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While the global smart city industry trades in the digital technologies enumerated in the previous chapter (and many others), it has also embraced and promoted (without irony) a utopian vision of the twenty-first-century metropolis – the tech sector’s rebuttal to Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller set in the hellscape of the Los Angeles of 2019.
Sidewalk Labs was by no means the only company to promote the notion that the technologically hyper-advanced city could solve many of the world’s most intractable urban problems, from carbon emissions to traffic congestion and public safety. Thousands of firms of all sizes have crowded into this fast-growing tech subsector, whose revenues could grow to anywhere from US$300 billion annually to over US$2 trillion, according to various estimates.
Many of these companies have employed, in their marketing materials, the visual and promotional language of cool urbanism and science-fiction futurism. The aisles of smart city trade shows are filled with glimmering digital maps, god’s-eye renderings, and mesmerizing data visualizations, all meant to entice customers – most of whom work for cities or regions, or for property developers – to imagine that the city, for all its chaos and complexity, can actually be optimized, like a machine.
The idea has a beguiling simplicity at its core: that with enough connected sensors taking the city’s pulse, and with sufficiently powerful information processing capacity for digesting all that raw data, smart city technology can not only ‘see’ what’s happening in urban space at any given time, but also automatically adjust the dials, so to speak. A brain responding to the body’s signals. A car engine tweaked to run at peak efficiency. A company whose products align perfectly to its customers desires. The utopian fantasy is that cities are potentially knowable, thanks to the omniscience of technologies that also purport to play the role of oracle, predicting the future, in all its granularity, and ordering up the necessary course corrections along the way.
Yet the relentless serendipity of cities is, as the joke goes, a feature, not a bug – the messy energy that spurs social movements, scientific breakthroughs, cultural achievements, and so on. In places with millions of people living in close proximity, all of them making countless choices each day, there’s more than a little hubris in the hegemonistic assumption that the bewilderingly tangled networks and systems of the city can somehow be mastered.
The neo-liberal smart city agenda, however, addresses itself to the flip side of the disordered urban world – to the institutions and commercial or political forces that want cities to be not only ordered and livable, but also attuned to the needs of business.
The practical justifications that inform city planning are familiar to anyone who’s followed a neighbourhood development fight or the complicated approvals processes required to create some new amenity, like light-rail transit or a park. Cities seek to regulate growth because they also have to manage infrastructure, like sewers and roads, while providing adequate housing and services. Some types of buildings interfere with others, which is why factories tend not to be next to residential neighbourhoods. Public spaces are necessary for livability, but they can also add or detract from private property. Cities need areas where people work, raise families, shop, play. For all these reasons and many more, modern cities plan, and are planned, to manage growth, to provide quality of life, to promote economic activity, etc.
For thousands of years, cities weren’t ‘planned’ in any way that we’d recognize, and certainly not with the aid of information-gathering technology. Rather, they spilled out of castle walls, huddled on the crests of hills, or sprang up around the port areas situated near ship-friendly harbours. Monarchs commanded the construction of large communal or ceremonial zones, like agoras or temples, while high priests advised on laying out cities in patterns that would please a deity. ‘In many ancient cultures,’ writes architectural historian Spiro Kostof in The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, ‘the city on earth was supposed to represent a celestial model which it was extremely important to reproduce accurately.’ Features like orientation, symmetry, and dimension ‘had to be observed,’ he adds. ‘Which in turn meant an artificial layout, often of some geometric purity’ (Kostof 1991, 34).
For example, in Beijing, which became the capital of the Ming Dynasty in 1421, the emperor relied on an ancient Chinese text known as the ‘Kao Gong Ji’ – a compendium of technologies described as the oldest municipal planning document. That juncture marked the development of the Forbidden City, the 180-acre walled enclave that marks Beijing’s political centre of gravity. ‘It was a means of legitimising their rule,’ Toby Lincoln, lecturer in Chinese Urban History at the University of Leicester, told the Guardian in 2016. ‘By explicitly drawing on this ancient manual of rites, their new capital city used divine numerology and ritual to express the power of the ruling elite in physical space’ (Wainwright).
