3.4. Interpretative remarks on the Case study descriptions

3.4. Interpretative remarks on the Case study descriptions

Out of the three case studies undertaken, it was observed that Portland, compared to other two cities is a structured case study. The Portland Plan clearly defines its 20-minute neighbourhoods, its features, its relation to the scale of city and regional scale in absolute terms. The city managers have created unique tools and measurement indicators like ‘Neighbourhood leakage indicator’ and ‘Neighbourhood Economic strategies’ for intraneighbourhood governance of local amenities at city scale. These indicators suggest that the city is monitoring, both, provision and quality of services/ amenities, and thereby, as a whole, progress of neighbourhood development to meet its minimum standards from citizens’ perspective. On the other hand, the case of Melbourne shows many contingencies. The three pilot projects of Sunshine, Strathemore and Creadon in Melbourne only demonstrate community engagement for identifying street beautification projects like adding pedestrian/ bike paths and commissioning mural paintings as part of urban spaces in underutilised lots, etc. Furthermore, Melbourne case does not propose any specific indicators or strategies like Portland’s NED strategy, which make the case of Melbourne weak. However, it should be noted that the city of Portland is a relatively mature case since it was initiated in 2012, while Melbourne adopted the narrative in 2017, thus it may be assumed that the FMC policy still in development taking into account that new updated document informing the FMC policy was published, entitled ‘Plan Melbourne Addendum 2019’ as an addition to ‘Plan Melbourne 2017’. On the other hand, Portland is a relatively small city, and the scope of FMC policy is the within the city limits. Regarding Paris, FMC, at the time of writing this thesis, is only a political commitment through the current Mayor’s electoral campaign programme published in 2019. Although the Mayor has appointed a commissioner for the 15-minute city , the official city-documents studied mention only ‘neighbourhoods and eco-quartier’ terms, however, no mention of ‘Fifteen-minute city’ or city of quarter hour’ is found in official documents. (The principal document studied under Paris case study; the Paris En Commun strategy, is a part of current Mayor’s electoral campaign) In the pilot project undertaken at Paris Northgates. The white paper suggests, that only mapping of local services was undertaken and proposal for increasing community engagement was suggested.

The differentiation between scales of inner core, city, and Metropolitan scale.

As mentioned above, the operating territory of FMC in Portland is the scale of city, while for Melbourne is the metropolitan territory. Both the cities have had focussed on car-oriented policies (and less on public transit access) producing low-density sprawl-like environments, especially in the suburbs, while the city centres of both the cities consist of high-rise towers and dense aggregation of population, depicting mixed land use features. Thus both the cities have combined structural spatial changes in the city, specially in the suburban areas (like installing public transit infrastructure, sidewalks, adding density through inclusionary zoning regulations) with public actions (like weekend farmers markets) and incentives to private firms for providing access to amenities to its residents.

While the Paris En Commun strategy encompasses only the inner core of Paris city, where, due to already given high population density, facilitating ‘desired’ services and amenities makes it primarily a governance issue of combining technical assessments and community aspirations (a complex topic in itself which is discussed in Chapter 5. Moreover, the inner-city socio-economic profile suggests its reliance on consumer economy and primarily managerial workers residing within the boundaries, with the advent of ‘work from home’ trends in recent months, for most of the citizens, the inner city might become a 15 minute city, therefore increasing the chances of highly segregated inner 15 minute city and ‘outer 51 minute city’ (Bouard & Carriere, 2019) due to price action of real estate markets.

However, in the Paris case study description, the author combined the Paris En Commun strategy with the Grand Paris strategy which encompasses both inner Paris as well as suburban region, with a core intention of creating symmetrical data. Interestingly, a combined study of both strategies demonstrates similar use of structural measures i.e., extension of public transit and building density around transit node through densifying traditional neighbourhoods and new neighbourhoods, coupled with public actions (like promoting pop-up economy, like farmers market on streets and urban plazas) and soft measures like providing incentives to private stakeholders. The following chapter synthesis the findings of this case studies and adds nuances to the understanding about this ‘time-based Rhetoric’. The chapter shall be structured to primarily respond to the three research questions elaborated in research design section, and which were established as guiding tools for analysing the empirical application of the proposed ‘new spatial planning concept’