I know it's spelled "minute". That was a typo and I am not going to fix it.
This is just describing the "revitalized downtown" of every North American city. Nothing "15 minute" about it.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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chapotraphouse
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I think this is mostly confusing the 15 minute city with a 15 minute district surrounded by spread out bullshit, which is what we have now and is what the 15 minute city concept proposes to fix. I'm not saying there isn't nuances here as per no true scotsman or cases where it works out like that but I don't think it's good analysis.
I disagree it's what we have now in the US. The downtown core is generally just office buildings with not too many street-level amenities or even housing. Places that have started to convert parts of the spread-out bullshit into 15 minute cities (which is how the process will occur, we have to deal with existing city design and cannot start fresh) see astonishing levels of gentrification in those parts.
a lot of people don't want to recognize how fantastic and unrealistic their perceived community is in the US.
that the steady supply of beaten down and forced-smile service sector workers who make their lives functional, appealing and b'treated are hauled in and trucked out daily from not-so-close, destitute places of the dislocated, without many of the basic features of civic life they take for granted in their glittering hubs and enclaves.
the geography of class conflict is some real shit.
Places that have started to convert parts of the spread-out bullshit into 15 minute cities (which is how the process will occur, we have to deal with existing city design and cannot start fresh) see astonishing levels of gentrification in those parts.
The road to the 15 minute city might be littered with 15 minute districts but again I feel like there's an important distinction to be made here. The 15 minute district is just gentrification, as noted, already happening. The 15 minute city would be rather liberating.
The first time I visited a ski-town as a part of a hiking adventure, I realized that despite how cool the city was, it was basically just a private reservation for rich people. All the workers drove from about 45 minutes out. It was so strange, but this sums it up.
Bit idea: 15 minuet cities. If you can't partner dance to anything you need in 15 minutes or less it's not a well designed city.
Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.
The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness
well, another for the list of things i'll hopefully read one day!
I agree with the overall sentiment, but the commute time needed to avoid theme park status is more variable. Like, a 30 minute commute would be well under average for NYC and that’s not a theme park (outside of Times Square).
Hot take but unfortunately most of Manhattan below 59th is a theme park these days.
To an extent, it’s an inevitability when you’re talking about a tourism heavy city plus large swaths that exist almost entirely for day job commuters. But that also means that the white collar worker coming in from New Jersey often has a longer commute than the service worker coming in from low income housing in the outer boroughs so the dynamic isn’t always the same as what the tweet is getting at.
Yeah broadly I think your point is still correct.
Ideally the workers would live in a 15 minute range of their job as well. They should be able to walk to work the same way you can walk there to get a coffee.
Philly has neighborhoods that are theme park, but a few blocks over the real estates cheaper and that's where the workers live.
This was the inner commie in me kicking and screaming when I used to work downtown.
ah, the ennui of downtown; everything I want from urban spaces and yet priced so terribly beyond beyond my budget
idk about your city/country but its not even what I want from urban spaces lol
barely any grocery stores, everything except some hyper-overpriced bars and restaurants closes at like 6pm because of the scary homeless or whatever, unforgiving concrete steel and glass skyscrapers full of offices and the most bland housing options you've ever seen (unless maybe if you have tons of money, then there might be a penthouse.)
Its rough. Around the edges of downtown you might get some older neighborhoods with mixed land use and smaller more affordable housing buildings, if you're lucky (if you're not lucky they fully ringed the CBD with interstate highways and demolished these), but some of the other issues remain
Okay sorry folks but since the comments keep adding up: Imagine if WFH was reserved to CEOs only (I mean, imagine!) and then conclude from that that WFH is bad
15 minaret city 