Other pre-modern instances of municipal land-use regulation sought to control urban populations. In 1516, for example, Venice’s administrative council designated a ‘ghetto’ – the first of its kind – specifically for Jews, who had long been present in the city. Venetian administrators over three centuries had already segmented the city into districts organized around uses, including wards specifically for shipbuilding, glass-making, and other proto-industrial activities. ‘[T]hese were the first large scale industrial areas to be set apart from the mixed uses of the ordinary medieval city,’ wrote Lewis Mumford in The City in History. ‘[T]he Venetians, no doubt inadvertently, invented a new type of city, based on the differentiation and zoning of urban functions, separated by traffic ways and open spaces’ (Mumford 1961, 323).
The law that established the Jewish ghetto, however, was anything but inadvertent. It decreed that Venice’s Jews could live and work only within a newly designated enclave, where they could engage in commercial activities like moneylending and pawnbrokering, and that would be locked at night. The move, according to a 2017 history by Dana Katz, allowed the city to profit from the presence of Jewish financing activity while segregating Jews from Venice’s Christian majority. ‘According to the senatorial decree,’ Katz writes, ‘ghetto enclosure was necessary to avoid the improprieties and illegalities that surfaced when Jews spread throughout the city.’
Meanwhile, imperial powers like England and Spain exported urban design schemata to colonial outposts in the Americas and Asia. ‘When the Spaniards settled in Manila [in 1571],’ according to an overview of planning and development in the sprawling Philippine capital, ‘they evolved ideas for town planning based on the Italian Renaissance theorists that emphasized the plaza complex in city development. The idea of town planning was codified in ordinances promulgated by King Philip II whereby guidelines for site selection, layout and dimensions of squares and streets and other land uses were provided.’
Surveyed street grids continued to serve as an organizing principle for centuries and can be understood as a technological process for the production of urban space, sometimes imposed by colonial authorities. In New York, the 1811 Commissioner’s Plan carved up rural Manhattan (north of Canal Street) into a vast cross-hatching of streets and avenues in anticipation of future development and commercial activity. As Kostof points out, the commissioners didn’t envision open spaces; Central Park came several decades later, when landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted made the case that working people living in crowded conditions required access to natural outdoor spaces for health.
Until the late nineteenth century, planning as currently practised simply wasn’t part of urban life or municipal governance, much less recognized as a profession. But then something changed.
In many cities around the world, two types of urban development became ubiquitous in the decades after World War II, initially in North America and Europe, and then in many other regions in the thirty years since global trade replaced the Cold War as the dominant framework of international relations.
One was the mass production of the high-rise apartment building, often modernist slab towers situated in the midst of an apron of open space. These apartment complexes sprung up within and on the edges of many big cities in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, and parts of Asia from the 1960s onward. Dense, yet often dehumanizing because of their scale, ‘slab’ apartment blocks were constructed in some cases by public housing agencies to provide subsidized accommodation. They also became destinations for millions of migrants, both from rural areas in search of economic opportunity and as immigrants or refugees fleeing strife in their home countries. Dubbed ‘arrival cities’ by journalist Doug Saunders, they replaced the overcrowded immigrant or working-class ghettos that characterized many industrial cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The second form enabled the growing middle class to move into suburban enclaves. Low-density, low-rise subdivisions consisting almost entirely of single-family homes on spacious properties with front and backyards, setbacks, and winding streets. Residential suburbs, served by arterial roads and shopping malls, included a wide range of dwellings, from modest bungalows to extravagant mansions. Yet they shared some basic characteristics: organized around private property, they tended to be situated away from industrial or commercial centres and, for the most part, required residents to own private vehicles to access almost all types of public and commercial services. In many parts of the world, exclusive suburban subdivisions are sometimes gated to protect their exclusivity and support the property values of the people who live inside the walls.
