Carlos Moreno – interview: ‘The 15-minute city is not a way of declaring a war against cars’

The urban planner behind the concept of the 15-minute city talks about why it is now an urgent necessity worldwide and considers why the idea of limiting car use has become so controversial

Carlos Moreno riding a bike in Paris. Photo: Mathieu Delmestre.

by NICOLA HOMER

The Place de la Concorde in Paris is a historic square. With a view of the Louvre, the public space functions as a roundabout for cars. For the Paris Olympics 2024, the square has turned into an arena for competitions; at the Paralympic Games, it will take centre stage. In a further transformation, half the square will be pedestrianised after the Games. This characterises the city’s sustainable approach. For the Games, the city has reused 97% of its existing infrastructure. The historic opening ceremony was held along the Seine to make it accessible. The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, took a dip in the river to show it was clean for swimming, although problems with pollution levels in the Seine emerged during the Games, in one instance leading to the Olympic men’s triathlon event being postponed. During the Olympics, people were encouraged to walk and cycle, as part of a bid to create a decarbonised Games.

“The mayor of Paris has in mind the 15-minute city because this is her programme. She wants to show that it is possible to manage to generate a new lifestyle in a city based on a happy, polycentric proximity. The idea is to offer this Games for all citizens in Paris,” says Carlos Moreno, the Franco-Colombian professor, scientist and researcher behind the idea of the 15-minute city, an urban-planning concept whereby everything you need – work, shops, healthcare and other amenities – are within a quarter of an hour’s walk of your home.

Moreno is a special envoy to the Paris mayor and a scientific director of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Sorbonne. Over the telephone, he discusses the Games in connection with the ideas in his book The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet. “The 15-minute city is a sustainable commitment for reducing our CO2 emissions. This is our challenge in cities for the 21st century and for that we need to foster citizens’ awareness for having more walkability, bikeability, to break with car dependency. The 15-minute city is a new lifestyle for providing more local services, decentralised, in all cities, and in this case to have a low-carbon mobility on foot or by bike or by public transport. The 15-minute city is at the same time a way for developing a more local economy,” he says.

The concept of the “ville du quart d’heure” was a centrepiece of Hidalgo’s successful campaign in 2020 for a second term as mayor. This was tuned in to changes in lifestyle whereby citizens worked and accessed services for day-to-day needs in proximity to their homes during Covid-19 restrictions. As chair of C40 Cities, a global network of city mayors, Hidalgo received about 1,000 mayors at the time of the UN climate change conference and the Paris agreement in 2015. Following the conference, where the low-carbon city was placed on the agenda for large cities, Moreno launched the 15-minute city as a framework for tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

During our conversation, he aligns his idea with the UN sustainable development goals, focusing on the goals of climate action and sustainable cities and communities. Moreno says he drew inspiration from the words of the UN secretary general, António Guterres. “I am totally convinced that the UN sustainable development goals are the common roadmap for humanity. António Guterres said: ‘We are today in the boiling era.’ Guterres said, too, that humans are not at risk; humans are the risk.”

Accordingly, Moreno’s book can be read as a call to action in view of the climate emergency. Beginning with a dystopian image of the effects of global warming, seen in the fierce fires affecting cities in Canada in 2023 when the masks worn during the pandemic returned, he addresses the problem of worldwide urban growth in terms of its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn drive climate change, with a solution to rethink urban planning, mobility and lifestyle.

In the first part of the book, Moreno investigates the history of modern cities and the geography of urban time, with an anchor in the form of the functionalism of Le Corbusier. In the central section, he explores the emergence of the 15-minute city with reference to the Paris agreement to mitigate effects of climate change, which sets the scene for international case studies on different iterations of the model in places ranging from Paris and Milan to Buenos Aires and Busan, and beyond. The 20-minute neighbourhood features as a similar concept to the 15-minute city model in a study of Melbourne, Australia’s biggest city, and a chapter on plans for Scotland and the Île-de-France region, where the Games promise a legacy. When we speak, he talks about the presentation of different cities with an optimistic tone that matches his visions of digital technology and a happier proximity at the end of the book.

He now lives in Paris, but he started life as the son of a farmer in a small Colombian town, almost 3,000 metres up in the Andes. He travelled from Buenos Aires, which he describes in the book as “the most European of South American cities”, to China at a time when cycling was still a means of mass mobility. He moves on to the rise of cars in consumerist society in 20th-century America.

He presents a vignette from F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, focusing on the narrator’s perception of New York: “Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.” This fictional skyline offers an insight into an age of prosperity, distant from the time of an orange haze blanketing the skyline, which stretched from Canada in 2023. The US had entered the 20th century as a buoyant nation and played an active role in the first world war, establishing itself as the greatest world power. With postwar growth, it enjoyed urban and economic expansion thanks to a rise in the efficiency of technological production, initiated by Henry Ford. In the 1920s, Ford’s Model T was one of the first affordable cars, which was widely accessible, transforming US society. The use of cars increased and brought greater freedom.

This offers a little socio-historical context to one of the contentious ideas associated with the 15-minute city, which is predicated on the role of individual cars in society. This year, Moreno visited the English university town of Oxford, at the centre of a lively debate among critics of the 15-minute city, which was until recently part of the traffic plan in Oxfordshire. I ask him why he thinks the 15-minute city concept has become so controversial with reference to Oxford. “The common point with the different attacks against the 15-minute city was the question of the role of individual cars. [It] is not a way of declaring a war against cars,” he says. “This is just to define our mobility priorities in high-density zones.”

Nevertheless, he suggests that cars produce carbon emissions that contribute to global warming so, because of the rise in our dependency on them in the 20th century, there is a need for a new way of living. He dispels the idea that the framework of the 15-minute city limits freedom. “We need to have the real conditions for justifying where a car is necessary. A car is necessary for people who live in the suburbs, for example, for elderly people, for disabled people, but the use of a car is for going from point A to point B,” he says.

Back to Paris, and this emphasis on mobility priorities such as walkability can be seen not only in the plan to pedestrianise half the Place de la Concorde after the Games, but also in front of about 200 schools in pedestrianised streets. Moreno refers to the pedestrianised school streets as ”mini parks”, stressing that this is better than having cars in front of schools. He points out that it also means that children benefit because there is less pollution and fewer accidents. Moreno is a man with a social conscience and his book is a riposte to his critics. In the 21st century, he says, it is necessary to switch from cities geared to cars to cities that are 100% geared towards humans. “This is no ordinary utopia,” he says. “This is today a reality for reconciling sustainability and quality of life in cities.”

• The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet by Carlos Moreno is published by Wiley, price £22.99.