Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

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WEF video envisioned carless human lives rebuilt around "neighborhood hubs" that are 15-min walking distance from their home offices, containing gym and bars, but no restaurants since those would be replaced by ghost kitchens. They envisioned biometric ID of each human by their heartbeat. WFH opens the door to workplace surveillance policy being applied to home-workspace activity. https://twitter.com/wef/status/1427721919483326470

Definition of 15-min city: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2021/02/08/defining-15-minu... & https://hub.beesmart.city/en/strategy/the-15-minute-city-nur...

This may come to fruition in private charter cities like Telosa, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/telosa-marc-lore-blake-ing... & https://cityoftelosa.com/

> A so-called "15-minute city design" will allow residents to access their workplaces, schools and amenities within a quarter-hour commute of their homes. Although planners are still scouting for locations, possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region.

Neighborhoods of existing US cities may also be candidates, https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/15-minute-cities/

> One popular concept hailing from Paris is the 15-minute city. It’s a city in which, wherever you live, everything you need is located within a 15-minute walk or bike ride away ... which of America’s largest cities have the greatest potential for transitioning into a 15-minute city?

This comment does a good job of citing why the 15-minute city concept feels kind of "off" to me.

It's ostensibly a good idea. I actually probably could live it, I'm 15 minutes walk from essentially everything I'd need.

But whenever I read 'marketing material' it always just sounds like some way to ensure that the proletarians exist less. Use less resources, basically just corral most people off into these little life simulators.

If you deleted long-distance transport like cars tomorrow I could still _do_ most of the things I need in order to subsist, but you would have immediately essentially just turned off the reason I get up in the morning.

Are you saying you need your car to go skiing or hiking or to visit your parents across town?

I don't think the 15 minute city precludes the use of cars, it just means they're not required, and are actually inconvenient for local journeys.

It's more that I have a fundamental desire to travel further than 15 minutes from my home on a regular basis, via any mode of transport.

That is to say that the feeling of being in a different place is psychologically important.

I think that most people have this desire and many of them don't realise it until they fall into a habit of not really leaving their local area (e.g. staying indoors for weeks on end doing WFH). They start to feel sad or frustrated and can't really identify why.

Exploration and novelty is important for the human spirit.

By far the best exploration and novelty I've ever had in terms of cities has come from those cities that embody the '15 minute' approach. Surprise - nobody bans you or even discourages you from travelling away further than necessary from your closest conveniences!

By contrast, cities that are car dependent and spread out have been invariably the most alienating environments possible in terms of novelty. You have to drive, and quite quickly, because there's nothing else but concrete and parking lots and gigantic stores on any human scale.

To stereotype a little (or not so little), Americans do their once-in-a-lifetime trip through the classic European cities and walk wide-eyed along the narrow winding streets, and eat ice cream along the many small town squares/piazzas/whatever, sighing happily.

And then they go home and vote for widening their local stroad, as if that would in any way contribute to solving the suburban hellscape problem.

Well, of course we have the opposite too.

I live in my little shoebox in inner/central London and then go and rent a big beefy beefcar and drive around the US, then go home and get on the tube. :D

The fact that your local shop, work or school is 15 minutes away doesn’t preclude you from walking for 30 minutes.

The fact that my commute is a business park 30 minutes away doesn’t make my life full of exploration and novelty, it just wastes time and money.

Being able to quickly fetch a gallon of milk or easily walk your kids to school actually enhances the ability to explore and take in novelty. Being forced to drive everywhere adds monetary and time costs as well as a great deal of risk from crashes.

Characterizing life in suburban America as it is currently built as embracing and enabling exploration and novelty seems pretty far off. It is much more common for people, especially young people who most desire exploration and novelty, to find our omnipresent suburbs to be stifling.

The source of confusion is probably that I'm not talking about the suburban US but basically just most cities in Europe or the UK.

You can live in basically any city (actual city, not the suburbs) and have most things close by, it's an available option.

What I'm arguing against is the idea that we should make everywhere like this, or that within those zones we should seek to make travel awkward for the sake of maintaining the 15-minute ideal.

For example, if you have to ban cars in my street to bring it from a 'everything within 20-minutes' to 'everything within 15-minutes', then logically in my view you lose more. This is just anecdotal, but my street is full of stuff like camper vans, off road vehicles, tourers and cool shit, they'd have to either give up their hobbies or move out and into the country.