The rapid spread of both of these types of urban forms depended on the emergence of a handful of technologies: steel-frame construction, elevators, the mass production of inexpensive building materials, and private automobiles, as well as the maturation of civil engineering techniques that allowed municipal services to extend outward into the hinterland at the edges of older urban areas.
Neighbourhoods in many global cities, from Istanbul to Copenhagen to Rio de Janeiro, are a mishmash of smaller dwellings alongside low- to mid-rise apartment blocks that hug the street grid, coexisting with commercial activity. Yet the proliferation of towers and subdivisions can be traced to the utopian ideas of a handful of reformers who sought to remedy the social and health crises of the nineteenth- century industrial city and the extreme congestion of its early twentieth-century descendant. Utopian urbanism anticipates the emergence of the smart city movement, with its rationalist promise of using technology to eradicate the ills of the city while optimizing its economic and social prospects.
Le Corbusier developed the template for a tower-in-the-park in response to his deep dislike of the chaotic environment of crowded Parisian neighbourhoods. Enumerating his impressions of Manhattan in his 1947 book When the Cathedrals Were White, he bemoaned the sight of hundreds of traffic lights during his highly publicized visits to the city in the 1930s. ‘I was irritated, depressed, made ill by them,’ he wrote. ‘There can be no salvation – no more for New York than for Paris – if measures are not taken soon which take into consideration the scale established by the automobile’ (Le Corbusier, 69).
To architects, Le Corbusier was one of the twentieth century’s pioneering designers, known for sleek modernist homes and apartment buildings, as well as the dramatic concrete chapel known as Notre Dame du Haut, in Ronchamp, France, completed in 1955. He described his residential designs as ‘machines for living in’ in his 1927 manifesto, ‘Towards a New Architecture.’
Beyond architecture, Le Corbusier’s influence stemmed from his ideas about urban redevelopment, particularly in Paris. As an alternative to the warren-like streets of the Right Bank and the overwhelming traffic on Paris’s wide boulevards, Le Corbusier formulated, during the early 1930s, a manifesto for a ‘radiant city.’ It featured soaring cruciform apartment towers set out in megablocks and delineated by a grid of superhighways. The apartment complexes would each be surrounded by green space, with the pedestrian realm separated from the highways that would traverse central Paris. His famous sketches, widely circulated during the 1930s, are rigorously symmetrical, evincing not only the god’s-eye perspective, but also his mistrust of the disorderly, organic realm of the city street.
The context is critical. Le Corbusier developed and energetically promoted his utopian vision of the Radiant City at a time when radical social movements had taken hold in many places beyond the Soviet Union. In Berlin during the Weimar Republic, which held power precariously in Germany from 1919 to 1933, left-leaning politics intersected with socialist design movements, such as Bauhaus, the rise of avant-garde art, and the release of zeitgeist films, like Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, both dystopic cinematic renderings of the mechanistic city of the future.
In Vienna, meanwhile, a slate of Social Democrats, backed by trade unions, had taken control of city council in 1919 and pushed through an ambitious program of public housing, which came to be known as ‘Red Vienna’ and was financed by taxes on the rich. The city developed tens of thousands of units of subsidized apartments in large blocks, all equipped with socialized amenities like daycares, libraries, recreation centres, theatres, and even city-run cafés. The Red Vienna program was a response to critical housing shortages, poverty, and overcrowding that festered as the city industrialized.
‘Though only one of several institutions designed to reshape the social and economic infrastructure of the city along socialist lines, the housing, as a locus for so many of the municipality’s communal organizations and facilities, was the nexus of Red Vienna’s institutions and the spatial embodiment of its communitarian and pedagogic ideals,’ wrote Harvard urban and planning historian Eve Blau in her 1999 survey of the architecture of Red Vienna (Blau, 44).
