We’ve all heard the sinister stories. Neighbourhoods with no-go zones and closed-off streets, or designated zones with checkpoints and random lockdowns. Cars allowed on certain roads at certain times. And every step you’re forced to take is monitored on closed-circuit television for Mayor Amarjeet Sohi to watch in his underground City Hall lair while he tents his fingers and says “Good, good… everything’s going according to plan.”
The term “15-minute city” was coined in 2016 by Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno, who received the 2021 Obel Award for promoting “architecture in the service of both people and the planet.” It simply means having all necessary amenities within a short walk, bike or public transit ride from one’s home.
Most people would say that sounds like a lovely place to live. But conspiracy theorists — along with some politicians and pundits who encourage them — now say the idea is tyranny. Sean Bohle, senior planner with the City of Edmonton, says the idea is old — much older than the term itself.
“It’s an urban planning slogan, and slogans get updated every few years to connect with the average person and explain what it is we’re trying to do,” Bohle says. “It’s been called ‘Smart Growth,’ or ‘New Urbanism,’ but they all mean essentially the same thing. You’d have to go back to probably the 1960s to find planning documents that were like, ‘What we need are freeways everywhere, and to separate all the houses from all the shops!’”
Shops are probably the most well-known spots in the Currents of Windermere, which acts as a buttress between the Anthony Henday freeway and the Ambleside community. That community was developed in 2005 — with many of the convenient trappings of a 15-minute city, but before the term existed and was subsequently politicized. “It has all those elements, but it’s not a new idea,” Bohle says. “Ambleside was built along very similar principles to what we’re talking about now in district plans.”
Each city in Alberta must have a municipal development plan and a transportation master plan, Bohle says. The City combined its plans into the simply named City Plan in December 2020 to help prepare for a million new Edmontonians in the coming years. While our population could double, the city can’t just double in physical size, so new residents will have to live in existing areas like Ambleside. That’s where the more detailed district plans come in.
“The City Plan is where you find the long-range vision, and the targets we’re aiming for on a whole bunch of fronts — land use, transportation, growth management. But it’s for the entire city, so it’s pretty high level in some respects,” Bohle says. “The 15 district plans take what the City Plan says about these things and provide some additional details.”
For example, Bohle explains that while the City Plan has information on what sort of mass transit networks we’ll need to support good mobility across the city, “The district plans say, OK, but do we have more specific current information about what mass transit changes we’re working on right now?”
The City develops both plans, but developers build the neighbourhoods. They see both plans, then submit their own plans to the City, which checks if developers followed the City Plan’s policies and principles. “So if they have a stormwater pond, and it’s all just private frontage onto it, the City will say, ‘where are the public connections past this stormwater pond?’ Or ‘how does this connect to the bike network nearby?’”
So how does it look in practice? Do City officials pass these “plans” onto developers with stern looks that say, We really hope you follow these plans to a T — otherwise things could go very badly for you?
“Every plan is a compromise,” says Jim Brown, founder of Sherrick Management, which helped develop Ambleside. “There’s no such thing as the City demanding that you do this, or us demanding that we want something. Everything is a compromise and a discussion, so it’s closer to an ask than a demand.”
There wasn’t much to ask about making Ambleside walkable, since Brown says that’s a big part of Sherrick’s development philosophy already. And while the city may “demand” a certain amount of greenspace, it doesn’t specify where it must go — and who doesn’t want more greenspace?
Brown says Ambleside’s unique in having a transit garage, an eco-station and a snow dump, and property types that range from industrial, institutional and commercial, to business, mixed use and low-to-high-density residential. “In terms of what was asked for by the city,” Brown says, “they wanted the industrial and institutional properties, and asked for an employment area that we probably would not have contemplated. So the city was certainly part of that, and it worked.”
Despite fitting coiner Carlos Moreno’s definition, Brown doesn’t consider Ambleside a finished 15-minute city — at least not yet. But he’d certainly like it to be. “There’s no high school, there’s no [health-care centre], there’s no library. There’s no community building, or religious assembly, but they’re all coming. The city actually requested a transit centre be within Ambleside, which we think was a great idea… But the city acquired the land for the transit centre, and has done nothing with it yet.”
Different levels of government issuing different plans, then receiving different developers’ plans in return, discussing details together and moving forward slowly over many years (too slowly, in some cases, for developers) — it all sounds more like the messy collaboration of democracy than the behind-the-scenes, dictatorial edicts conspiracy theorists claim occur.
But that’s the thing about conspiracy theories: they often require dozens, sometimes hundreds of people working together seamlessly to con thousands, sometimes millions of other people — and each person who’s in on the con is also phenomenal at keeping a secret. Theorists unwittingly ascribe a level of discreet adeptness unreachable for mere mortals, which is why the notion makes actual civil servants working within government laugh.
The reality is that “15-minute cities” existed long before actual big cities. The original Fort Edmonton, and every current small town in Alberta, is a 15-minute city. Whyte Avenue is a 15-minute city. So is downtown. And the England town after which our Ambleside is named (which sits just north of England’s Lake Windermere) is a particularly old and beautiful example. Sure, North America is a car-culture continent now, but the historical record shows that the past 70 years of car companies’ successes were preceded by about a quarter million years of humans walking around. There’s no reason we can’t balance things more evenly going forward.
Bohle says Paris is a great example of civic leadership showing citizens a better way, but not because Paris just never had cars in it. “There, they are taking places that were busy car routes along the rivers and turning them into pedestrian walking areas with bike paths. So it isn’t that there’s just nothing we can do here, and Europe just happens to be this way. No, there are decisions that we can make to improve other options.”
And, after a recent trip to Europe, Brown doesn’t think our communities are 15-minute city enough. “I happened to spend a month in [the London neighbourhood of] Marylebone, England, last year,” he says, “and it was like a five-minute city. It’s [hundreds of] years old, so it’s tough to compare, but the point is it evolved over time. I hope Ambleside, and Edmonton, will evolve too.”
This article appears in the Jul/Aug 2024 issue of Edify
