I recently read a colleague’s article advocating for 15-minute cities. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of having everything I need within 15 minutes of me, but I don’t think it’s everything it’s cracked up to be.
First of all, I love my long drives. I used to take public transit everywhere, so the privilege of now having a car is a big deal for me. I have cut my average travel time from an hour and a half to just 30 minutes. Even when I did take the bus, it wasn’t all that bad — minus the occasional wacko or that one person who thinks the bus is the place to have a loud and public lover’s quarrel over the phone.
But those hours on the bus, and now my traffic-filled trips to campus gave and continue to give me time to enjoy podcasts, listen to music on full blast, roll my windows down to embrace the sunshine, and sometimes, they give me the chance to sit in silence. I drive to the Abbotsford campus from my home in Surrey and I get to see the shift of city to farmland, all with the impeccable backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. British Columbia is in fact quite beautiful, and I do find myself thinking, yeah, this is it. This is why people stayed here.
I could go on for pages about my love for being able to sit in my car and just be, but it’d be more practical to talk about the realities of 15-minute cities. For me, the concept of a 15-minute city is an urban development plan that would end up displacing me from my home — again. The idea of it seems great when I think about having everything I could need nearby, and that I would be able to enjoy more time with my family rather than spending it on the road, but then I think about what has to happen for that sort of life to exist.
Gentrification: a word full of stigma and concern. At the end of the day, it just means taking a place and developing it for the better, but unfortunately, this ends up displacing people a lot of the time. A 15-minute city means higher population density and changing the way our cities work in their entirety. In “Transformation or Gentrification? The Hazy Politics of the 15-Minute City,” Joe Herbert warns against “a capitalist, growth-driven model of the 15-minute city” that could “exacerbate rather than reduce urban inequalities and ecological impacts.” Left to its own devices, we could see a widespread increase in rents, driving out poorer tenants.
One of the largest factors in a rent price is property value. But what makes a property value high? It’s based on a variety of points, with one of the main ones being the access to resources. For example, if we were to analyze the local area of the Greater Vancouver Area, we would see the rent prices are the highest in areas that are high density, with necessities nearby. To me, this is a clear sign that if my current neighbourhood were to adopt the 15-minute city lifestyle, that I would have to move to a new neighbourhood simply because the cost of living in such a neighbourhood would still be too high, even if I no longer had to pay for a car.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have 15-minute cities, I just think how we go about implementing them needs to be done carefully and mindfully of the people currently living in the area. Before we go about shifting entire neighbourhoods, it would be better to focus on giving people that already live there the ability to continue living there with the shift toward a walkable city life.
Emmaline is working on her BA and ambitions to become an English teacher. They always say, those who cannot do, teach. She spends her free time buying, reading, and hoarding books with the hope that one day she will have no furniture and instead only have piles of books.