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A few facts. The 15-minute city is a simple design goal. In the USA, most residential areas are zoned far away from commercial, making this design goal complete

A few facts. The 15-minute city is a simple design goal. In the USA, most residential areas are zoned far away from commercial, making this design goal completely impossible without zoning law changes. All cities and towns built before 1910 all met this goal. This goal is not an either-or proposition: You can have a 15-minute city without the removal of cars and personal freedom. In fact personal freedom goes up, because now a middle or working class person can ride their bike to the train if they so choose. They could still take an Uber or Taxi if they wish. Anyone who reads Jane Jacobs or Christopher Alexander should already know this?

motohagiography 3y ago
Getting in and out of the city and maintaining relationships in it is diminished. We see it with the cameras in London today. Stopping sprawl is a worthy goal, but that’s done with planning not with individual movement restrictions and monitoring. These same policy objectives produced the hellscape apartment blocks of outer paris, the poverty traps of council housing, soviet brutalist and anti human towers, and the housing projects we call ghettos. It’s all the same policy urge, which is for a govt to replace their electorates with impoverished dependents whose votes are cheap and whose lives are too tenuous to interfere with political objectives.
- jaybrendansmith 3y ago
  Monitoring is the result of poor privacy laws, not zoning regulations. In the US, we have no movement restrictions in our pre-1910, well-designed towns, so the two are not correlated here. Ghettos are not inevitable. I think a lack of transit or highway access is definitely a major concern, which is why modern planners need to ensure that dense, multi-use, 15-minute cities have both. The same mistakes were made in the US with our streetcar suburbs ... we removed the transit and ended up with many claustrophobic areas with poor access. None of this is inevitable, but it happens when planning is disregarded, and cities have illogical zoning and planning regulations, or when regulatory capture is allowed to run rampant.
  - motohagiography 3y ago
    Be dense and multi use, but absolutely ban surveillance by making its products inadmissible in any proceeding, and make collecting personal data without a license punishable. If you don’t do that, you get domestic passports and gesundheitpass schemes for restricting basic freedom of movement and association. You can’t advocate 15min cities and be ignorant of privacy or treat it as an externality without colluding with some very evil interests who are co-opting and fooling naive environmentalists. It’s banality of evil level stuff.

motohagiography 3y ago

Getting in and out of the city and maintaining relationships in it is diminished. We see it with the cameras in London today. Stopping sprawl is a worthy goal, but that’s done with planning not with individual movement restrictions and monitoring. These same policy objectives produced the hellscape apartment blocks of outer paris, the poverty traps of council housing, soviet brutalist and anti human towers, and the housing projects we call ghettos. It’s all the same policy urge, which is for a govt to replace their electorates with impoverished dependents whose votes are cheap and whose lives are too tenuous to interfere with political objectives.

jaybrendansmith 3y ago
Monitoring is the result of poor privacy laws, not zoning regulations. In the US, we have no movement restrictions in our pre-1910, well-designed towns, so the two are not correlated here. Ghettos are not inevitable. I think a lack of transit or highway access is definitely a major concern, which is why modern planners need to ensure that dense, multi-use, 15-minute cities have both. The same mistakes were made in the US with our streetcar suburbs ... we removed the transit and ended up with many claustrophobic areas with poor access. None of this is inevitable, but it happens when planning is disregarded, and cities have illogical zoning and planning regulations, or when regulatory capture is allowed to run rampant.
- motohagiography 3y ago
  Be dense and multi use, but absolutely ban surveillance by making its products inadmissible in any proceeding, and make collecting personal data without a license punishable. If you don’t do that, you get domestic passports and gesundheitpass schemes for restricting basic freedom of movement and association. You can’t advocate 15min cities and be ignorant of privacy or treat it as an externality without colluding with some very evil interests who are co-opting and fooling naive environmentalists. It’s banality of evil level stuff.