The Perfect Response

You live in a ‘fifteen-minute city’ if essential shopping, banking, healthcare and schools are accessible on foot.

Urban planners in the U.S. and Europe sometimes describe the benefits of “15-minute cities,” meaning locations within even a large town where most necessary support services are within a short walk or an easy bike ride. No automobile required for essential shopping, banking, healthcare and access to schools.

The idea has gained traction recently as more young home buyers seek locations that seem ecologically friendly. The trend may be a rejection of their own childhood experience of living in an unending sea of suburban sprawl. Real estate is especially hot in locations where a commercial street of shops and restaurants is just yards away from homes on a nearby side street. Among other sources, we’ve learned from the Italians, Swiss, Spanish and British about the different quality of life that is possible in mixed use settlements: places where clustered housing organized around pedestrian-friendly streets reduces the need for long feeder roads laid out over too many miles. Years ago, I had a one-day demonstration of smart planning from a long day of touring in Sweden, starting with a modern commuter train near my host’s home in the woods, and moving on foot by boat and bus throughout greater Stockholm: a wonderful day of sightseeing without a car.

As usual, we have partly reinvented what earlier generations already knew. The walkable city was a necessity before the automobile, and is now reborn in older towns able to retain their human scale. In addition, many larger cities—even those that sprawl—are developing downtown housing that make it possible for resident to do their shopping or visit green spaces nearby.

This kind of local access easily describes many locations in some of New York City’s boroughs. But it also matches features in many older towns, some laid out with commercial corridors next to established neighborhoods. There are no shortages of examples: Silver Spring or Annapolis Maryland, Charlotte, Virginia, Montclair and scores of other small towns in New Jersey, Pacific Grove California, Abington or Easton in Pennsylvania. Interestingly, the idea behind Disney’s design of Celebration Florida near Orlando recreated in 1996 with walkability in mind. Homeowners have cars, but the modern town is designed to keep them from being the organizing pattern of its layout. It’s direct opposite can be seen in most other Florida locations, where wide multi-lane streets or “stroads” (streets that are also highways) meet their counterparts in vast intersections too wide to attempt to easily cross on foot. Florida must lead the nation in having vast acres of asphalt and traffic barriers. But it is not alone. They are also common in California, New Jersey, Arizona, Texas and many other other states.

Only recently I’m enjoying the benefits of the 15 minute city, moving into a town of 4000. I can easily walk to a doctor, a bank, hardware store, pharmacy, and similar services, while still surrounded by some green space. Most homes in this historic area are attached, and mingle with small businesses with upstairs apartments. In an emergency, I think I can even make it to Bell’s Tavern in under fifteen minutes.

The experience is much like a town where I lived for a year in the English Midlands. There, it was the norm for a family member to make a habit of walking to nearby shops to get the makings of that night’s dinner. This was once a way of life for people with moderate incomes. Everything you needed was in the shops lining a small triangle of roads a half-mile away.

Space Without Connection

It’s tempting to see a location’s walkability as an amenity that might be nice, but not essential. But we now have a monoculture of housing sprawl in a nation with too much open space, but too few places for families to live. That’s mostly due to a preference for zoning vast tracts for single family residences. Mixed-use zoning is more the norm in tourist centers within Europe, where residential and functions comfortably comingle. Europeans have a lot to teach us, even while there are growing pockets of rebellion against supposed “totalitarian planning” in cities like Paris.

To be sure, vast residential expanses can seem like an American birthright. But we owe it to low and middle income families to solve the accessibility and affordability shortfalls that are becoming chronic. More clustered housing, townhouses, condos and apartments have never made more sense. Among other things, four connected homes are much more efficient to heat and cool. And shrewd use of housing density makes other things possible: underground utilities, proximity to essential city services, and better better opportunities to interact with neighbors. I’m finding that people downplay differences with neighbors when they are just a few feet away.

