PODCAST: The promise and challenges of the 15-minute city

James Cook: You might know it as a compound city or maybe a complete community or the popular term, the 15-minute city. But all of that is essentially talking about the same thing. It is a vision of city life where you've got most of your daily needs within a short walk or bike ride away. Now the idea for this has really captured the imaginations of city planners, policymakers, and residents too. People want compact, accessible neighborhoods. But the problem is there are challenges. People have different perspectives on how all of this should come together.

Phil Ryan: There's certainly always going to be some fighting and opposition on that point because a lot of people just don't like change. Even if we all agree that this is the kind of place we want, what does that actually look like, the stated versus actual preference? So, we might all say we like this concept, but when we actually get to the details of it, that consensus then starts to break apart.

James Cook: That is Phil Ryan. Phil is a director of JLL's Global Insight Group, and he focuses on what you'd call city futures. In today's episode of Trends and Insights, Phil is going to join me for a conversation with Philipp Rode, the Executive Director of LSE Cities at the London School of Economics.

Philipp Rode: My own background is in the world of transport systems through which I have then started to appreciate the role of cities, land use, architecture, urban design, and I continue to connect the sort of questions of movement for accessibility with questions of the physical location of urban functions in my academic and policy-oriented work.

James Cook: So today, we're going to talk about the tension between the ideal vision of the livable city and the practical challenges of turning that vision into a reality. Now, we all know conflicting desires and resistance to change often complicate consensus. This is Trends and Insights: The Future of Commercial Real Estate. My name is James Cook, and I am a researcher for JLL.

James Cook: I want to ask about affordability for residential real estate, and Phil Ryan, maybe I'll ask you this because you're my real estate expert today. Isn't it true, though, that folks find the most walkable places have the most expensive apartment rents? Doesn't that make it difficult to attract people to something like that?

Phil Ryan: When you have a high rent or a high home value and it's because of the type of development or the type of use, what you're really saying is this is undersupplied compared to what people want. So there's an implicit demand that people actually really like, either 15-minute cities or even the foundations of them. They like having amenities near them. They like having programmed retail and public spaces. They like the freedom to not have to drive everywhere. They like the sort of gentle density, and they appreciate the design focus. So what we're really saying is we need actually more of this. So that's a price signal for us. And it tells us that these types of neighborhoods are one, desirable, and two, we aren't producing enough of them, I think pointedly. So the question then is, how do you get to that? So what types of infrastructure do you have to leverage that's already there or has yet to be delivered in order to build the foundations and the bones for that? Where is the next set of locations that are best able to accommodate this type of development, and how do you do it in a way, particularly when dealing with an existing built environment, that often you can't start from scratch? So how do you progress this linearly? I think it's a key point.

James Cook: For cities that want to move toward this and make this more of a reality, there's a lot of regulation and laws that need to be enacted to help this along. Is that often a challenge?

Phil Ryan: So whenever you're dealing with significant changes in the way that land is used or the way that people's communities will change, there will inevitably be some, if not quite a lot of opposition. I'm from New York originally, and I always found it funny that even getting a bus lane in the middle of one of the most densely populated islands in the world had a lawsuit come over it when I was living there because someone wanted their onsite parking space. There's always going to be contention there. The question is, how do you best deal with that in the political system? And two, how do you mitigate against it? So there's certainly always going to be some fighting and opposition on that point because a lot of people just don't like change. And then the second part is, okay, even if we all agree that this is the kind of place we want, what does that actually look like, the stated versus actual preference? So we might all say we like this concept, but when we actually get to the details of it, that consensus then starts to break apart.

James Cook: Absolutely. Philipp, around the world, are there different approaches, or is there really only one good approach to making this a reality?

Philipp Rode: I think overall, it's a representation where there's a sense of deficit. Where is that particular city maybe really struggling? Where do also local residents feel, look, we need more of this within greater levels of proximity? And then there's a huge difference whether you talk about core inner-city areas, the suburbs, or even the urban periphery, and the application of the concept can vary significantly on the basis of that, even within the same metropolitan region. So let's take the idea of health services. The city of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, has been quite successful in introducing the idea of care blocks, where they divide the city into districts where you want to have and ensure that there's a certain threshold number of care facilities. If you go to Melbourne in Australia, you will have references to the 20-minute city neighborhoods, not even cities, but their focus is on neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. Really a reflection on sort of the disadvantages of excessive suburbanization stabilizing other functions than residential and indeed increasing that. You may then want to go to a European context where the broader concept of the 15-minute city has been then superimposed on preexisting strategies around superblocks and changing the layout of streets in Barcelona, Munich, Vienna, even London are examples of that.