Le Corbusier’s planning ideas were grounded in two basic assumptions about urban planning: one, that automobile traffic had to be rigidly segregated from other forms of street life and urban forms; and two, that autocratic administrators would be able to wield the power needed to impose drastic changes that would sweep aside the clamour and poverty of the older city. (Later, his sympathy for the Vichy regime in occupied France and the authoritarian cast of his thinking caused some early adherents to reject his ideas.)
In Paris, the focus of his attention, there was precedent for sweeping, dirigiste redevelopment. Beginning in the 1850s, von Haussmann embarked on an extremely ambitious reconstruction of central Paris. ‘The key to Haussmann’s success lay in his relationship to the emperor, with whom he was in almost daily contact,’ writes planning historian Peter Hall in Cities in Civilization (716). He ordered the demolition of sprawling tracts of medieval housing in favour of the grand boulevards lined with elegant apartments that give Paris its distinctive look. The program involved extensive investment in public works like sewers and watermains. Hall characterizes the scale of von Haussmann’s plan as ‘unprecedented’ in human history.
Unlike von Haussmann, Le Corbusier didn’t see his Radiant City plans for Paris adopted as he had envisioned, although in the post-WWII era, large-scale demolition in central Paris and the construction of high-rise social housing projects in the suburbs (‘banlieue’) suggest the influence of his ideas. Le Corbusier also found receptive followers in Brasília, the new capital of Brazil that was built (from scratch) according to the kinds of modernist design and planning ideas that formed the core of his top-down utopianism.
Critics have pointed out other ironies in the way that Le Corbusier’s urbanism found expression in the real world. As David Pinder comments, ‘Ideas that were intended to rush in a new space and way of life now became, through a tragic twist, a means to bolster the prestige of corporate and bureaucratic clients as well as to provide predominantly cheap and mass-produced solutions to meet pressing housing needs’ (Pinder 2005, 140).
The twentieth century’s other profoundly influential utopian planning ideology predates Le Corbusier, although the two philosophies worked together and were enabled by the emergence of transformational technologies. Together, they altered the course of post-WWII urban development in many parts of the world.
The Garden City movement was the brainchild of a British planner named Ebenezer Howard. His eponymous 1898 treatise outlined the conceptual thinking behind a set of urban planning reforms that he saw as a means of confronting the alienation of industrial cities, with their slums, noise, and pollution, among many other ills. Howard argued that the remedy to urban overcrowding was the development of new and meticulously planned suburban satellites, where residential and industrial uses were strictly separated from one another, with civic amenities – parks, libraries, etc. – situated at the symbolic and physical focal point.
‘Howard asserted that his programme was not anti-urban but rather based on a “balanced” way of living,’ observed University of London geographer David Pinder in Visions of the City, a 2005 study of urban utopias. ‘This involved building anew on fresh ground. He wrote: “Order and beauty rather than chaos and ugliness: the needs of the whole people rather than the supposed interests of a few will be the governing elements in determining the ground plan of the city”’ (36).
Howard was by no means the father of suburbanization; as Pinder points out, Howard acknowledged earlier sources of inspiration, including Thomas More’s Utopia as well as the ideas of other nineteenth-century social reformers. Emerging real estate trends also played a role. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the members of the newly affluent merchant and industrialist classes had begun to decamp from centres of dense cities like London, where rich and poor had lived and worked cheek by jowl for generations. Those who could afford it built large homes and estates on the outskirts, with the (male) breadwinner commuting into the commercial centre. While these exurban villas were initially used as weekend or vacation retreats, they evolved into full-time residences for the families of the well-to-do and then the striving middle classes. The out-migration by those with means, writes historian Robert Fishman in Bourgeois Utopias, represented an organic response to the stresses of city life, yet it also suggested other social dynamics, such as the assertion of class.
The new suburban mansions, for example, were often adorned with gothic details, he observes. ‘This appropriation of aristocratic symbolism by the industrial bourgeoisie is not surprising if one considers that suburbia was not “a retreat from urban society and its problems” but a new way of expressing dominance within that society.’
