![]() ![]() The desire for self-sufficient neighborhoods aligns perversely with the fashion for mixed-use, developer-branded enclaves where residents need never journey more than a quick, 60-story elevator ride and a few horizontal steps from bed to conference room, then on to a bar, dinner, a show, and back to bed. When the city’s conduits seize up, as they have in the past few months, divisions deepen and society fragments. Yet we mix on the street, in the subways, and at work, concentrating in the places where, sooner or later, almost everyone has to go. New York remains scandalously segregated in housing, schools, and economic opportunities. Adopting the mantra could, paradoxically, attack inequities and increase them at the same time. But, like most concepts that lend themselves to a catchphrase, it glosses over complexity, combining the seductive with the counterproductive. The idea of the 15-minute city is made for export in theory, at least, it could transform highly centralized cities all over the world. Hidalgo and Moreno’s crusade would flip that model, hastening the advent of the post-automobile city. Urban highways severed neighborhoods, evicted thousands, and left a legacy of pollution that disproportionately sickens residents of color. For decades, feverish road-building programs all over the world gratified the desire to get into, out of, and around the center city quickly, at any time. Moreno has a more radical realignment in mind than simply scattering every arrondissement with pharmacies and municipal field offices. Ideally, every richesse of urban living, including your job, can be compressed into an area the size of a hamlet. Among Moreno’s gnomic pronouncements is “ The mobility of the future is immobility”: Instead of letting hours leach away in traffic crawling between leafy residential neighborhoods and high-rise business districts, thus depleting resources and enveloping streets in carbon monoxide, the virtuous city will fragment into a collection of villages that entices residents to stay put. Hidalgo’s guru, the Colombian-born, Paris-based professor and urbanist Carlos Moreno, developed the concept of the 15-minute city as the key to a green and pleasant urban life, guided by data, aided by technology, and implemented by beneficent officials. Part of the plan involves prying streets away from cars, and the other involves seeding neighborhoods with options so fewer people will feel the need to drive. The street, which cuts through Paris’s expensive core from the Marais to Place de la Concorde, is the emblem of the future metropolis, what newly reelected Mayor Anne Hidalgo describes as the “15-minute city.” In her vision, no Parisian should need to travel more than a quarter of an hour, on foot or by bike, to work, shop, or deal with a government agency. ![]() One image from Paris has inspired a particular wistfulness: The rue de Rivoli, until a few months ago a perpetual traffic jam with a scent of diesel and a soundtrack of frustrated honks, is now a whispering conduit for pedestrians and bicycles. ![]() This is a season of envy for American cities, as Tokyo subways fill, Berlin museums reopen, and Aucklanders get together for weddings again. Photo: Christophe Archambault/AFP via Getty Images
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