'The X-minute city': Reshaping urban life for a more sustainable future

According to Professor Carlos Moreno, Paris itself is a good example of the reality of introducing the 15-minute city, as well as its originating spark. File picture

A conversation with Carlos Moreno can only open in one way, really.

The Colombian is associate professor and scientific director of the ETI chair at the Sorbonne Business School, a special smart city envoy for the mayor of Paris, and a chevalier de la légion d’honneur. The week after we spoke, he was heading to New York to give the prestigious annual Lewis Mumford lecture at the City College of New York.

But people know him mostly as the inventor of the 15-minute city, one of the key concepts in modern urban policy.

When we chatted in his office in Paris earlier this month, then, the starting point was obvious. Just what is the 15-minute city?

“In a nutshell, the 15-minute city is a way to reshape our cities in the face of three challenges,” said Moreno.

“The ecological challenge with climate change, the economic challenge in terms of developing local jobs and businesses, and the social challenge — to develop more vibrant, liveable neighbourhoods.

“It means an area which has an intensive mix of social functions and activities: Walking and leisure, medical facilities, educational services, cultural activities, public spaces — and jobs, which are a direct benefit of new technologies developed during and after the pandemic.”

And one where most of those objectives can be accomplished within 15 minutes by foot, bike, or public transport from home. 

Researcher, scientist, and urban planner Carlos Moreno is known as the inventor of the 15-minute city, one of the key concepts in modern urban policy. File picture: Miguel Medina/AFP

Re-shaping the city in this way comes with different challenges — as Moreno says, it means “the development of social housing not in particular areas but all over the city to produce a social mix, it involves reducing our surface footprint by reducing the distances that we travel and by encouraging the economic life of the area, it means we will also have more liveable environments because part of the aim is to reduce the spaces for cars, which increases the room for people. But all of this should improve quality of life for people”.

Paris itself is a good example of the reality of introducing the 15-minute city, as well as its originating spark.

“Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, was a pioneer in 2015 when Paris hosted the COP21,” says Moreno. “She co-hosted the climate summit for local leaders with UN special envoy Mike Bloomberg, empowering cities, local and sub-national governments to set targets for reducing emissions. and that was the spark.

“However, she felt that wasn’t enough, that we needed to develop active mobility — travelling by bike, walking and so on — in order to reduce our carbon footprint even further. And for that reason now in Paris we have amazing bikeability, over 1,400 km of separate cycling lanes.

“In addition, Paris has developed more vegetation in the form of the urban forest — there is a good example outside the Hotel de Ville itself — and plans, in the different arrondissements, to develop local commerce. On that basis the city of Paris has reduced rents in certain areas to encourage artisans and small shops to open, to open co-working locations. That is the economic aspect of the 15-minute city.

“There is also an idea related to the local public schools which are spread across the various districts — that such schools are the ‘capital’ of the district. That means at weekends, for instance, the schoolyards can be opened for use by people in the neighbourhood, and cars are banned from the streets around the schools, transforming them into mini-parks.

So Paris is a pioneer of the 15-minute city but it has also spread that concept around the globe. Last September we hosted a conference here on sustainable initiatives in various cities all over the world.

Go back further, however, and the circumstances aligned to present a testing ground for the 15-minute city idea.

“In November 2019, Anne Hidalgo said she would take on the concept of the 15-minute city,” says Moreno. “She said the concept was a good one and the time was right, and she wanted to propose an urban policy programme for her re-election campaign. She was interested in combating climate change and the 15-minute city offered a way to address that issue.

“She announced her support for the concept, therefore, in January 2020, and many people were surprised because they hadn’t heard about it. Three or four weeks later, we had the pandemic, and the lockdowns.”

Moreno points out that those lockdowns heightened people’s awareness of their own neighbourhoods.

“During lockdown, many people made local discoveries. They discovered neighbours they had not known before, or they discovered businesses near to their homes they were unaware of. They found green areas nearby and they developed their digital skills. There was a development of solidarity on the street or in the block where people lived.

“So the 15-minute city was a good way to handle covid-19.”

Since then the idea has spread even further. Moreno is keen to point out that its adherents come from every part of the political spectrum.

Many mayors worldwide, whether left wing, right wing, or centrists, adopted a 15-minute city-style approach. The political viewpoint didn’t matter — places as different as Milan, Buenos Aires, and Busan implemented similar concepts, for instance.

“That showed, then, that the 15-minute city is not a political or ideological position but rather a humanistic way to reshape our cities that is people-centred. We felt it was available to socialist parties, centrist parties, right-wing parties.

“It’s important to say that the 15-minute city is not a dogma, either. It’s not a diktat. People are free to implement it in specific ways which relate to the specific conditions of the city involved. Milan is not Buenos Aires and Busan is not Milan, so it has to be adaptable. 

"That applies to the name of the concept, even. Different cities use different names — in Scotland the term used is the 20-minute territory, in Utrecht they call it the 10-minute city, in Bogota the vital neighbourhoods — but this is the same concept.

“That is why I now refer to it as the X-minute city.”

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Future for the 15-minute city

What is the future for the 15-minute city concept? Its originator, Moreno stresses the need for local government to lead the way.

“We need to avoid the 15-minute city becoming just part of a new marketing presentation for private developers, part of a plan which separates people, one driven by money.

“If the 15-minute city is to be for the common good, then that needs to be led by local government. That’s very important to avoid a form of the 15-minute city which is driven by private entrepreneurs, who are looking to develop housing and facilities based on high prices per square metre, which means facilities that are suitable only for those on high incomes.

“For that reason, we want to continue to work with local governments to develop new urban plans in a city or region.

“National governments are also involved: The Scottish parliament voted in 2024 a framework for the 20-minute neighbourhood; Spain is to make an announcement soon on 30-minute territories; South Korea the same.”

