5 ms·
The 15-minute city is a dead end
- phoronixrly 4mo agoI 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?
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoFrom 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.
- blensor 4mo agoThe 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.
- allemagne 4mo agoWow, 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.
- mrhottakes 4mo agoMainstream western economists are essentially LLMs that have been trained incorrectly as a joke
- allemagne 4mo agoI 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.
- queenkjuul 4mo agoI'm pretty confident that mainstream Western economists are all jokes, I'm even more confident that all of them at Harvard are
- breezybottom 4mo agoWell now you know what it was trained on.
- whynotmaybe 4mo agoThe 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.
- dpark 4mo agoProof that humans can also generate low quality slop.
- HardwareLust 4mo agoYeah 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
- blensor 4mo agoIs 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
- phoronixrly 4mo agoYeah, 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...
- mrhottakes 4mo agoThat's how conservatives criticize the concept. It's a conservative economist making a conservative ideological argument.
- lo_zamoyski 4mo agoExcept 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/44640c2c786250e3a426d1f4c21191cc761e745c.pdf https://cdnc.heyzine.com/flip-book/pdf/44640c2c786250e3a426d...
- ninalanyon 4mo agoEvery instance of the word city in that article, and the title, should have been qualified with 'US'.
- jeroenhd 4mo agoThis 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!
- mrhottakes 4mo agoIt's just conservative ideology
- dpark 4mo agoThe 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.
- xboxnolifes 4mo agoIDK 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.
- an_account 4mo agoI 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.
- mrhottakes 4mo agoHe's making a conservative ideological argument; that's exactly how conservatives describe mixed use, walkable city planning.
- pseudohadamard 4mo ago"15 minute cities, or as they're known in Europe, 'cities'".
- PaulHoule 4mo agoShanghai, Beijing, and other big Chinese cities are like that. People in places like that also think overnight delivery from AMZN is terribly slow.
- fedeb95 4mo agomoving 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.
- bensyverson 4mo ago[dead]
- cma256 4mo ago> 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.
- mrhottakes 4mo agoMuch 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.
- dpark 4mo agoAnd 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.
- runarberg 4mo agoSuch is the state of the educated class in the year 2026.
- queenkjuul 4mo agoSuch has been the state of Harvard Business types for a long time
- Delphiza 4mo agoAn 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.
- rho138 4mo ago> The rise of autonomous vehicles and technologies like hyperloop may make a major difference to the way we travel around cities. Oh, got it.
- karhuton 4mo agoI’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.
- egypturnash 4mo ago> 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
- queenkjuul 4mo agoHow 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!