You have probably heard of the idea of the 15 minute city popularised at Davos. Imagine you don’t need a car to go around. Everything, groceries, school, dentist, parks, you name it, is within walking distance. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Wouldn’t it solve global warming?
Big cities bought into the idea, and put it into their stated plans. Melbourne, Portland, Paris.
Some people view this as a conspiracy plot to force them to get rid of their cars. Others view this as the way of the future.
That last one makes me laugh. People explaining that I will enjoy living fifteen minutes from everything I need are describing my neighborhood in Tomsk, Russia in the 70s. They also made a video about how I will own nothing and be happy. That has also been tried, indicentally in the same country. The fifteen minutes worked out much better than the happiness.
The Soviet Union pioneered this in the 1950s at scale.
The microdistrict became a design standard. Many thousand residents, a school within this radius, a kindergarten within that one, a polyclinic, a grocery, a house of everyday services, all inside walking distance, all on foot. No car in the assumptions, because not many people had a car. Good public transportation: buses, trams, trolleybuses.
So yes. Moscow is the ultimate fifteen-minute city, and so is Tomsk, and so are a few hundred other places nobody in the West has heard of. The people who built it were not trying to make you happy. They were trying to house millions of people quickly with a public transportation network and no private cars. The fifteen minute city was the result.
It is also the moderate version. The radical one was tried first.
I visited Dom Kommuny (House of Commune) once, the student dorm that a prominent constructivist architect Nikolaev put up for the Institute for Steel and Alloys in 1929. It was not a fifteen minutes, but a zero minute solution.
You slept in a tiny cabin with a bed and not much else, and everything else, eating, washing, studying, living, happened in the communal block. The private cell was small on purpose. You were supposed to be with the collective most of the time.
I hated it. Normal people don’t live like that.
The microdistrict is the same idea with the rough edges filed off.
The industrial can opener
A Russian science fiction writer, Vadim Shefner, wrote a book where an inventor builds an industrial can opener, an enormous machine. How efficient it would be for the housewives! How convenient not to worry about your own can opener every time you need to open a can. Just jump on a bus, get to the facility and have you can conveniently and quickly opened. This story really stuck in my head for 40 years.
The protagonist designed his machine for an imaginary ideal housewife in his ideal communal city, not for a real person.
The 15 minute microdistrict is built the same way.
15 minute city with 2 hour commute
I just returned from Moscow, having had the time of my life. It is a splendid city, and it puts Berlin, London and Paris to shame with its cleanliness, beautifully maintained architecture, convenience of the public transportation, the level of service, and digitisation of everyday life. Every block has a bunch of stores and establishments on the ground floor of highrise apartment buildings. Usually it is not just one grocery store but three. A budget one, a high end one, and something in between.
So I put the fifteen-minute city story to my local friends. Yeah, very convenient, they said, for mothers with small children.
But how are we supposed to get to work? It takes many people 2 hours one way. You jump on a commuter train, then the subway, then walk or take a bus.
This is a killshot to the whole concept. The fifteen-minute city solves problems of a person who spends the day inside the radius. A parent with a toddler, a pensioner, a child walking to school. For them the courtyard really is the whole of their life. It works for them.
However, for a working adult the main trip of the day is their commute. It does not fit in the radius by definition, unless he happens to teach at the school in his own courtyard. A planner can put a bakery under your window. He cannot put your job there.
The Soviet version demonstrated this with unusual clarity. Everything domestic was in the immediate vicinity of your apartment building. Then you rode across town to the factory or the institute, with a transfer. The daily errands were solved and the commute was untouched.
Who lives in fifteen minutes
Another Muscovite friend of mine looked into Moscow schoolteachers, having access to the City data for mining. Same profession, same city, same qualifications. The women worked within five minutes from home. The men averaged twelve kilometers. Women chose proximity because they have to take care of their kids within the radius, and men wanted the best job they could find because they had to provide for the family.
An hour commute in Moscow is considered good. An hour and a half tolerable. People read on the trains, or find something else to occupy their time.
The one way to make it work
There is one arrangement where the fifteen minutes include your job. You put the employer inside the radius.
The boarding school I went to was part of Akademgorodok, the science town in the forest outside Novosibirsk. Institutes, apartments, the school, the shop, the House of Scientists, all in close distance under the magnificent pines. A fifteen-minute city where the commute really was fifteen minutes, because all the research institutes were in it. Then I worked in Zelenograd, the Russian microelectronics center. Same thing, it was a city in the forest, build for one industry.
The Soviets built a great many of these, mostly around a single plant rather than a cluster of laboratories. One enterprise, and a town assembled around it where the workers could walk to the gates.
It sort of works. But then you cannot change employers without changing cities. There is no labor market. And if the enterprise fails, everybody’s fifteen minutes become worthless. Plenty of those towns got into trouble when the USSR disintegrated.
That is the price of putting work inside the radius. The commute disappears and the labor market disappears with it.
Among strangers
Part of me admires Moscow. It works on many levels. It offers better food, better culture than back home. The new apartments are great living places, spacious, quality built.
The other part of me cannot stand the arrangement. Once you go down the elevator you are never not among strangers. The lobby, the courtyard, the bus, the train. You just can’t escape the unfamiliar crowd.
So, you will pry my steering wheel from my dead fingers. Not because of the distance to the store. The car is a room of my own that moves, on a schedule nobody else sets.