The accelerating spatial segregation served as a physical manifestation of the class divides that industrialization had sparked, Fishman continues. ‘As workers and their factories were thus confined [in the core], the modern factory zone came into being. Once the “breezy heights” were firmly in the possession of the middle class, factories and their workers were increasingly crowded into the zone between the high land values of the core and the privileged residential zones at the outskirts’ (82).
Both Howard and Le Corbusier actively promoted their respective philosophies of the city through international networks of architects, social reformers, political organizations, and the media. Prescriptions from other utopian-minded thinkers also surfaced. In 1932, for example, architect Frank Lloyd Wright proposed ‘Broadacre City,’ a radically decentralized and agrarian conception of modern life that explicitly rejected urban and suburban forms, as well as the coarsening influences of big-city capitalism. (His architectural oeuvre included modestly scaled ‘Usonian’ houses geared toward middle-class families, which heavily influenced suburban residential design in the post-WWII era.)
The adherents of the early ‘town planning’ movement, which gained momentum after the turn of the century, drew their inspiration from sources like the Garden City advocates, as well as related ‘progressivist’ campaigns to improve public sanitation and purge corruption from municipal government. Some of the first municipal planners, in fact, subscribed to a collectivist, radical vision of government and rejected the voracious types of laissez-faire capitalism that had produced enormous banking, railroad, and manufacturing fortunes.
By the 1920s and 1930s, planning had become an established function of municipal government. Modern cities, in turn, no longer resembled the nightmarish factory towns that had outraged (or inspired) earlier generations of radicals and reformers. Grade-separated highways were built in response to the growing popularity of the privately owned automobile as well as downtown traffic congestion. Sanitary conditions had improved, as had public health practices, like pasteurization. Skyscrapers were sprouting in downtowns while railroad and streetcar suburbs had grown up around the stations of the commuter rail lines radiating out of downtowns. As well, the earliest purpose-built Garden City suburbs – places like Letchworth, in England outside London, and Radburn, New Jersey, both featuring tree-lined, curving streets and stately homes on large lots – had spurred a new type of real estate speculation focused on the domestic needs and consumer desires of middle-class families.
The writer H. G. Wells, as Fishman points out, had anticipated these dynamics as early as 1901. In an essay entitled ‘The Probable Diffusion of Great Cities,’ he commented that urban society was ‘in the early phase of a great development of centrifugal possibilities.’ The outward push of cities, Wells observed, was directly connected to the emergence of new modes of transportation that allowed people to travel ever farther afield for their daily routines.
‘Wells’ and Wright’s prophecies constitute a remarkable insight into the decentralizing tendencies of modern technology and society,’ Fishman comments. ‘Both were presented in utopian form, an image of the future presented as somehow “inevitable” yet without any sustained attention to how it would actually be achieved’ (189).
While the rapid evolution of transportation technology clearly played a major role in the growth of twentieth-century cities, so too did some of the ideas deeply embedded in the thinking of Howard, Le Corbusier, and others. They rejected the chaotic world of the old city in favour of orderly urban areas – both in the core and on the periphery – where land uses could be strictly regulated and separated from one another, linked by networks of roads and highways.
The notion of separating uses wasn’t entirely new: ancient and medieval cities had areas set aside specifically for military, ceremonial, or commercial activities. But in the modern context of the democratic nation-state, zoning laws became the practical tool for implementing the utopian ideals expressed by Howard, Le Corbusier, and others. Indeed, zoning as a mode of municipal rule-making is scarcely a century old, and evolved from the administration of public works. Zoning policies allowed city officials to impose order on disorderly urban environments and therefore to translate the reformers’ highlevel principles into regulation. The resulting ordinances, bylaws, and official plans demarcated what could happen with a particular piece of land – its uses, the allowable heights and densities of buildings, the size of lots, the setbacks from streets or property lines, and so on.
