spread quickly across the continents, popularised by C40 cities and its proponents Carlos Moreno and Ann Hidalgo. The idea has been also well received by media and rose international discussions among practitioners and theoreticians alike. While the idea seems to be strongly supported by many, its critics call for it to be a political advocacy and a proponent of inequalities exacerbated by the pandemic. 3 On another cautious side, it has been observed that there exists a cultural gap among discussants across the organizations and geographies in the way they perceive the idea of 15-minute city. The white paper of C40 on 15-minute cities 4 which seems to be a hinge of reference for most of the discussions, rather adds to the already exaggerated contingencies in interpretation by promoting its 97 city members and their projects and policies as best practices of 15-minute city which can be replicated and applied to cities that embrace the concept. These examples cover a variety of suggestive policies ranging from Barcelona’s superblocks to San Fracisco’s open street program, from Johannesburg inclusionary zoning policy to New York’s participatory budgeting. Prima facie, it looks like rather than being a concept, its an umbrella term with these set of policies.
From Urban theorist Wildavsky’s (2018) point of view, who through his monograph entitled, If planning is everything, Maybe it’s nothing’, raised a criticism against planning prophesies and dictated that planning should be an exercise to resolve a specific problem and not everything, it can be well commented that, If ‘15-minute city’ is everything, then maybe it’s nothing!
Under these circumstances, it becomes more than important to undertake an investigation to address various contingencies around the topic and to avoid making the idea ‘reductive’. Thus, the rhetoric of ‘15-minute city’ needs to be defined and situated in the larger arena scientific scholarship of urban planning. The thesis identifies this gap and attempts to fill it. It is expected that this explorative study will bring forth a better understanding of this ‘new concept of spatial planning and urban development’ and stimulate a discussion regarding its utility as an ‘utopian’ idea or a ‘political campaign’ or a ‘new planning model’.
3
Peverini, M., & Chiaro, G. (2020, November 26). ArcipelagoMilano | QUESTIONI DI SCALA: L’ILLUSIONE DELLA CITTÀ DEI 15 MINUTI. Archipelago Milano. https://www.arcipelagomilano.org/archives/57231 4 C40 Cities Knowledge Hub. (2020, July). How to build back better with 15-minute city. The C40 Knowledge Hub. https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/How-to-build-back-better-with-a-15-minutecity?language=en_US
2
