen minutes and ideally without needing a car. It&#8217;s a lovely idea, and the parts of residential America that are like that \u2014 most of them <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-a-field-guide-to-american\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">former suburbs<\/a> \u2014 are insanely desirable and therefore insanely expensive. If it were easy to make more of them, you&#8217;d think the market would have figured out how! And if I had any confidence whatsoever that anyone involved in municipal planning could produce more neighborhoods like that \u2014 leafy green places full of parks, libraries, schools, and shops \u2014 or even that they wanted to have safe, clean, and reliable transit options, I&#8217;d be all for it. But these are the same people who are gutting public safety in the cities while failing to maintain or enforce order on <em>existing<\/em> transit. These are the same people who imposed draconian Covid mitigation policies like Zoom kindergarten, padlocked churches, and old people dying alone with nothing but <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reuters.com\/world\/americas\/hands-love-warm-latex-gloves-mimic-human-touch-covid-19-patients-brazil-2021-04-20\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a glove full of warm water<\/a> to mimic human touch, all of which were meant to buy time for &#8230; something (human challenge trials? nationalized N95 production?) that never happened. It&#8217;s easy to ban things; it&#8217;s hard to <em>do<\/em> things. So you&#8217;ll excuse my doubts about their ability to build a 15-minute city that looks like <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Jane Jacobs&#8217;s<\/a> ideal mixed-use development, with safe, orderly streets and a neighborhood feel. One rather suspects they would find it far more within their wheelhouse to simply abolish single-family zoning or imposing restrictions on who can go where, when.<\/p>\n<p>Jane Psmith, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thepsmiths.com\/p\/review-the-wizard-and-the-prophet\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;REVIEW: The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann&#8221;, <em>Mr. and Mrs. Psmith&#8217;s Bookshelf<\/em><\/a>, 2024-01-22.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Take, for example, the 15-minute city, which is a radical proposal that people should be able to get pretty much anywhere they need to go within fifteen minutes and ideally without needing a car. It&#8217;s a lovely idea, and the parts of residential America that are like that \u2014 most of them former suburbs \u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,41],"tags":[712,1020,1533,527,1363],"class_list":["post-86916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-quotations","tag-centralplanning","tag-progressives","tag-psmithreviews","tag-publictransit","tag-wuhancoronavirus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-mBS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86916"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95133,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86916\/revisions\/95133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}