Despite the egalitarian values espoused by utopian urbanists, the earliest land-use rules did little to improve the lives of the working class or the very poor – quite the contrary. By codifying what would not be permitted – e.g., apartment buildings or small lots – zoning regulations served to exclude racialized minorities and played a devastating role in isolating poor Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods in American cities. Such land-use tools could further be deployed as instruments of social engineering, e.g., effectively ensuring that lowrise residential areas were highly gendered/domesticated zones that contained housing and services exclusively for families with children.
Other scholars have pointed out the contradictions inherent in municipal planning. As Rutgers University urban studies scholar Michael Lang observed in a 2010 paper, ‘It has been noted that modern town planning, once a nexus of radical and progressive theory and practice, has been transformed to a means of developing and delivering a series of professional techniques appropriate to the maintenance of the prevailing capitalist system’ (Lang 2010).
During the post-WWII decades, municipal officials overseeing suburban development and the construction of greenfield subdivisions embraced the principle of rigorously separating industrial, commercial, and residential land uses. By that point, urbanist critics like Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford were attacking the technocratic orthodoxies of modernist planning, which depended heavily on cars and the demolition of working-class neighbourhoods to make way for dehumanizing public housing complexes – the cheaped-out offspring of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City – and highways linking subdivisions to central business districts.
Since the 1960s, in fact, a previously unknown form of urban conflict and politics surfaced in big cities, revolving around disputes over land-use policies. Jacobs fronted grassroots movements against highway construction and top-down slum clearance programs packaged as ‘urban renewal.’ Meanwhile, the backlash to seemingly limitless suburban sprawl, which had been driven by demographics, postwar prosperity, and, in the U.S., ‘white flight,’ exported congestion and car dependence to the urban fringes while ratcheting up the cost of municipal infrastructure.
Beginning in the late 1970s, as artists and young people began to reclaim hollowed-out downtowns and abandoned industrial buildings, gentrification and NIMBYism came to define the contours of land-use planning politics – a dynamic that persists to this day.
Fast-growing cities have responded in many ways, enacting regulations meant to contain sprawl, investing in rapid transit infrastructure, up-zoning residential areas to allow for more density and approving intensification policies for core areas. Along the way, municipalities that had, for decades, rigorously enforced the separation of uses began to approve ‘mixed-use’ development, a somewhat new term for a very old urban idea, which is that people can live in the same areas where shops, businesses, and offices are located, as is the case in the mega-cities in the global south as well as most of Europe.
Yet intensification and mixed-use planning have posed tough questions for cities that were accustomed to a more orderly approach to land use. Planners have to show that the additional growth won’t overwhelm existing urban infrastructure systems. Some residents will balk at the prospect of change and uncertainty, while others demand access to better housing and services. The proliferation of sophisticated digital planning tools is a technological response to the political and bureaucratic friction generated by the trend toward denser and more vertical urban neighbourhoods.
There’s a certain irony in the way this story has evolved. Many cities had sought to banish or severely limit the mixing of land uses in part to address the environmental and social crises of overcrowded industrial cities. In so doing, postwar metropolitan regions swapped out the problems associated with extreme density for the problems that flow from extreme sprawl.
The utopian urbanism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have had more influence because most societies at the time were not predominantly urban, so architects and planners and critics had the latitude to conjure up the ideal future metropolis.6 However, the great waves of urbanization that began in the early twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first have produced cities and mega-regions with no historical precedent whatsoever. Mass migration is dramatically reshaping the social and cultural fabric of cities of all sizes. And torrents of highly mobile global capital have rapidly altered urban form and development around the world, forcing booming cities and their planners to look to land-use regulation as a means of managing growth in ways that are socially and environmentally sustainable.
