Where the 15-Minute City Went Wrong
The Promise of the 15-Minute City
The Promise of the 15-Minute City
In 2023, my focus was deeply invested in understanding the modern conception of ‘the self,’ exploring how this conception interacts with public life, our institutions, and with the intangible. This journey unveiled the complex ways in which these personal and societal dimensions intertwine, giving rise to the varied social articulations that define our everyday experiences.
Amidst this exploration, the bizarre 15-minute city backlash occurred and captured my attention, as it seemed to me to be utterly incoherent. The 15-minute city is a straightforward concept emerging from the fields of urban planning and sustainability, that presents a model to improve urban life by increasing our freedom through a reduction in the acquisition of resources needed for modern living.
This seeming straightforward endeavor however resulted in an unexpected and profound backlash from the more conservative end of the political spectrum, who argued that the 15-minute city was actually a plot designed to reduce our freedom and contain individuals in a dystopian urban prison. This response baffled proponents of the 15-minute city, and many proponents instead of looking beneath the aestheticized rhetoric to find a thread of intelligibility, retrenched into their corner, and engaged in the typical ‘othering’ performatives.
I am sympathetic to this response. However, I believe there is a profound insight to be gained from stepping away from the rhetoric, and teasing out a possible coherent narrative that informs the actions of the opponents to the 15-minute city. In order to explicate my thoughts on this I am needing to jump into some philosophical terminology.
The 15-Minute City and Modern Ontologies
The crux of the debate surrounding the 15-minute city lies in two contrasting ontological interpretations of ‘the good life.’ In contemporary understanding, ‘the good life’ is often associated with the primacy of the individual, distinct from pre-modern, hierarchically assigned societal roles. This modern interpretation posits success — The Good Life — as largely hinged on the acquisition of material resources. Here, success is viewed in isolation from a collective societal context, where both material and social capital become the yardsticks for an ever-expanding scope of personal achievement and attainability.
Central to this modern ontology is a dynamic stabilization process, fundamentally anchored in the logics of capitalism. Capitalism, in its contemporary form, necessitates not just resource acquisition but an escalating efficiency in production over time. This imperative for increased output within the same unit of time, is central to the stabilizing forces that keeps the spinner, our society, stable and upright. Without these efficiency gains, the system will lose balance and begin to wobble. The relentless drive for more productivity per unit of time thus becomes the defining ontology of modernity — it becomes an absolute.
Have you ever noticed the paradox where each new technological advancement, designed to save you time, only intensifies the pressure to achieve more in less time? This reflects our lived experience within this demanding ontology — just one more app to better organize your life, one more diet to optimize your hustle. Any deviation from this trajectory of increasing efficiency introduces disequilibrium, leading to social destabilization and material detriment. This scenario firmly entrenches all aspects of our social orientation, both spiritual and material, within the confines of this dynamic stabilization process.
The Inverted Ontology of the 15-Minute City
However, the 15-minute city model introduces a radical reimagining of ‘the good life.’ In this vision, stability is no longer anchored to the ontological absolute of continuous resource and efficiency gains. Instead, this relationship is ingeniously inverted: the model proposes that more can be achieved with less resource acquisition. This inversion, however, stands in stark contrast to, and is fundamentally incompatible with, the established ontological construct of modernity we’ve outlined above.
This philosophical pivot invites us to reexamine our metrics for assessing life’s quality. Traditionally, in our prevailing social system, the quality of life is invariably measured against the absolute of perpetual resource gathering and efficiency gains. This metric is so deeply ingrained that it shapes the very fabric of our institutions and personal identities. From the outset of our individual lives, we are inculcated into an ontology where the expectation is a continuous increase in our horizons of acquisition, and correspondingly, our acquisition per unit of time. Our societal reward systems, too, are intricately aligned with this relentless pursuit of more.
In contrast, the 15-minute city model challenges this paradigm by decoupling quality of life from the incessant need for more. It posits that a fulfilling life can be achieved through more sustainable, less resource-intensive means, thereby questioning the very foundations upon which modernity’s definition of success and stability are built. This model does not merely disrupt the prevailing ontology; it obliterates it, dissolving what has become a primal drive for the modern subject.