I'n Paris we have amazing bikeability, over 1,400 km of separate cycling lanes.' File picture

These are laudable aims and achievements, but one objection presents itself immediately. Even if local government is a driver of the 15-minute city, surely the private real estate and development sectors need to be involved?

Prof Moreno advocates that combination of public and private sectors, particularly to develop multi-function purposes for buildings.

“We are still dealing with the legacy of 20th-century urban planning, the ideas of people like Le Corbusier; some of those ideas focused on having a district for residential living, another for administrative services, another for cultural activities, and so on.

“That was an essential point of Le Corbusier’s thinking, but those districts led to people travelling long distances from home to work, to the primacy of cars; to the transformation of people, almost, in to half-human, half-cars.

With our concept, we need to reshape our cities to generate more multi-purpose activities and to have an end to the administrative district, the cultural district, and so on. We need places where we can work, do business, go to school or university, enjoy cultural activities: And one place to do so.

“Now that is becoming a new business model for private actors in real estate, retail, and other sectors.”

That old system, of distinct quarters being used for specific purposes, is still “very visible” in places such as Prof Moreno’s home base in Paris, he says.

“Take La Défense, in the west of Paris, which was unveiled as a working area for 400,00 workers, who would be concentrated in the different towers built there.

“But many of those workers lived at the opposite end of Paris, towards the east of the city. For that reason, the banks of the Seine had to be converted to a double highway for cars to accommodate those workers, many of whom were driving to their offices.

“Inevitably, that led to huge traffic jams, which led, in turn, to various terrible consequences: Huge air pollution, time wasted sitting in traffic, and so on.

“Today, after the pandemic, the business model of La Défense has collapsed. Many of those big towers, which were intended for hundreds of thousands of workers, are empty. The occupation rate has plummeted.

“That business model is also under pressure, because younger workers, aged from their 20s to their 40s, say, want to work form home, or want hybrid work. They don’t want to go to an office block five days a week.

“Those consequences are visible, and real estate companies have taken notice of that.”

Prof Moreno points to similar lessons in the retail sector, which has responded swiftly to large-scale changes in behaviour, such as the working-from-home phenomenon.

“In the past, the large stores, like Ikea, big supermarkets, were located in the outskirts of Paris, which led to people devoting their weekends to travelling out to make purchases.

“That model is also in decline now. We have city markets. We have much smaller versions of Ikea; little shops, not the huge warehouses. We have smaller versions of the supermarkets: Carrefour City, for instance. Combined with online shopping, which is  obviously very popular, retail is also changing hugely in Paris.”

'The city for all has a lot of services for all people, while the city for everyone offers services for the different profiles of inhabitants.' File picture

Prof Moreno describes this as “a new form of economic geography, where we need to reshape the economy of the world according to our activities”.

He and his team are working to that end by joining the 15-minute city idea with the spread of this new economic geography through cities, and, last September, they held a conference at the Sorbonne on how that combination of ideas expresses itself: Sustainable proximity.

“We had representatives of local governments from five different continents sharing their best practices, and we also had scientists from different disciplines — urbanists, economists, architects, mathematicians, and so on — and we have created the Global Observatory on Sustainable Proximities [UCLG Decalogue].

“This organisation aims to work on the different initiatives worldwide — with all those different names, the ‘X-minute city’, the ‘X-minute territory’ —with a view to sustainable proximities.

“That ‘X-minute city’ term is important for avoiding the restrictions when it comes to the number, not getting fixated on it being a 10-, 15-, 20-minute city, even for me.

When I came up with the concept, it was not with a view to thinking: ‘This must be 15 minutes, the distances cannot be any longer than that or else this is no good.’ It was an image: Not too far, not too close, but an intermediate area which could be accessed with ease.

“Different cities have different densities, so parts of Copenhagen could be a five-minute city, parts of London a 20-minute city.”

Developing sustainable proximities has its own challenges, such as gathering data.

“We have up to 9m people in the Île-de-France region and 2m in Paris itself: Young people, old people, women on their own, women on their own with children, and so on. We therefore need to know what kind of people are in the city, and how they are living.

“That is different in different cities: In Africa, many cities have a huge proportion of young people. Along the Mediterranean, many cities have a large proportion of older people.

“The profiles are different, and so are the needs: For younger people, the priorities for proximity may be a bar, a disco, restaurants, sports facilities. For older people, we need a doctor, pharmacies, medical services.

“We need a global picture of the different profiles in order to work out the different proximities, and that means going from a city for all to a city for everyone.

"The city for all has a lot of services for all people, while the city for everyone offers services for the different profiles of inhabitants."

A wider, more recent context introduces yet another element.

Prof Moreno says: “We must understand the role of cities when nation states are in a fragile situation: With the USA, with the difficulties with Europe’s relationships with China and Russia.

That means cities are now where we find stability and continuity, and, for that reason, I propose considering proximity as the new resilience.

“We have global difficulties and instability, from climate change and all the associated problems, to pandemics, which makes accessibility of services the best guarantee of safety and stability.

“For that reason, proximity is the best form of resilience, and the term I have coined is ‘proxilience’, which mixes proximity and resilience. When we have extreme events and abnormalities, proximity is our best option, our best possibility.

“In the US, when ICE is present in a neighbourhood, then that neighbourhood, that community, organises itself to offer solidarity with immigrants, to watch out for ICE, and so on. So a very powerful movement is at work in the US, a very localised movement, to deal with these difficulties, where the federal government is confronting cities such as Miami, Minneapolis, Seattle, and so on. The key element in that dynamic is proximity.”

As the key element in the 15-minute city, proximity is the obvious mechanism to drive the concept to the next level.