Good Cities 1: The New Jerusalem & the 15-minute city
By Tim Thorlby
5 mins
This is my first blog in a short series looking at what makes a ‘good city’. It takes the idea of a 15-minute city as a starting point and then explores how bringing different kinds of uses into closer proximity may bring greater fairness, sociability and life to our urban areas.
1 – And did those feet in ancient time?
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
William Blake (1808)
‘Jerusalem’ was my secondary school hymn, which the Head insisted we sing regularly. I rather liked the tune and the poetry of it all, but, to my simple teenage mind, the answer to the question posed by the hymn was always ‘No’ - those feet obviously did not walk upon England’s mountains green – and so it remained a bit of a puzzle to me.
The hymn has been rousing, and perhaps confusing, the nation ever since Sir Hubert Parry found a stirring tune for it in 1917, over a century after William Blake penned the original poem.
When Blake wrote the poem in the early 19th Century, Britain was in the tightening grip of the world’s first wave of industrialisation and it was, by all accounts, a grim time for many people. As the population of England urbanised at an accelerating rate in the late 18th and early 19th Century, the virulence of disease in these new, unplanned, densely populated towns led to shorter and grimmer lives for many workers and their families. Not for nothing did Blake write about those ‘dark Satanic mills’.
Many, including Blake, were horrified by the conditions in England’s towns and cities and the physical impact of the ever-expanding factories, with chimneys belching out smoke, waste and pollution on a frightening scale never seen before.
It was these experiences of urban horror and rural destruction which called forth an urgent desire for hope and a plea for something better. The ancient myth that Jesus once visited dear old England may have little going for it, but Blake finds hope in the biblical vision of the future ‘new Jerusalem’ which we are promised at the end of the age. The Bible famously begins in a perfect garden (the Garden of Eden) and ends in a perfect city (the new Jerusalem).
Except Blake can’t wait that long, so he calls for us to build this new city now in the final verse:
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
He’s not alone. Many people since have invested great effort into imagining how our towns and cities (and countryside) can be improved and made into healthier, happier and more sustainable places to live. And with some success – the urban sanitation and public services we now take for granted would be mind-boggling to a 19th Century time traveller.
But many challenges remain for the UK’s towns and cities of the 21st Century; the new Jerusalem remains elusive for many. With poor air quality, rising poverty, communities under stress and continued reliance on carbon-based fuels, challenges abound for our urban areas.
It is good to dream, so in this blog and the next three, I want to think about what a ‘Good City’ looks like, why and how we might get there. I am going to draw on the ideas of the ’15 Minute City’ as a simple framework and a starting point for our exploration.
Come, hop on your bike!
2 – The 15-Minute City
The ‘15-minute city’ is a simple concept developed and popularised by Professor Carlos Moreno, a Colombian-French urbanist working in Paris[1]. It achieved prominence when the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, adopted it in 2020 as a framework for the rejuvenation of Paris. It has since been explored and adapted by a growing number of cities around the world.
The core idea is not complicated, and is also not really new, drawing on longstanding ideas about what a ‘liveable’, ‘smart’ or ‘compact’ city looks like. It is an approach to urban planning which seeks to ensure that daily requirements – work, shops, schools, healthcare, etc – can be easily reached by residents within a 15-minute walk or bike ride (i.e. within c2km or 2,000 steps). The aim is to make cities healthier, more environmentally sustainable and improve the quality of life for all residents, rich and poor. Some have described it as a ‘return to a local way of life’ with less long-distance commuting and less reliance on the car.
Moreno likes to talk about ‘chrono-urbanism’ which is an academic’s way of saying that our quality of life goes up when we spend less time commuting between places and more time, well, actually in those places. It’s a fair point. If we placed a proper value on our time, and built our cities to reflect this so that we made the most of our time, then they might just look rather different. Moreno also talks about “living in happy proximity” which is a nice way of putting it.
Clearly, our towns and cities are not blank pieces of paper and cannot easily be re-engineered. No-one is proposing that we demolish our urban areas and start again, or introduce draconian policies, so the challenge is very much how to retro-fit such ideas onto existing places, which is why making it happen would require some creativity and time. It has implications for planning, transport, development, business and other aspects of life and so any progress towards it would likely be in fits and starts.
Its practical implications include the need for our cities to become more poly-centric, with work, shops and other services not just concentrated in the city centre. The rise of home-working since the pandemic actually supports and enables this kind of change, and has opened many minds to the idea that making our urban areas happier and healthier places is perhaps not impossible. The need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and find ways to make our towns and cities more sustainable also provides a sense of urgency.
Cynics might pause to wonder why the oldest, densest, most diverse and most walkable neighbourhoods in most cities tend to be so popular and have such high property values. Maybe they have their advantages?
There are four dimensions to the 15-minute city which Carlos Moreno has picked out as key themes. I would like to consider each in turn, the first in this current blog and then the rest in future blogs.
Proximity
Ecology
Solidarity (or fairness)
Participation (or democracy)
Thinking about the future of our towns and cities is a big, messy thing and cannot be readily reduced to a single plan or framework, so I feel it is worth pondering such a huge subject from different angles. In each case I will also consider the faith perspective and the extent to which 15-minute city ideas lead us towards a ‘Good City’.
3 – 15-Minute City Theme 1: Proximity
One of the core themes, and indeed requirements, of a 15-minute city is proximity – i.e. that the different kinds of activity that we participate in need to be physically closer together. From where I live I should be able to more easily reach shops, work, schools and health services without having to drive to them or spend hours on a bus or train. This is the cornerstone of the idea. Proximity is not the goal, it is how we achieve our goals:
It would enable us to spend less time travelling.