James Cook: Phil Ryan, your work is with commercial real estate developers around the world. Are they thinking about this? Are they adapting?

Phil Ryan: I would say more so than ever before, but there is also very much a regional and cultural disparity in how developers approach this. And that's shaped one by the regulatory environment that they're in. But then also the market demand. When I think about somewhere that's a 15-minute city, or I often call them complete communities, because I tend to think that it better enshrines the concept of having access to goods and services. The one that always pops to my mind and is often used as an example is somewhere like Tokyo or actually Japan more broadly. And why I bring that up is because Japan takes the inverse approach to zoning to the way that we would think of it in an American or some European or Australian contexts in that it's not exclusionary. It's somewhat inclusionary. So you're given a set of possibilities to simplify this where certain things aren't allowed. But for the most part, it's cumulatively allowed. In Japan, that means that you get a very organic urban structure; people get a lot of flexibility to do what they want when it comes to development. And it happens all the way down to the lot level, to the precinct, to the city level. So there's a lot of somewhat idiosyncratic building, but you often just naturally get this sort of human scale. It's fascinating how this happens at different levels, but that happens because that's considered normal. And so no one really thinks much of it. If you were to apply the same method to somewhere in a different country, I'm not sure you would necessarily get that because the standard expectation and then also having to deal with getting people from outside of that community would require different types of infrastructure that may not be there, may not exist. So, yes, developers are actively interested in this, particularly in places where, as I mentioned before, it's very undersupplied, and therefore there's a huge price premium associated with it. But it's still something that's in progress, and I certainly wouldn't say everyone goes towards it just because they are also dealing with trying to meet certain demands. And there's a lot of countries and cities, particularly in sprawling areas, where people want the single-family houses. And someone has decided that's a captive market.

James Cook: Phil, post-pandemic, now we've got, at least here in North America, folks going to the office maybe on average three days a week. Does that need to be in the office less make it more difficult to get folks to a 15-minute city because they're like, "I'm not commuting as much, so when I do commute, I can go a longer distance?" Does that return to the office play into this?

Phil Ryan: I think counterintuitively, it's the opposite. I think that having, whether it be a 15-minute community in and of itself or a city that has a number of activity nodes that are easily connected to each other, actually creates a higher propensity to come back into an office because it makes the commute time generally more reliable. In the North American context, it would often mean not having to deal with a congested highway commute or having a greater amount of possible journey options. So I would certainly say I don't think that it makes it harder. I think it actually improves, in some ways, the ability of people to come back into work because you're creating a destination. You're creating an experience. People actually like that. We find that there's quite a lot of net growth, particularly in alternative and non-traditional submarkets and neighborhoods and cities that are actually more complete. Whether that be in the U.S., it's happening in Europe, Australia, so I don't think that they're in conflict with each other at all.

James Cook: Gotcha. Okay. So, Philipp, let's say we create this just ideal, walkable community, live, work, and play, that's highly desirable. How do we avoid it just being a gentrified community that only the wealthy can afford?

Philipp Rode: The starting point here is where do you begin rolling out your strategy around the 15-minute city? And already choosing either more affluent, wealthy neighborhoods, as probably also for political convenience has happened in many cities, as opposed to going back to the Colombian case where you say let's really focus on underserviced, underprivileged areas is already a really fundamental choice. Now, back to Phil's point around any form of improvement, any form of betterment, will ultimately find its expression in monetary values assigned to properties in that area going up. And so it would be hugely problematic to conclude that the only way we can avoid gentrification is no longer to improve any part of the city. Because the moment you improve, whether it's new green infrastructure, better schools, better health care, more jobs, more whatever retail, you immediately set off these dynamics. It's quite the opposite. You, number one, want to prioritize improving areas in the most disadvantaged areas, but then at the same time ensure that there is no displacement effect. And displacement effects are slightly different from gentrification, because you can have gentrification while avoiding displacement. What I'm referring to is a neighborhood slowly densifying, creating alongside greater mixed-use and income diversity, but that's only possible if you protect the status of the original population and dwellers. And there are, of course, many good practices in cities around the world, how you do this. Possibly the most successful is Vienna in Austria, where you have considerable improvements of the public realm of the city and broad quality of life in the absence of major displacement effects. But there's a political will, and there's a question also about the overall economics and the political economy of the property market. And that's where the real tension is. If you have a property market that is fundamentally working on the premise that wherever you improve and you have invested into improvements, you need to then recoup these investments. It's already a bit of a catch-22 situation.