The desire to travel doesn't support the conclusion that automobiles are somehow natural and vital to the human spirit. In my world, traveling is a much richer experience when automobiles aren't involved. Indeed, they're a real buzz-kill.

China has hundreds of millions of people living in '15 minute cities'. You can still get out and explore with public transport that will take you literally anywhere in the country faster than driving.

It isn’t always about speed. Even if I could get to work faster via rail or bus, I would still prefer to use my car. I like being alone, I like driving, I like being in control of the temperature and airflow, I like being able to pick my route and make any stops I want.

When you look at the best selling vehicles in the US it’s clear that people generally aren’t buying the least expensive vehicle that would work for them. They spend tens of thousands more because they want to.

Yeah I'm at a loss there- I have good Turkish, Greek and British food locally, but I need to travel if I want the best Indian, or vegan, or cocktails, or... it's not like I'm trapped here, I just have quick and slow options.

> This comment does a good job of citing why the 15-minute city concept feels kind of "off" to me.

As a European, this comment is perplexing to me. We all live in 15-minute cities over here.

I live in a European city! A city in which I could live my entire life without using delivery services and without stepping further than 15 minutes from my front door. Okay, maybe 20.

I agree that by that metric basically any European capital or major city has loads of this.

That's not what I understand the '15-minute city' concept to mean. The video posted is a good example of it. It seems to be centred more about fundamentally rewriting the way I live my life (e.g. get rid of the office, try to discourage me from going outside of that 15-minute zone by encouraging walking over all other forms of transport including trains/buses).

It's weird because I've just re-read my initial comment and I'm just re-typing what I said. Is there something confusing there?

Optionality is tautologically great, but discouraging people to travel is not that.

My dentist, my general practitioner, my gym, my favourite restaurant(s), my friends, the food store(s) I use are all in different parts of town, and I believe that hugely enriches my life. The job I used to have was about 30-45min away, and after work I would then explore _that_ area.

I could go to the ones next door, but then I'd only ever go next door. Why would I want to only ever go next door?

I guess basically I'm just reading American shit and thinking "what's all this nonsense about 15 minutes? what you want is a dense urban city with public transport".

I actually want my city and its' trains to expand out so that it's a 4 hour city and I can tap a card and get the tube to Manchester and wander about there, lol.

> I actually want my city and its' trains to expand out so that it's a 4 hour city and I can tap a card and get the tube to Manchester and wander about there, lol.

That’s what I want in the US. Unfortunately we don’t have a city-to-city train system to speak of, Amtrak isn’t even close, and it doesn’t seem to be on the horizon either. I don’t really know, but part of the issue may be that cities in the west and midwest aren’t yet big enough and numerous enough and dense enough to support the financing for a better train system.

It's also perplexing to Americans who don't hate cars, as we all live in 15-minute cities as well (by the definition that no daily task takes more than 15 minutes of one-way travel time).

I'm not sure I understand this. Every decent city I've lived in (NYC, Berlin) has everything I need in <15 minutes already.

Old cities in North America have cores that were created pre-automobile. They were built on "human/horse scale" like cities in Europe.

New cities in the mid west are spread out over wide distances assuming automobile transportation.

Denver and the surrounding suburbs come to mind and Calgary in Canada as well.

It's not really that these cities were built for the car, moreso that they were bulldozed in order to over-accomodate the car.

Sometimes in the inner cores, yes. But many North American cities are new. Built mostly post-war. For example, Calgary is a city of ~1.2 million now. In 1946 it was ~100,000.

More than 90% of the city was built in the post-car era, and the main city planning stage (in the 50s and 60s during the population explosion) was of course, heavily car-centric. That's the legacy we're still living out, with similar stories in cities across North America.

> Denver and the surrounding suburbs...

I live in a developing "15 minute city" that encompasses a border with Denver and one of its neighboring cities. Development has been... okay I guess. We have a light rail stop that goes downtown to Union Station and to all the main stadiums, and bike trail that runs alongside it.

That's pretty much it. The area has been zoned for everything a 15 minute city might need, but developers have been reluctant to build anything beyond 5+1 apartment buildings and small townhome developments. It's hardly a 15 minute city and both municipalities (Denver and the other) that have a stake in the development don't seem to care much about the area.

We are still fully car dependent for basic errands, and now that they are enforcing parking laws for blocking hydrants, alleys, etc, people are up in arms.

The "which of America’s largest cities have the greatest potential for transitioning into a 15-minute city?" line is really confusing. Instead, I believe they're talking about American suburbs and minor cities.

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