[blensor]

Is the premise of 15-minute cities really that every final destination is walkable within 15 minutes or that you can reach everything you need within 15 minutes?

If I live in a big city with good public transport and have most daily need things walkable within 15 minutes and good public transport connections also within 15 minutes then I can benefit from opportunities that are farther away while also having the locality of the rest of the day to day things.

That's what I personally would consider a 15-minute city

[phoronixrly]

Yeah, I don't understand why this person makes it sound like a 15-minute city is some sort of a jail, or an island you can't get in a car and drive out of should a need arise...

[mrhottakes]

That's how conservatives criticize the concept. It's a conservative economist making a conservative ideological argument.

[lo_zamoyski]

Except it's not really conservative. What often gets called "conservatism" is very much just a variation of some form of liberalism. (Republicans in the US aren't conservative either, not in any meaningful sense.)

Conservatism favors community life, not hyper-individualist atomism. New Urbanism and similar architectural movements[0] are heavily conservative in substance. This is actually an area where I suspect some of the Left and some of the Right can cooperate, and should, because there is enough agreement, at least where the need for sane urban planning is concerned. There is nothing conservative about sprawl and suburbs.

"15 minute city" is just a synonym for neighborhood, effectively. If you can't get most daily things done within a 15 min radius, then guess what? You don't have a neighborhood. You have an internment camp. Hyper-individualism has no need for neighborhoods or polities, because it conceives of human beings as atomized consumers.

[0] https://cdnc.heyzine.com/flip-book/pdf/44640c2c786250e3a426d...