James Cook: So reluctantly, I feel like we do have to address one issue: this concept of 15-minute cities has been getting some weird misinformation and press. Philipp, can you encapsulate what that's all about?

Philipp Rode: Very unfortunately, you're right. There has been an effort at some point to equate the idea of the 15-minute city not as an offer as an opportunity of having more services close by, but instead to restrict physical access. And there were even videos circulating where supposedly the police stopped people in Canada on a street telling them that they can't continue driving here. Complete fake news, completely fabricated. Any person that has been advocating that concept over the last decades will have always positioned the opportunity of increasing access within your 15-minute walk and cycle distance alongside much better metropolitan access—access to metropolitan institutions, access to those opportunities that will be impossible to distribute within each individual neighborhood or part of the city. So this is very much working together and giving greater freedoms for people to choose where to go, what to do, and most importantly, by which transport mode. In the alternative scenario where you have very dispersed sprawl, you essentially are locked into the use of the private automobile. You don't have any choice. You don't have any freedom to access opportunities beyond that particular mode.

James Cook: I love that because we have been told that, at least in my country, car ownership is equated with freedom. Those are supposed to be, and I do think now the younger generations that are coming up don't hold those beliefs as strongly as my generation or earlier ones did. But you're absolutely right. What we're talking about here is freedom of movement, freedom to choose different modes of transportation. Freedom of choice around where you live and how you live. So I'm so glad we talked about this. It's been a fascinating conversation. So we're running out of time, but I want to ask one more question. I want to talk about the future, and I know people hate to make predictions, but if you had to, on our current trajectories, let's look out maybe 20 or 30 years into the future: Have we made significant progress towards a more walkable, complete community? And Philipp, I'll start with you.

Philipp Rode: So the evidence is very clear. We have not at all made enough progress. The majority of global urban development is one that continues to de-densify cities, that develops the city into where sort of housing targets are set, irrespective of locational considerations, where quantity rather than quality is considered and where, broadly speaking, also a very private notion of quality of life is prioritized. What I mean by that is private over public space, modes of individual transport over public, and that goes to the very heart of a contradiction with what the city in its original sense is all about. It's a place where we come together and share resources, public space, opportunities, and it can give humans an enormous amount of pleasure. The good news is that we have a lot of exciting practices. Lighthouse projects all over the world. We also feel, as Phil alluded to, know that you are going to pay the highest premium to live in exactly those areas. That tells us something: that's what people seem to want when it is about where they put their money. The ultimate sort of disrupting force to all of that equation is this question of virtualization. And we refer a lot to hybridity. So rather than sort of a shift towards something where physical space no longer matters, we'll see the emergence of urban hybridity where the intelligent coming together of virtual connection but also physical in-person connectivity is playing out. And on that end, I would probably predict that we will see more urbanity within residential areas. That doesn't have to be working from home, but maybe that there are opportunities to also work closer to home.

James Cook: Love that vision. My day job is I'm a retail and shopping researcher and that environment is where people get most excited and enjoy shopping and selling. So I'm all for that. So, Phil, give us your thoughts on the future and your take. And maybe I'll ask you to give it from the commercial real estate property industry point of view. What do you think the future looks like, and how can our industry help shape it for the better?

