2.2. Critical Voices

2.2. Critical Voices

Though FMC’s individual components such as decentralization of services, pro-active land use management, promotion of soft mobility, which if interpretated in project policy terms leads to actions such as pop-up bicycle lanes, expanding terraces and converting parklets into public spaces, traffic calming measures and creating robust complexity and vitality in neighbourhoods, etc are well appreciated (Florida et al., 2020; Keesmaat et al., 2021; Ortega et al., 2020; Thrift et al., 2020), yet there are strong critical perspectives offered from experts in urban development especially the new urbanists, geographers, economist and transport planners in genera. The crux of these arguments originates from the accessibility perspective of the 15-minute city, which contrast the concept’s endorsement of socially inclusive urban development.

The section is divided into three parts,

1. the first section is informed by the comments of economists and sociologists on the job localization proposed by the proponents of FMC, they argue that proximity of firms to each other is important for economic growth and localization of jobs will lead to lower socio-economic mobility of lower classes and dilute the main function of city as places of opportunities. 2. The second section highlights the ambiguities in defining the spatial dimension of FMC modules and its features. The main arguments come from New Urbanists and proponents of compact city like Andres Duany, Randall Ghent, who emphasise the inconsistent and incomplete prescriptive elements of the concept and highlight the 15-minute access changes as per people’s personal ability, perception, modes of transport adopted. With a common understanding of scale of economies, its important to create a hierarchy of services which should be availed within the 15minute circle. Similar thoughts are provided by Gehl Architects, Copenhagen which propose to deconstruct the 15 minutes into 1,3,10, 15 minutes as per the respective functions. 3. From the urban geography perspective, some parts of the cities already experience the 15-minute city with rich quality services within reach of bike or walk. It’s a common understanding that there is a linear co-relation of centre-periphery cross section of city and 15-minute cities, with the suburban areas more impoverished, an observation confirmed by various studies undertaken across the cities like Milan,

Chicago, Bagota, Lanchester. These disparities are created due to socio-economic complexity in a free-market setup where the vulnerable get displaced to the peripheries of cities and thus societies. A common concern raised is that an even application of the FMC concept shall create buoyancies in the real estate market thus risking creation of further inequalities due to land-price action.