The 15-minute city problem - Who decides?

There’s much spluttering from the professional planning classes over this opposition to 15-minute cities. This is just the latest:

Imagine an old-fashioned British country town. Good citizens strolling down the high street to their friendly baker, grocer and butcher, relaxing in pubs and on cricket fields, their children walking to school, “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist” as John Major, quoting George Orwell, once put it. This, surely, is the sort of thing Conservatives like.

But no. According to Nick Fletcher, Tory MP for the South Yorkshire constituency of the Don Valley, this way of living is an “international socialist concept”. Specifically, he fears and loathes the idea of the “15-minute city” developed by the Colombian-born Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, which proposes that most of what you need or want – places of work, homes, shopping, education, sport, social life, pleasure – be within a 15-minute walk or cycle ride, as in a traditional town or city. This, says Fletcher, who seems to be drawing on some of the nuttier claims on the internet, “will take away personal freedoms”. It’s a case of lunacy on stilts as virtuoso as any in the world of conspiracy theories. It also highlights a central question of modern conservatism: do they actually want to conserve things?

There was a similar harrumph and dismissal as lunacy from The Guardian’s planning and architecture guru last week.

To be clear - there’s nothing wrong with 15-minute cities. The only interesting or important question is who decides? For undoubtedly some people do like the idea of being able to amble around to all the bits that make life a fun thing. One of us lived in central Bath for years on exactly that basis. How excellent, etc. But there are others who do not enjoy that rural amiability transferred to the urban core. London, with its teeming 8 million, excites more. Or perhaps at a stage of life it does as it did for that same one of us. Or what about the 9 million Britons who live entirely more rurally and to whom having near anything within 15 minutes of them would be an anathema?

The mistake here - and the thing to be revolted by and revolt against - is the ghastly pomposity of those planners. Having noted that some like 15 minutes they then decide that they’d better impose it upon everyone. Which isn’t, at all, how the world is supposed to work.

As Jane Jacobs was fond of pointing out the desirable cityscape, that urban environment, is something that grows organically, not something that is planned or imposed. The 15 minutes isn’t the international socialist conspiracy, it’s the imposition of the one plan fits all which is.

This is not a new mistake of course. As it happens Roy Hattersley talks about his work in Sheffield 60 years back:

He claimed, with the authority that came from years of poverty on Labour party pay, that the working man’s ambition was to live in a “decent-sized cottage with a bit of garden at the back”

So, instead and of course, they built stack-a-prole worker flats in the worst Brezhneviki style of a kind which stemmed from “an admiration for the brutalist housing developments in Soviet-occupied eastern Europe.”

We see the same even further back than that, in David Kynaston’s (“A World To Build” etc) collections of Mass Observation notes. The planners were going to stick the bombed-out working classes into tower blocks instead of the des res with front and back garden desired. After all, Europeans lived like that therefore so should the English.

One problem with this being that a different population with a different culture might not desire that same style of housing. The other being that the planners hadn’t actually understood the European housing culture. Those flats near always come with the country cottage (oversized allotment, dacha, chalupa and so on). The flats are to huddle in for the winter, those country places - normally in a wide ring right around the town or city, where we seem to have Green Belt that cannot be disturbed - to expand into over the summer. The European system depends, that is - to a large extent - on everyone having a holiday home.

Not only were the planners trying to impose an alien housing culture they didn’t even understand the one they were trying to impose. No, allotments don’t make up the gap for what is the one absolute about a British allotment? You’re not allowed to stay there overnight nor build anything even remotely shack-like where anyone could.

Planning by the informationally incompetent does not a happy society make. But then there’s the grand problem being faced by planners. The UK currently has, apparently, 67.33 million people. That’s therefore - by definition - 67.33 million individual utility functions. The aim of society being to optimise, as best is possible, each and every one of those 67.33 million utility functions. It is impossible for the central planner to even know what these utility functions are let alone how to optimise them. Therefore central planning does not work as a method of optimisation.

But the grand delusion of the very idea of scientific socialism is that the planner can know and can optimise. Which is why we’ve had this past century of British architects and city planners attempting to force-feed the population into urban landscapes which aren’t, in fact, optimising. As at the top, it’s that forcing which is the socialist conspiracy.

The grand lesson of the 20th century is that socialist planning doesn’t work. We, humanity, did test that model to its destruction. So, dear urban planners, please stop trying to impose that not just clapped out but proven to be wrong model.

In fact, don’t just stop trying to plan cities, please go away.