The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet

“The 15-Minute City” is a plea for urban leaders to rethink how neighborhoods work. The change it advocates: Bring nearly everything people need for daily life within a 15-minute walk, bike ride or bus ride, including housing, work, shopping, health care, education and entertainment. If we did this, the book argues, neighborhoods and cities would be happier and more resilient places.

Carlos Moreno is a professor at Paris’ Sorbonne University.

The big ideas for Urban Atlanta:

1. Bringing things people need for daily life closer to residences has great benefits, from helping with climate change to making neighborhoods friendlier and more interesting.
2. Benefits could be realized if only some things were brought closer to where people live. That is, if shopping and entertainment were brought to neighborhoods even as health care, large employment centers and cultural institutions remained elsewhere. 
3. Even a partial 15-minute city approach would require new forms of infrastructure and new thinking about mobility’s purposes. We would need trails, sidewalks and bike lanes to help people move around and between neighborhoods.
4. Not all neighborhoods would welcome greater proximity or be good candidates for a 15-minute city. The right approach, then, is to begin with places that have some elements already in place and would embrace greater proximity.
5. Work from home may offer an opportunity. Neighborhoods are filled today with people who combine home and work. The 15-minute city could improve the lives of these stay-at-home workers by placing other necessities in walking distance.