Learning from Le Paris du 1/4 Heure

This week saw praise rain down on Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. She is the driving force behind Le Paris du 1/4 Heure – the 15 Minute city which aims to create viable low-carbon communities. As France riots and belief in politicians here plummets, she is that rare thing in an age of hopelessness, an inspiration.

She is breaking the mould on several levels. First running on – and getting elected on a specifically radical environmental programme is a rare thing. Second, successfully delivering it is unheard of. But reports this week show car use in Paris down 40% over the last 10 years, air pollution is down 45%, cycle lanes are up from 200km in 2011 to over 1100km; 300 ‘school streets’ are coming and there are major plans to make streets safer for children and older residents.

How is she bucking the trend?

Hidalgo’s successful 2014 and 2020 mayoral elections in Paris have been a revelation in running on a ticket of positive change and then embracing it. She has got people’s buy-in and then delivered. In the words of Hidalgo, “Big cities are responsible for 70% of greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a political responsibility, as mayors, to say, ‘We must act now’”.

What does it look like?

In a world where we work less and travel less and pollute less, it would mean that we have most of our basic needs for work, education, leisure, sport, entertainment localised.

The inspiration behind the 15-minute city idea is the Professor Carlos Moreno, from la Sorbonne who believes the “core of human activity” in cities must move away from oil-era priorities of roads and car ownership. To do this he argues: “We need to reinvent the idea of urban proximity. We know it is better for people to work near to where they live, and if they can go shopping nearby and have the leisure and services they need around them too, it allows them to have a more tranquil existence.”

The ideas have been embraced by Hidalgo who wants to encourage more self-sufficient communities within each arrondissement of the French capital, with grocery shops, parks, cafes, sports facilities, health centres, schools and even workplaces just a walk or bike ride away.

Called the “ville du quart d’heure” – the quarter-hour city – the aim is to offer the people of Paris what they need on or near their doorstep to ensure an “ecological transformation” of the capital into a collection of neighbourhoods. This, Hidalgo argues, would reduce pollution and stress, creating socially and economically mixed districts to improve overall quality of life for residents and visitors.

The Ville Du Quart D’Heure concept is based on Moreno’s idea of “chrono-urbanism,” or having leisure, work, and shopping close to home. This means “changing our relationship with time, essentially time relating to mobility,” says Moreno.

Moreno says he was inspired by the urban theorist Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

“A neighbourhood, she wrote, is not only an association of buildings but also a network of social relationships, an environment where the feelings and the sympathy can flourish.”

Jacobs was influenced by Lewis Mumford, himself a disciple of our own Patrick Geddes. We have our own rich tradition of urban theory and civics to draw on here.

“The quarter-hour city would reduce two serious problems plaguing many Parisians: the air pollution that kills 3,000 people a year, which is largely caused by car traffic, and the many hours lost in transport suffered to go to work,” says Delphine Grinberg, a member of Paris Sans Voiture (“Paris without cars”).

These moves are happening elsewhere too. Feargus O’Sullivan has written:

“Barcelona’s much-admired “superblocks,” for example, do more than just remove cars from chunks of the city: They’re designed to encourage people living within car-free multi-block zones to expand their daily social lives out into safer, cleaner streets, and to encourage the growth of retail, entertainment, and other services within easy reach. East London’s pioneering Every One Every Day initiative takes the hyper-local development model in a slightly different direction, one designed to boost social cohesion and economic opportunity. Working in London’s poorest borough, the project aims to ensure that a large volume of community-organized social activities, training and business development opportunities are not just available across the city, but specifically reachable in large number within a short distance of participants’ homes.”

What would the “ville du quart d’heure” look like in our cities?

Sharing some good news this week triggered a wave of negativity from some on Twitter. The gist was “this could never work here” – a strain of the “Don’t you get above yourself” syndrome that still holds Scotland back. The problem, I had explained to me, was the weather here you see. Despite having literally invented urban planning a century ago, Scotland would be uniquely incapable of (re) designing our own cities. This is exhaustingly stupid. It’s learned failure.

Of course the Hidalgo/Moreno ideas would not transfer across seamlessly. Every design needs its own local variant. That’s the point. But to argue that “we couldn’t do it here” moves us into a sphere of inferiorism and decline. We could and we should and we must.

The real obstacle to the implementation of radical re-design of Scottish cities along these lines isn’t ‘the weather’. Our local authorities and our ‘city fathers’ (and mothers) have been both starved of real resources and also demonstrated terrible decision-making for a long time (these things are not un-related).

The problem for the implementation of 15 minute cities – a necessary and radical reconceptualization of life in cities for a viable future – is about class not rain. Not every neighbourhood is heaving with cargo bikes and community gardens. But rather than make this a mark of failure it could become a metric for success. If the core idea is that everyone should have all of the necessary on our doorstep: our work, play, education, food, space, all in a safe and affordable and accessible way, then this is the measure of what communities demand. The first step for decentralising communities within Scottish cities is democratising them. If Low Traffic Zones (LTZs) sometimes feel like impositions, despite popular support to introduce them, that is because those disaffected about our cities are, by definition, not involved. The obstacle to radical re-imaging our cities – or our coastal communities – is not the ideas for change – it is how they land or how they feel they land. The answer is for these solutions to be driven from below, by the people who ‘own’ and run their communities. Nothing else will work.

In an urban environment Hidalgo is facing runway success. Despite the hysteria of the car lobby, the weird backlash of the libertarian cults and the scepticism of everyone to (any) change – actually less cars in cities and creating empowered communities and neighbourhoods is an inspiration.