In this context, the prevailing ideas around contemporary urban growth have tended to be anything but utopian, focusing instead on more grounded goals like promoting ‘creative cities,’ economic ‘clusters,’ or social housing programs designed to reduce income inequality. Some planners, like Denmark’s Jan Gehl and New York’s transporation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, fought to create more pedestrian-friendly spaces and bike lanes in recognition of the twinned demands of density and climate change. Others predicted that so-called ‘edge cities’ – suburban satellites that attracted not just home builders but all kinds of economic activity – would define the urban future. For a brief time in the early 2010s, an American management professor had some success promoting his concept of an ‘aerotropolis,’ which envisioned cities rearranging themselves around major hub airports linked to adjacent business parks filled with companies that made and shipped goods. In the years since, smart city advocates and tech firms, as we’ll see in later chapters, have sought to solve the problems of twenty-first-century cities with digital tools.
Urban utopians, however, haven’t abandoned the intellectual playing field. In the 1990s, a school of American architects and planners led by Peter Calthorpe and Andrés Duany set to work promoting ‘New Urbanism,’ an approach to town planning that more or less explicitly evoked Howard’s ideas. But when New Urbanism found its way into the plans of real estate developers, it quickly degenerated into little more than high-end neo-traditional residential architecture in exclusive new-build communities.
In the fall of 2021, an e-commerce billionaire named Marc Lore unveiled plans to build a ‘utopian megalopolis’ on 50,000 as-yet-undeveloped acres somewhere in the U.S. southwest. Dubbed by one academic as an example of ‘unicorn planning’ for its tabula rasa approach to city-building, ‘Telosa’ will be fitted out with smart technology and eventually grow to 5 million residents. Lore also wants it to be governed by a non-profit foundation that would reduce inequality by reinvesting taxes on rising land prices into social services.
‘If you went into the desert where the land was worth nothing, or very little, and you created a foundation that owned the land, and people moved there and tax dollars built infrastructure and we built one of the greatest cities in the world, the foundation could be worth a trillion dollars,’ Lore told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. ‘And if the foundation’s mission was to take the appreciation of the land and give it back to the citizens in the form of medicine, education, affordable housing, social services: Wow, that’s it!’ (Brustein 2021).
Meanwhile, in Europe, the concept of the ‘fifteen-minute city’ – first introduced in 2015 by a Franco-Colombian academic named Carlos Moreno – has gained currency among some urbanists and can be described as a utopian response to the stresses of twenty-first-century cities in the era of climate change. Moreno’s idea, popularized via a seven-minute TED Talk, is that all city-dwellers should be able to access the majority of their needs – markets, health care, schools, recreation, culture, etc. – within a fifteen-minute walk or bike ride of their homes as a means of building local communities and reducing car dependency. Moreno’s thinking – which has been attacked as elitist – was widely discussed during the early months of the pandemic, when many people were working from home.
The fifteen-minute city’s best-known disciple is Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo (as of 2022), who moved to severely restrict car traffic during the COVID-19 crisis. Moreno’s vision, however, has found adherents beyond the French capital, including the international network of climate-focused cities that calls itself the C-40. As the online architectural publication Dezeen reported, ‘Moreno’s framework, which can be adapted to suit local cultures and needs, has already informed urban planning in cities such as Buenos Aires, Chengdu and Melbourne.’
Moreno, like Le Corbusier a century earlier, regards cars as anathema to healthy and livable cities. In his view, there are, or should be, four core principles underwriting the development of the fifteen-minute city: ecology, proximity, solidarity, and participation. Every bit of urban space, Moreno argues, should have multiple uses, all in the service of reducing traffic and creating calmer, cleaner, and more human-scale neighbourhoods. ‘The fifteen-minute city,’ as he says, ‘is an attempt to reconcile the city with the humans that live in it.’
His brand of urban utopianism is less mechanistic and grandiose than the prescriptions of dreamers like Le Corbusier, Howard, and Lore. But like theirs, Moreno’s vision is built on a foundation of sweeping assumptions about how cities should yield to a set of tidy planning ideals that have little to do with the messy ways in which city-dwellers actually live their lives.
6. According to the U.S. census, fewer than 20 per cent of Americans in the 1890s lived in cities. The proportions were similar in industrialized European countries like Germany.