City life can vary a lot. Yating Zhao and Lindo Sibiya are colleagues and both communications experts, but they have had very different urban experiences. In the Chinese town where Zhao grew up, her parents cycled home from work in their lunch breaks. When Zhao moved to Beijing, her home and her work were in the same neighbourhood, which grew quickly after international companies arrived in China. She made use of the local services and enjoyed the fact that she didn't have a long commute.
Sibiya, on the other hand, grew up (and still lives) in Johannesburg, South Africa's largest city. Under apartheid, previous generations of her family had been forced to move out of the city, far from their place of work. When Sibiya was young, she had to leave home early in the morning to get to school on time. Today, she lives close to the city centre — a central location that she loves — and is a comfortable drive away from her office.
Cities designed for cars
Although not segregated in the same way as Johannesburg, many cities were divided during the 20th century. "To a large extent, the design of cities is inherited from functionalist urbanism, as theorized by Le Corbusier, in which all the functions of cities are fragmented: housing, work, traffic, leisure," says Alexandre Mot, territorial development manager at Avisa Partners in Paris.
The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier was a pioneer but also a controversial figure whose ideas have been criticized for imposing widescale urban plans on neighbourhoods with little regard for locals. He was also a lover of the automobile, and his urban model was conceived for the car, which allowed residents to travel ever longer distances between the various city zones.
Before the Covid pandemic, many people were doing just that on a daily basis, but we are now starting to see a reverse in this trend. "Neighbourhoods should be designed so that we can live, work and thrive in them without having to constantly commute elsewhere," says Carlos Moreno, scientific director at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, in his TED Talk. "It's funny if you think of it: the way many modern cities are designed is often determined by the imperative to save time, and yet, so much time is lost to commuting."
Everything within 15 minutes?
Moreno is one of the thinkers behind a new model, known as the "15-minute city". The idea is that residents can access all the services they need (work, health, education, leisure, etc.) within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from home. The result is a decentralized city in which people have deep connections with their local neighbourhoods.
Moreno describes the concept as "an attempt at converging life into a human-sized space", and when it was first proposed, in 2016, it came from a desire to improve the quality of urban life for residents and do something about climate change by reducing car use. Since Covid, people have also come to see the value of their communities, and interest in the idea has grown.
As Mot points out, city dwellers have new expectations today. "People no longer want to work in office towers. They want cosy places, flexibility and the possibility to work in multiple spaces, including home," he says. "The other trend shaping cities is the desire for immediacy and speed to meet the needs of e-customers."
What might this look like in reality? Paris was the first city to adopt this concept of "hyper-proximity", which the city's mayor, Anne Hidalgo, argued for in her re-election campaign in 2020. She told the Financial Times: "A city's creativity doesn't depend on cars. That's the 20th century."
Paris, which is preparing to host the 2024 Olympic Games, is Europe's second-most congested city (after London). Hidalgo's plans include adding a lot of new cycle paths, wider pavements and more trees. She also wants to spread out commercial space and co-working hubs (encouraging people to use local shops) and create small parks in school playgrounds that would be open to locals outside school hours. She has also involved residents, who are able to vote on parts of the municipal budget. "The goal is to avoid the errors of the past, when architects designed cities according to an ideological vision of society and not real experience," Mot adds.
The fight over who cities belong to
The concept of the 15-minute city has been widely recognized and won the 2021 Obel Award for architectural achievement — the jury described it as "a real step towards the future". Other cities, from Bogotá to Melbourne, are following similar ideas.
However, not everyone welcomes this vision of the city. It is being met with fierce resistance from certain sections of society. Moreno has received death threats and been accused of wanting to create siloed zones that would ensure "tyrannical control". He suspects that rich people just don't want to share public space with poor people. Hidalgo has also got pushback from Parisian motorists and others, with some using the social-media hashtag #SaccageParis ("Ransacked Paris"). "There are conservative people who aren't interested in change because they live well," she says. "They don't share the life of a middle-class Parisian."
Despite such opposition, projects continue to be inspired by the 15-minute city — such as the future conversion of Downsview Airfield, in Toronto, Canada. The development, which is planned for 80,000 residents, is being arranged around the old airport's former runway. This will become a "pedestrian corridor" linking communities and preparing for a car-free future.
There are other big projects aiming to create new communities on unused land. Two of the most ambitious are Saudi Arabia's The Line, a 170-kilometre linear city intended for nine million people, and Telosa, a city for five million in the desert of the western United States. The Line will be built inside a mirrored megastructure that's 500 metres tall but only 200 metres wide. A transport system will connect the two ends within 20 minutes while the various city functions, like residential, commercial areas, etc., will be arranged vertically.
Telosa, the brainchild of billionaire entrepreneur Marc Lore, is being designed to be sustainable, with diverse housing options that are accessible to all and provide everything residents need within a short walk. As part of the concept, the land will be owned by a community endowment, meaning increases in value could fund the city's further development and improve resident welfare.
Is the future urban?
Whether new modern metropolises will really rise from the desert remains to be seen, but most of us will continue living in cities in the future. The World Bank expects that, by 2050, nearly 70 per cent of all the world's population will be urban. What's more, despite the growth of megacities, defined as having more than ten million residents, the majority of people will most likely live in small or medium-sized cities (with populations below five million). The EU's European Strategy and Policy Analysis System predicts that megacities will be home to only about eight per cent of the world's urban population by 2030.
"People talked of an ‘urban exodus', and at the peak of the [Covid-19] crisis, large cities seemed empty," Mot says. "But today, there is no statistical evidence that this will become a real structural change." However, the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen dramatically over the past few decades, and Mot thinks that rural areas have more opportunities for growth than before if they can provide the minimum infrastructure for business, such as fast internet connectivity. More people can now work remotely, and some companies see advantages in relocating certain operations to campuses in the countryside.
Even so, there will always be strong demand for centrality and services, Mot believes. And their cultural offerings, creativity and innovation will always make cities attractive — alongside the vibrancy and diversity of individual communities, as Zhao and Sibiya found. Cities not only drive prosperity and progress, as Edward Glaeser writes in Triumph of the City: "People report being happier in those countries that are more urban."