By postulating the feasibility of acquiring more with less, the 15-minute city renders the previous absolute of constant resource acquisition obsolete. In its place, it erects an inverse relationship between resources and freedom. However, this new ontology introduces a profound anxiety, as it radically deviates from the foundational logic of modernity that equates constant resource acquisition with stability — a principle that is as spiritually influential as it is ontologically embedded. This challenges not only our material practices but necessitates a reevaluation of our spiritual and existential bearings.
Seeking New Spiritual Language: The 15-Minute City’s Challenge to Contemporary Identity
The modern self is unable to comprehend the ontological shift heralded by the 15-minute city for it lacks the necessary vocabulary and corresponding narratives. This should appear obvious as this stems from the fact that, over the last four centuries, the modern self has been meticulously molded to align actions and decisions within an ontology where more is equated with stability (and self-worth). This alignment has defined our spiritual identity as it is embedded within this materialist orientation. The spiritual-self however has been overshadowed in this configuration, its voice and influence severely diminished by a relentless focus on material accumulation and efficiency. This can explain our bafflement when presented with the profound backlash to the 15-minute city, as these processes have been naturalized and submerged within the background of our daily lives. These normative arrangements are so ingrained and ubiquitous we fail to recognize their construction and influence.
The 15-minute city, by proposing an alternative framework, offers a radical expansion of genuine choices, bringing into stark relief the long-naturalized norms and logics of our societal structures. It forces many to confront, perhaps for the first time, the realization that what has been deemed necessary and immutable is, in fact, a series of contingent choices made unwittingly every day. This revelation not only challenges our material practices but also calls for a profound reevaluation of our spiritual frameworks. In this new light, the habitual pursuit of more is seen not as an absolute necessity, but as one option among many, opening up a space for reimagining our relationship with resources, community, and the very concept of stability.
But the very space that is opened by the 15-minute city concept resembles an Abyss, a profound expanse from which we can either extract limitless knowledge, providing essential spiritual and material scaffolding, or find ourselves paralyzed with terror - now confronted with the Abyss where once stood the absolute. For many, this represents the first time their choices and habits are not dictated by this absolute; the possibilities can only be realized by directly engaging with the Abyss. This engagement is daunting, as we currently lack the spiritual resources necessary to navigate coherently within this new ontology. It’s a paradigm shift that requires us to develop new ways of understanding and interacting with our world, transforming how we conceive of community, stability, and personal fulfillment.
Crafting New Narratives: The Role of Pragmatism in Providing The Necessary Vocabulary
How, then, do we commence the work of constructing the vocabularies and narratives needed for this profound transition? The principles of Pragmatism, as articulated by American thinkers like John Dewey and William James, along with contemporary pragmatists such as Gregory Pappas, Carolyn Pedwell, and Kim Diaz, provide invaluable resources in this endeavor. Their work lays the foundation for creating new social articulations and ontologies, essential for making transformative urban planning projects like the 15-minute city comprehensible and accessible to the modern self. With its American origins (The work of Pappas, and Diaz show all the Americas), Pragmatism is uniquely positioned to guide the development of cross-disciplinary frameworks. These frameworks are crucial as we strive to bridge the gap between the established and the emerging, transforming the unfamiliar into the familiar and the unknown into the understood. The pragmatist approach, with its emphasis on practical consequences and making sense of individual actions within a pluralistic public, can help us forge the narratives and tools needed to navigate and embrace the changes brought by concepts like the 15-minute city.
Recognizing that the reactions from those opposed to the 15-minute city within the current ontological framework is rationally articulated, is essential. This takes a level of intellectual humility, a central tenet of Pragmatism. The visceral reactions against the 15-minute city stem from a deeply ingrained understanding of our world that has been in the making for over the last four centuries. As we move forward, it’s imperative that those advocating for a world not predicated on incessant resource consumption for social stability to advance the necessary metaphysical and spiritual work so as to make legible this new ontology. We must build frameworks and projects that can translate new habits and conceptions of the good life into terms that resonant and motivate. This endeavor is not just about changing physical spaces but about evolving the very way we think, feel, and exist in our communities.