Why are so many people against making London a nicer place to live?
Taking on the 15-minute haters
Almost exactly one year ago we dedicated an issue to the idea of the ‘15-minute city’. Here it is (you should go take a look if only for the smouldering portrait of the man who introduced the world to the concept, the French-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno):
If you can’t be bothered to read that, then we can give you the potted version instead. The idea of the 15-minute city basically says that your ‘urban essentials’ (somewhere to live, somewhere to work, places to buy stuff, healthcare, schools, entertainment, etc) should be a quarter-of-an-hour away from each other, either by foot or by bike.
If you want a slightly less prosaic description, here’s what Joe Miller wrote in a recent article for the FT, headlined Frankfurt: the perfect ‘15-minute city’:
“I can count on my fingers and toes the number of times I have used public transport in Frankfurt — I cycled almost everywhere. My 80-square-metre, well-insulated flat on the south side of the river, complete with an enormous balcony, is just a 15-minute bike-ride away from the FT’s downtown offices, and a three-minute walk from a 5,000-hectare forest. All of this for just a little more than I was paying for a single room in a damp, shared flat in London’s Zone 3 around the middle of the last decade.”
Sounds pretty good right? But when we went to see if the idea of the 15-minute city had taken a foothold in London in the past 12 months, mostly what we found was various groups trying their damnedest to make sure it doesn’t happen.
It’s a woke conspiracy to rob us of our cars
Even a year ago, papers like the Telegraph were using the idea of the 15-minute city to beat up on anything which they saw as ‘anti motorist’. Thankfully, over the past few months the discourse around things like low-traffic neighbourhoods has calmed down considerably as everyone has realised that we’re all one big interconnected community with a common goal.
Just kidding. It’s worse than it’s ever been!
The idea of a 15-minute city is now just as triggering to right wing reactionary commentators as words like ‘woke’, ‘avocado on toast’ and ‘Greta Thunberg’.
This idea that 15-minute cities are part of a greater conspiracy against motorists is maybe best exemplified by the odious James Woudhuysen who, just a few days ago, wrote a piece for the dependably repugnant Spiked, with the headline The madness of the ‘15-minute city’.
(Just to give this a bit of context, you should know that, as well as billing himself as “visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University” Woudhuysen also describes himself as someone who is “too old and white to be allowed to give keynote addresses to giant corporations”.)
Here’s what the poor, disenfranchised James has to say about the idea of the 15-minute concept:
“What is posed as a revival of Britain’s green and pleasant land is in fact a coercive drive to put motorists on a leash. Those homes with a car will have to count how many times they use it to cross town. There will be permits, penalties and almost certainly more ubiquitous surveillance.”
The problem with Jim’s critique (other than the fact that it’s impossible for something to get ‘more ubiquitous’) is it suggests that the development of a 15-minute city depends on an extension of the kind of punitive measures employed to enforce certain LTNs in the past few years.
But, just as no one is actually talking about a return to ‘green and pleasant lands’, no one is planning to install a totalitarian regime in order to stop Jimmy Wokehater fulfilling his Richard Hammond cosplay fantasies behind the wheel of his Mazda.
At its core, the idea of the 15 minute city is about a mix of local investment, community engagement and government initiatives in order to create affordable public transport options, improve cycling and walking infrastructure, reactivate high streets, and boost green spaces.
If you want to drive, you can do. It’s just likely to be more expensive and probably take longer.
15-minute cities are just for the one percent
This whole debate isn’t helped by the fact that marketing teams for luxury developments keep using the 15-minute concept to clumsily ‘greenwash’ their projects.
We called out the Wood Wharf on the Canary Wharf Estate a year ago, but it’s still happening. Earlier this year, the “luxurious East London development” Royal Docks (where the new City Hall happens to be) was touted as “a prime example of the ‘15-minute city’, in which “high-quality public transport, public amenities, green spaces and community areas provide residents with access to everything they want and need.”
That’s great and everything, but we’re not sure that Carlos had 24-hour concierge services and hydrotherapy pools in mind when he was putting together his list of ‘urban essentials’. But we are certain that this framing of luxury ‘hybrid spaces’ as a solution to London’s structural and social challenges is so much PR bullshit and is ultimately damaging to the debate.
Aren’t we all working from home now?
Another argument against the idea of the 15-minute city is the one that says, because so many of us are working from home, there’s no need to start revolutionising our infrastructure because nobody has anywhere to go.
But London’s car pollution is now the worst its been since the start of pandemic. In fact it’s so bad that some boroughs have had to put traffic control measures in place, not because they have utopian fantasies of ‘green and pleasant lands’, but because people are being poisoned:
“Lambeth and Hammersmith & Fulham have introduced traffic control measures after NO2 levels there rose well above revised World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations this year, putting residents’ health at risk… New evidence suggests NO2 “is a lot worse for us than originally understood”, said Professor Frank Kelly, Head of the Environmental Research Group at Imperial College London. So the problem is even though we’ve had small improvements in London over the last five to seven years because of various traffic measures, the target where we should be has gone down significantly, so we need to be doing a lot more than we thought we should be doing.”