I’m a slow learner, but I certainly had warnings over many decades of suburban home ownership. Years ago I was on a township planning board where the prime concern was whether a private golf course would allow riders from local horse farms to jaunt through the adjacent woods. This was horse country, just a few miles from my current 15-minute city. Back then I thought the planning board’s warped enthusiasm for riding paths was a perfect moment to propose a pedestrian overpass for local kids that had to negotiate a four-lane highway on foot or by school bus to reach their nearby school. But I got no more than blank stares. Pedestrians were an afterthought. That suburban township was all about protecting property and horses. Thankfully, in our new town kids walk on sidewalks to the nearby school, often with a parent, a dog and a skateboard in tow. It’s a wonderful sight.

The complexity of our world often requires multiple responses about any single individual.

Across the nation chapters of the Audubon Society have been groping with the question of whether the racism of their namesake is a blemish that must be erased. In his day, not only did naturalist John James Audubon give us exacting visual images of the birds of North America, but he also held the view that slavery was justified, going so far as to advocate for the return of fugitive slaves to their “owners.” Audubon accepted the barbarous premises of slave ownership, along with many of the nation’s founding figures. Indeed, even the White House itself and the capitol building were built with the aid of slave labor. Exposing such a mix of attainment and debasement is now a common pattern for reassessing foundational figures who were once unequivocally revered. It’s a necessary process, but not as straightforward as it might seem.

We can add in many other everyday complications that might show up in the pasts of other figures we would normally revere: a sibling who contributes to a hate group, a generous mentor who has supported authoritarian politicians, a wonderful actor caught up in a religious cult, or a thinker who anchored an important intellectual tradition while revealing an anti-Semitic streak. We should not be surprised at how many slave-owning ancestors Henry Louis Gates Jr. discovers in his genealogical series on PBS, Finding Your Roots. Thanks to Gates’ tact, most of his celebrity subjects take the news with a surprising degree of grace.

And then there are hypocrites: people who say who one thing but conveniently abandon it when it is convenient to do so. Obvious examples are hate bills in legislatures proposed by legislator’s who find it convenient to argue that they are “protecting our freedoms.” “Showhorse” legislators are legendary for committing to ideas that they have refuted in private.

When is forbearance for another’s failures too high a price to pay?

The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited with the famous line that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Most of us have had to deal with the dark beliefs that exist in a corner of an important and productive figure. But when is forbearance too high a price to pay?

Humans born to create, initiate, interpret and invent are bound to engage in actions that seem contradictory. Some are worthy of condemnation; but the pattern is too common to write off the whole species. After all, we are all we have. And, to be fair, we are the victims of language forms that handicap the capacity to deal with good people who do or say bad things.

It is obvious that we are more complex than being reduced to a singular response that something is “right” or “wrong,” “true” or “false.” Part of the problem is the common but false view that multiple answers are not possible with humans or the English language, both of which thrive on exclusionary binaries. We perceive with other oppositional terms well: true or false; good or bad; intelligent or stupid; correct or wrong, and so on. In English, something “is” or “is not.” We don’t typically entertain the idea that a person or an idea is both. Other non-western languages like Mandarin are more able to handle the natural ambiguities of life.

Consider one area where more contingent thinking is absolutely necessary. Researchers in the social sciences have reasonably clear pictures of how most people respond when placed in common situations. We have many theories that make “if”-“then” predictions. For example, group theory includes the idea of “groupthink,” an observational theory that applies most of the time. It predicts that if almost everyone within the same group thinks a certain way, any few holdouts will begin to shift their attitudes to align with the others. We have a natural interest in blending with the crowd. This kind of prediction generally holds, but not always. And a good researcher on group behavior knows that the theory will not fully explain what will happen in a specific case. It’s a necessary instance of “accepting” and not “accepting,” born out of diversities in human responses.

It would be the same for a scientist to hold to their religious faith, even though some teachings hold that the world is only 6000 thousand years old. He or she must know that earth science puts the age of the planet at around 4.5 billion years. They need to be able to handle both views without looking for a way to fudge the vast temporal difference. In short, the complexity of our world and those of us who inhabit it often requires multiple answers to single questions. Our multifaced nature should make it harder to completely write anyone off, even when they are guilty of the serious moral failure of John James Audubon.

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

The fifteen Minute City

Living with Our Contradictions