Shrink the City: The 15-Minute Urban Experiment and the Cities of the Future

by Natalie Whittle, Lorna Bennett (Read by)

Overview

“[Shrink the City] surveys ways in which cities around the globe have created compact neighborhoods where residents’ daily needs are quickly accessible on foot or by bicycle—a concept known as the 15-minute city. . . . deeply researched and winsomely written. . . an invaluable overview of the cutting edge of urban planning.”—Publishers Weekly

Cities define the lives of all those who call them home: where we go, how we get there, how we spend our time. But what if we rethink the ways we plan, live in, and move around our cities? What if we didn’t need a car to reach the grocery store? What if we could get back the time we would have spent commuting and put it to other uses? 

In this fascinating, carefully researched and reported book, longtime Financial Times journalist Natalie Whittle investigates the 15-minute city idea—its pros, cons, and its potential to revolutionize modern living. 

From Paris, Melbourne, and Rotterdam to Charlotte, North Carolina, and Tempe, Arizona, cities worldwide are being guided by the 15-minute city’s ideals—with varying results. By looking at these examples, Whittle considers:

• what really happens when a city expands bike lanes and pedestrian areas—and disincentivizes long commutes
• which approaches to building affordable housing are actually effective
• how neighborhoods of varying wealth are affected by 15-minute city policies
• whether it’s possible to convince car-owning city dwellers to replace their vehicles with other forms of transport.

This timely book serves as a call to reflect on our cities and neighborhoods—and it outfits us with insights on how to make them more sustainable, safe, and welcoming.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798228007888
Publisher:	Tantor
Publication date:	09/10/2024
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Glasgow-based writer and editor Natalie Whittle is a freelance contributor to the Financial Times, where previously she held editing roles across the magazine and arts sections of FT Weekend for fifteen years. She founded Outwith Books, an independent bookshop and writing space in Govanhill on Glasgow’s Southside that was open from 2019 to 2022.

Table of Contents

UK edition contents 

 Preface: What is a 15-minute city?

Introduction: The way we move forward

A tale of several Parises

Handlebar utopia

Cycling to what? Walking to what?

Live and die localT

he new Victorians

Time and the city

Conclusion 

Acknowledgments

Selected references and bibliography

About the author

Editorial Reviews

07/22/2024

Journalist Whittle’s enlightening debut surveys ways in which cities around the globe have created compact neighborhoods where residents’ daily needs are quickly accessible on foot or by bicycle—a concept known as “the 15-minute city.” Whittle begins by highlighting the 15-minute city’s benefits to not only the climate (it reduces emissions) and human health (it promotes daily exercise and limits pollution) but also to commerce, as many studies have shown walkability and bikability increase a community’s economic activity. The examples she spotlights are deeply researched and winsomely written. In a chapter explaining why Paris has been leading the way on walkability and car-reduction, she attributes the development to the doggedness of longtime mayor Anne Hidalgo but also to the fact that Parisians never really developed a strong attachment to the automobile (in Paris, the car has for decades been “like a nervous aristocrat, getting on with life but catching glimpses of the guillotine”). In another chapter, Whittle explains how “Latino Urbanism” is now being studied as a powerful force for revitalizing deadened, sprawling suburban areas of Los Angeles, where incoming waves of Latino residents have brought food stalls, front-yard gardens, and other small, inexpensive changes that “lift up the spirit of the place” and create walkable corridors. It’s an invaluable overview of the cutting edge of urban planning. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Shrink the City makes the case for creating smaller cities within big cities. Whittle describes a series of small, densely occupied circles within cities that would allow people to mingle naturally and get to know one another in their neighborhoods. Today, many city dwellers don’t have easy access to parks, libraries, theaters, restaurants, schools, and so on. Putting the ideas in this book to practice would cut down the time it takes to get to these places, enriching the lives of city residents, and transforming megalopolises from discouraging human interaction to encouraging familiarity and friendship."

Dickson Despommier

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. The 15-minute city—which we call the walkable city and others just call the well-planned city—is the proper way for humans to occupy space. This book and the movement it describes are only necessary because, for almost a full century, logic was turned on its head, and the perverse ideals of distance and speed replaced those of proximity and access. Shrink the City is a lovely and useful guidebook to bring our civilization back to a scale at which it will stop stinking so badly."

Jeff Speck

"An exciting and accessible read [that] weaves together the anecdotal with thorough research and academic investigation."

SNACK magazine