The shorter distances would also make walking and cycling easier to achieve, which in turn has both health and environmental benefits.
There is also a social argument that having a greater mix of activities locally makes social connections more likely and makes the city less anonymous
Culturally, diverse places also potentially make more interesting places – more vibrant, more colourful, less monotonous.
Some neighbourhoods in our towns and cities already achieve a high level of proximity. Where I live in north London, a fairly dense and urban place, within 15 minutes I can walk to shops and supermarkets, our primary school, playgrounds and parks, cafes, the GP surgery, even the local hospital. On the days that I work at home, I can also access work. The only time I need to travel further, most weeks, is for work meetings ‘in the office’ or leisure. So, here, we’re already quite a long way towards achieving a high level of ‘proximity’.
Other areas have a very different experience, however.
Some of the UK’s neighbourhoods, often those which are more deprived, are poorly served by many services, and with less of these residents owning a car, the result is longer journeys and greater expense to achieve simple daily goals. The evidence tends to support the value of proximity. For example:
Retail - In 2018, researchers estimated that over 10 million people in the UK lived in ‘food deserts’, defined as a neighbourhood of up to 15,000 people with two or fewer supermarkets[2]. Of these people, 1.2 million were in deprived areas. The research indicated that lack of proximity to a supermarket made it harder to buy healthy, affordable fresh food, particularly for those without cars. Smaller convenience stores tend to be more expensive and stock a narrower range of products.
Public services – some public services have become more concentrated in fewer locations to save costs and this has, unsurprisingly, made it harder for some people to access them. Studies[3] on how we access health services have shown that those who live further away are less likely to access those services and more likely to suffer worse health outcomes; proximity clearly matters.
Work – in an interesting study on ‘neighbourliness’ the Young Foundation[4] found a strong correlation between long commuting times for workers and negative impacts on their family and social relationships. It also found that the UK had one of the most mobile and least rooted working populations in Europe, with some of the highest commuting times (pre-pandemic) and declining neighbourhood ties. Their study also found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, those people who knew their neighbours better were more likely to be happy.
So how would a town or city seek to increase ‘proximity’ of different services and employers and other activities?
There is no simple answer to this, not least as no-one is proposing monolithic top-down planning solutions today. However, answers are likely to include:
More mixed-use developments – making our cities more poly-centric means a greater distribution of services across the city, implying more mixing of uses and less concentration of services in single locations. This can also be achieved by using buildings for more than one purpose.
Shared buildings through the day - Often, public buildings like schools can sit empty in the evening, so finding creative ways of sharing spaces through the day can help to bring more life to an area, without the need for new development. Some secondary schools already share their sports facilities with the local community outside school hours and many more possibilities like this exist.
Higher densities in some suburbs – low density residential areas often do not include many different uses, which may not be viable without a higher density of development at least in parts, so some additional development in some areas may be a part of the response.
Neighbourhood businesses and co-working – the rise of home and hybrid working in the UK post-pandemic looks here to stay and could have significant implications for the shape of our towns and cities. With fewer employers insisting on daily attendance in the office, is there now more scope for local co-working spaces or more distributed offices across our urban areas?
4 – The New Jerusalem?
One ancient prophet looking forward to a new city was Jeremiah. As his home of old Jerusalem lay in ruins and many of his people were taken abroad into exile, he also, like William Blake, couldn’t wait for the New Jerusalem.
To the exiles now living in other, foreign cities, he wrote:
“seek the welfare of the city…for in its welfare, you will find your welfare.”
(Jeremiah 29:7)
In other words, make the best of where you are, because this is in your best interests too.
The cities we live within embody certain values and assumptions in the way that they are built; and some of these clearly need to change. Our towns and cities could be more life-giving to more people. Cities are fundamentally places where human beings are supposed to flourish, and in a way which respects the planet. We may not be able to fashion the perfect city - the New Jerusalem -but we can surely work to improve the towns and cities which we have inherited?
In this blog, we’ve touched the surface of how more being more intentional about bringing different kinds of activities together – into greater proximity – could make for fairer and more sociable cities. Making shops, services and other amenities more accessible for more people would bring greater benefits.
5 – Next time…
In the next few blogs, I want to take a closer look at the three other themes in the 15-minute city:
Ecology
Solidary/fairness
Participation/democracy
You may be wondering what the practical application of this is. But given that we all live within the area of a democratically elected local authority with a Local Plan and planning powers, the ability to influence the shape of where we live may be within closer reach than you think. We’ll look at this in more depth in a future blog.
Thanks for reading!
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. Please sign up for the free monthly email if you’d like to know about future blogs.
Notes
[1] For a fuller statement about the concept in Moreno’s own words, this article is a good starting point: Moreno C, Allam Z, Chabaud D, Gall C, Pratlong F (2021) Introducing the “15-Minute City”: Sustainability, Resilience and Place Identity in Future Post-Pandemic Cities, Smart Cities, 2021, 4(1):93-111. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2624-6511/4/1/6 There is also a nice 7 min TED talk from Moreno at: https://www.ted.com/talks/carlos_moreno_the_15_minute_city
[2] Corfe, S. (2018) What are the barriers to eating healthily in the UK? Social Market Foundation
[3] For example: Haynes, R. (1999) Effects of distances to hospital and GP surgery on hospital inpatient episodes, controlling for needs and provision, Social Science & Medicine. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953699001495
[4] Young Foundation (2010) Neighbouring in Contemporary Britain. Available at: https://youngfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Neighbouring_in_contemporary_Britain.pdf