Aren’t we all going back to the office now?
Just a week ago the Standard ran a slightly perfunctory article listing four smart-city ideas that could make London more sustainable. ‘15-minute neighbourhoods’ appears on the list alongside vertical farms and autonomous, electric buses. But when it comes to assessing their ‘chances of success’ the Standard is less than confident:
“The reality is that it often requires changes to the neighbourhood’s underlying infrastructure, planning rules, and traffic management. City workers’ return to the office might also hamper plans for 15-minute neighbourhoods, as people get back into their commute routine.”
It’s a strange logic that says ‘we probably shouldn’t bother trying to encourage new ways of living because people are getting used to their routine again’, but even weirder is the idea that a ‘return to the office’ means we shouldn’t be looking to introduce more bike lanes, pedestrianised streets and green spaces to our city.
There’s been a huge uplift in walking and cycling since the pandemic, but the city isn’t built for it. Even though cycling infrastructure has got better in recent years, it’s nowhere near where it needs to be and that’s seen the number of collisions involving bicycles in London go from 150 in 2017 to 437 in 2021 (a stat that was reported at length in the Evening Standard!). Another 307 accidents were recorded between January and August this year.
But, sure, let’s not invest in cycling infrastructure because people are ‘getting back into their commuting routines’. After all, you can’t move in London for people telling you how pleasant their commutes are.
Won’t somebody think of The City?
At the start of November City AM ran an article which set out to answer the conundrum of How London could become a 15-minute city, without leaving its centre behind.
The article suggests that the spanner in the works is the fact that “London’s transport is skewed in favour of the city’s epicentre” and that might make moving between neighbourhoods in ‘outer London’ more difficult. If you start, “taking from the centre to redirect it to other places” argues this article, then it’s not just the “high-skilled workers in the City who would lose” it’s also the “lower-income sandwich shops and cafes that would go bust.”
This argument seems to be assuming that, in order to make the rest of London more accessible and interconnected, we would have to scatter the Square Mile to the four winds. This isn’t going to happen of course, and the City has already created a pseudo-15 minute neighbourhood of pied-à-terres, most of which empty out at the weekend
The slightly arrogant tone of the article does grate a little though. It admits that “all roads basically lead into the City” but as only around 600,000 of London’s 9 million inhabitants work there, that means a huge part of the capital’s transport infrastructure is serving less than 7% of its population. Does that sound like a good thing?
And what about all those ‘lower-income sandwich shops’ in the rest of London?
15-minute neighbourhoods are happening though
Thankfully, despite all these self-interested naysayers and conspiracy theorists, there are some plucky projects starting to take route.
Newham was disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, with the number of residents claiming benefits rising sharply. Plus, the borough has the highest particulate pollution in London and the highest number of child asthma hospital admissions.
Now they’re spending some of the £40 million they got from the Levelling Up Fund on “low traffic neighbourhoods and school streets; community cafes, fitness centres and work spaces; public art; urban greening and more” around the high streets in the north of the borough and off Romford Road.
Meanwhile, up in Camden they’re trialling the idea of pedestrianising the high street between the tube station and Hawley Crescent, “to increase walking and cycling in the borough”.
Elephant and Castle’s Elephant Park development is also being hailed as “an absolutely exemplary example of what we need to be doing to make cities greener” in the New York Times of all places (although there are other complications surrounding that project - see the ‘5 little bits’ section below for more on that).
Maybe best of all, the argument for ‘low traffic neighbourhoods’ just got a major boost from Imperial College London data, which shows that LTNs do indeed ‘reduce air pollution within and around intervention areas’. For a deeper debunking of anti-LTN arguments take a look at this article from the London Cycling Campaign.
Coming up on Wednesday 🗞️
In this week’s subscriber-only issue we’re listing our favourite London long reads of 2022. Here’s last year’s to get you in the mood:
Start your free trial today and that will be in your inbox first thing on Wednesday morning:
5 little bits
While we’re talking about dramatics shifts in London’s structure and demographics…. The Centre for London held its annual conference the other week, and one of the presentations looked at why the centre of London is becoming a ‘child-free’ area.
In related news: New statistics released last week show that the collective worth of all the properties in London owned by offshore companies is £55bn. In south London “the new Nine Elms development in Battersea has seen a significant amount of investors from overseas, while the Elephant and Castle regeneration has drawn in buyers”.
The Met have decided to take no action over the ‘Christmas party’ that was held at Conservative HQ and attended by Shaun Bailey, saying that there was not enough evidence to “disprove the version of events provided by attendees”.
A man living in Kensington and Chelsea can expect to live a whole 17 years longer than his counterpart in Barking and Dagenham. There’s always been disparity between the poorest and most wealthy areas on London, but Covid has made it markedly worse.
Running all this week, the Tottenham Literature Festival is “celebrating enriched, diverse stories by Black authors, poets, and artists from Tottenham and beyond”. If you can’t get to the Bernie Grant Arts Centre then there’s a full virtual programme here.