Cycling, conspiracies and connectivity: the 15-minute city

From Paris to Shanghai to Kitchener, the concept of more livable, walkable, cyclable cities has taken hold.

The idea of developing 15-minute neighbourhoods was included in Waterloo Region’s Official Plan in 2022. With a population that could reach close to one million by 2050, development is well underway, with intensification happening across the cities and townships.

It’s a model seeing success in Europe, as more cities incorporate the accessible concepts into urban plans.

After leaving Europe for multi-year stints in Florida and New York, the move back to the Netherlands in 2020 caught researcher Mehmet Baran Ulak unprepared for a transit system designed for two-wheel ease.

“Should I buy a car or a bicycle?” he asked himself.

In Waterloo Region, despite extensive new cycling infrastructure, it’s not yet the type of dilemma most encounter when they’re faced with how to get to work, do their errands, and move around their city.

It’s a different story in the Netherlands, where Ulak’s 15-minute cycle to the University of Twente in Enschede requires 20 minutes by car.

A slow evolution into cyclist culture eventually led Ulak and other researchers about 160 kilometres to the west, where the city of Utrecht has quietly developed a modern urban marvel: a true 15-minute city.

With a population of more than one million people, every person living in Utrecht has access to at least one fundamental daily service or essential need — everything from housing to health care to dining — within a 15-minute bike ride. The city now intends to up the ante, building toward a 10-minute city, with 90 per cent of the population already meeting the threshold.

There isn’t a consensus on the 15-minute city, which has become a quasi-umbrella term for a variety of concepts that revolve around the desire to have a certain number of resources and amenities within a short, walkable distance.

Even walking isn’t a consensus, with some considering cycling to be the optimal mode of transportation. This is a major sticking point in certain European cities, especially in the Netherlands where governments have spent decades reversing trends to auto-centric transit, led in part from protests over unnecessary deaths and accidents.

“All of these urban planning concepts are actually coming to the same core idea that we need to put accessibility in front of mobility,” said Ulak. “And what I’m trying to say is all over the world, especially in North America and Europe as well, the focus has been on the mobility.”

This has led many cities to end up with entire districts of isolated, unconnected residential areas.

“It’s building more roads, providing more cars. So, this has been what we’ve been doing for a long time, and it’s flawed,” said Ulak.

A 15-minute city isn’t new. In some ways, it’s a romanticized throwback to ancient cities, where walkability was the only option.

In 2013 — a year after MIT professor Kent Larson gave his now famous speech on the 20-minute city — Luca D’Acci from the Polytechnic University of Turin introduced his concept of Isobenefit Urbanism.

It would take another decade before people really started taking notice.

“I chose a terrible name and I chose terrible language because it was too technical and too mathematical,” he said from his home just outside Oxford University in England.

D’Acci, who specializes in urban studies, has traced the modern idea for the 15-minute city to 1898 with Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City,” with multi-functional towns all linked by roads and rail. Other concepts ensued, with Leon Krier’s “Urban Quarter” in the 1970s, Peter Calthrope’s “Pedestrian Pocket” in the 1980s, and an explosion of similar concepts in the 2010s.

For D’Acci, the core of his concept is around social equity.

It comes down to 10 main basic principles, with hyper-connected walking trails as well as sky trains and subways to keep the land free, constant proportions between green land and built areas, limitless growth by linking new walkable units, and a clear algorithm that allows planners to foster intentional development.

The academic world of urbanism has long been wary of planning, more focused on the invisible hand leading the charge. After his initial uneasiness, D’Acci now sees the importance in governments laying the groundwork, but still allowing for innovation from private industry.

Consider the new development at Toronto’s former Downsview Airport, where the 520-acre project will see 50,000 to 80,000 residential units linked by the old airport runway, with parks, community facilities, and businesses all accessible to larger transit options such as the subway.

“What I hope is that as we have newer populations coming in, we finally can start making this happen because to change existing cities is almost impossible,” he said. “There are functions you can change but not on a big scale. But with an incoming population, with new developments, we have an opportunity to apply this.”

Not all are in favour.

Conspiracy theories have also simultaneously developed, with some arguing the concept is an attempt for greater surveillance, and others likening it to dystopian, isolated districts where citizens will no longer be able to freely travel.

Interconnectivity is the key, said Rod Regier, Waterloo Region’s commissioner of planning and development.

Cycling lanes are expanding — a process that has not gone without its detractors — and the region is also investing heavily in light rail, with the next stage set to link Cambridge to the network.

“It is risky from a public policy perspective, because I think it is easy to look at this and say that we’re not like Europe. But most of Europe is not like most of Europe.”

At a conference in Vienna discussing how to integrate better modes of transit, University of Waterloo’s Troy Glover was struck at the universality of the issue.

“I was really taken aback at these European planners discussing the challenges of trying to build in walkability and cycling in their cities. I thought: ‘What? We look to you for these inspirations and ideas.’”

Like Canada, many cities across Europe are seeing massive population growth, largely on the backs of immigration.

It offers incredible opportunity to build new neighbourhoods, but Glover cautions against making the same mistakes as the past.

“At the end of the day, we have to remember that we want to build neighbourhoods that are actually worth living in,” he said.