A decade after the launch of the “15 Minute Cities” model, its creator, the Colombian-French urban planner Carlos Moreno, recently participated in the Madrid International Urban Forum organized by the Official College of Architects of Madrid (COAM) in its “Madrid 2050” initiative. In dialogue with La Razón, Moreno shared the evolution of this concept in these 10 years and the experience of some cities that have implemented it.
What has been the scope of the model?
At the beginning we had the support of the United Nations program for sustainable urban development, and of UCLG (United Cities and Local Governments), the oldest global association of local governments. In September, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and my team from the Sorbonne received representatives of local governments from around the world and scientists from the five continents together with the world’s most important urbanist, Jan Gehl, who paved the way with his book “Cities for People.” Then, a global community was created, on the one hand, with local governments that implement the concept and, on the other, with the scientific community. We started from scratch, but today articles are written every day. Five years ago, the EU created a funded cluster of all 27 countries for “15-Minute Cities”, called Driving Urban Transitions (DUT), which includes cities from non-EU countries each year. The last ones were from Brazil, South Korea and Taiwan.
When the concept became popular, many criticized it. How did you face the criticism?
When I first proposed this concept, after COP21, in 2015, the first word that came out was that this was a utopia, that the way of conceiving the city was never going to change and that if people lived far away and it took them a long time to get to work, they would buy a book and educate themselves while traveling. Nowadays, there are many projects that I don’t even know about, in which mayors go to the Internet, download the documents, give them to the urban planning teams and implement them. In Scotland, in December 2023 Parliament voted a law to transform territories called “20-minute Scotland”; Here in Spain there is a project called “30 Minute Territory” and the Italian Parliament is processing a law called “Proximity Law.” At the other extreme you have Kiełczowa, a town of 15 thousand inhabitants, near Poznan, which launched our model and has won awards, what they have done is spectacular.
How has this concept overcome political polarization?
This has radiated to what we call humanistic urbanism, an urbanism that seeks to put people at the center of city development projects with quality of life with three key elements: ecology, economy and social impact. And in today’s world there are many mayors who, even if they are from the left or the right, recognize themselves in humanist urbanism, because paradoxically we have become a kind of meeting point of that urbanism about which people from the right and the left speak based on the needs of the large metropolises. The first mayor at the South American level to take this concept to develop it was Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, in Buenos Aires, who is center-right; in South Korea it was the liberal-humanist wing and in 2023 Valérie Pécresse calls me, the president of the Regional Council of Ile-de-France, the area surrounding Paris, and was a right-wing presidential candidate at the same time as Anne Hidalgo, because she wanted to put the “20 Minute Region” project in her strategic program, despite criticism from her team for coming from a socialist and rival. Today that is already on the way. But, as I explained at the Madrid International Urban Forum: Without social housing there can be no proximity in cities.