CITYBUILDING | 15-Minute Cities for the South
The South is no walkable utopia. A new vision is helpful.
Written By Satchel Walton
The 15-minute city might be a hip and trendy phrase in urbanist circles, but it is rooted in simple, age-old principles. The basic idea is a three-word summary of how village life was conducted before the advent of the automobile. Around the globe, and across cultures, there was a relatively universal form with medium-to-high levels of density and both residential and commercial uses side-by-side, allowing people to efficiently execute their daily activities on their own two feet.
Carlos Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris, first proposed the 15-minute-city idea at the 2015 Paris climate talks, and it has grown more popular in the wake of the pandemic. It provides a hopeful vision of urban environments in which citizens can be within a 15 minute walk, or perhaps bike ride, of groceries, schools, jobs, doctors’ offices, cultural institutions, and all the other vital amenities.
Built environments are, at least partially, a reflection of the values and norms of any society. The post-war, car-centric American suburbs were built on the idea of individual nuclear family units with strong social networks. The 15-minute city instead accommodates a variety of family models and is premised on the idea that community and social ties should be developed locally, within a definable area. In an era when Americans spend more time alone, have fewer looser social networks, and live less in nuclear families, the 15-minute city is an idea that makes sense. More than that, it’s an idea to aspire to. It’s a benchmark metric we should rebuild cities around.
It is, also, to put it mildly, not the model that Southern cities have followed over the last century. In fact, the Southern U.S. is host to some of the least dense so-called “urban” areas on earth. The South is arguably the antithesis of the 15-minute city.
North American metros are now among the most sprawling, car-dependent agglomerations in the world. The South’s cities have seen most of their growth take place since that fateful moment when Model Ts started rolling out of Detroit. And the South's cities didn't have very much old pre-automobile urban fabric to begin with. In some ways, the true urbanization of the South wasn't in full swing until sometime around when the Olympics came to Atlanta. Consequently, ours are some of the most car-dependent urban areas of all. The bottom of the list of North American cities by Walk Score is packed with Southern cities—the likes of Jacksonville, Charlotte, Montgomery, and Nashville.
Encumbered by historical choices as well as modern rule sets that dictate space, buffers, parking, and sprawl, Southern cities can’t pivot to the 15-minute city on a dime. Perhaps, not at all. Many millions of families have two or even three cars. Those who drive ten minutes from a subdivision for groceries, twenty minutes to an office park for work, and then half an hour across town to a friend’s house exist in an environment that no amount of redesign can make walkable. That task of Southern sprawl repair is Herculean, and potentially impossible.
The sprawl repair problem is a classic example of path dependency: Past decisions are largely locked in. We can’t raze the cul-de-sacs of the world and salt the Earth such that McMansions or three-car garages can never spring up again.
Sometimes, in the land of 26-lane freeways, the creation of a 15-minute city seems as plausible as snow in Miami. Everyone knows that “Nobody walks in L.A.!” but the abbreviation could just as easily stand for Louisiana as Los Angeles.
There are, however, urban neighborhoods in the South. And we can further enact policies that allow old urban cores and streetcar suburbs to build walkable density or regain some of the population and commerce that they have lost. We can work to revitalize small-town Main Streets. It won’t be done overnight, but the 15-minute city is a helpful utopian ideal to orient ourselves and move toward. If it is not a perfect union, it is a more perfect one.
We can’t remake past decisions, but we can learn from them. Here’s to hoping that policymakers consider a better model for what healthy, thriving communities can be—and use the principles of the 15-minute city as a lodestar to get us there.
Satchel Walton is the Mencken Publishing Fellow on Urban Development.