Phil Ryan: So I tend to think of cities as like a sponge. Sort of an odd way of thinking about it, but it's how I do it. Which is that if you have a really dry sponge, and I'm going to equate that to a highly centralized kind of traditional way you think about dense core, drop off, whatever, throw it in water, and then things rapidly shift. But what happens if you have one that's wet? It's moist? And then you move it around. You notice that the change is a bit more subtle. It's a bit more of a gradient, right? So for me, what I always find interesting is what's that gradient, and what's that shift? Where I feel like we're headed towards is what I would call a multi-nodal or polycentric city. One in which there's a hierarchy of different types of activity nodes and that are increasingly in a very complex manner connected to each other in varying degrees. And each of those as they continue to grow and evolve becomes more and more specialized, and its place within the ecosystem of centers will shift to some degree or another. And so what we think about when we develop and plan over the longer term is how do we kind of shape that? And how do we get from A to B? I feel like we're moving in a direction where we're going to probably end up somewhere like London, where I'm based, is very much a city of villages that kind of mash together over time. In the same way that you see it in, and I've mentioned Japan before, Tokyo is a similar example of this. And we're also seeing it even with places that aren't traditionally either walkable. So L.A. is a good example where you're starting to see the densification of specific nodes and hubs, in part because it was actually designed before the car. And a lot of people forget this. So the bones of it are there, and then even in haphazard locations. One of my favorite days is Bangkok, which is a complete mess from a planning perspective, but actually organically develops like this with these little hot spots. So that's where I feel like we're headed more towards. Because what people want is a destination and an experience that's actually interesting to them and one that is visually and physically arresting. And that's how you can also best handle changes in density. If you have it where everything is lumped together, what ends up happening is that everything gets consolidated, and then it's saturated. And then as it gets saturated, the spillover becomes very massive, but there's no easy way to accommodate it. So if you can better distribute those functions, you reduce the pressures that come with a lot of change, whether it be gentrification or possible displacement. You reduce the level of fundamental inequality in access and mobility. And you also create a lot of different places that are interesting, and it better allows people to find somewhere they like to live or work or have fun. And that's what I'm really excited for. And I think one of the things that, on the private side, is being able to actually, one, provide the capital so that these types of places can take shape. And then the second is having a lot of experience working with communities and actually having an on-the-ground presence there so that we know and can generally get a good feel of what works, what passes the—I'm going to sound young here—vibe check. Because that's so much of what cities are, what makes them interesting, is vibes. And that's where I think we're really headed towards. Very much not the traditional way that we think of a, here's where I work, here's where I live. But rather, how do they blend?

Philipp Rode: James, I have to add something fundamental because otherwise, we're missing the plot. The most fundamental driver over the next 30 years in terms of urban development is our energy, resource, and carbon equation-related constraints, and that will dramatically change everything. The so-called Global Commission on the Economics of Water revealed the latest evidence on water and food security or insecurity in many cities around the world. To have an abundance of energy to transport people, to heat our homes; we have gotten used to being able to manage the disruption from weather events. This will dramatically change. And I think the necessity to really future-proof cities, live with far greater energy resilience, and also local hubs of self-serving capacity is absolutely critical.

James Cook: I totally couldn't agree more. And it is, for an individual, it can be overwhelming a little bit. So maybe I'll end on one last question. If folks do, maybe this is the first time they're hearing about some of these issues, is there a general audience, maybe a book or website you might recommend that folks could start to dig in and learn more? Do either of you have any thoughts on that?

Phil Ryan: The classic is always Jane Jacobs, just because I think it's very accessible and a lot of this stuff is very relatable. Do I agree with everything she said? No. But, I think there's a good amount of contextualization as to why a lot of one's cities ended up, particularly in a North American and to some extent a European context, the way that they have. And how we learned from some bad mistakes.

Philipp Rode: You cannot spend enough time on the C40 website, the city leadership group on climate. It's an excellent archive of information and blogs and perspectives, including also specifics on the 15-minute city. And if that's not enough, have a look at books by LSE Cities, like "Living in the Endless City" and "The Endless City," or "Shaping Cities in an Urban Age." There's an Urban Age archive of almost 20 years of convening, debating, and conferencing. Everything can be revisited and looked at.

James Cook: That is an enticing curriculum, and I look forward to diving into some of that. Some of those I'm aware of, others are new to me, so this is great. I love learning this stuff. Philipp and Phil, thank you so much for joining me today. We just scratched the surface on this topic, and it's a fascinating conversation. I think our listeners are going to really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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