The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet

This is probably an unnecessary book. The idea of the “15-minute city” is such a simple and catchy one that you probably understand it already from the handful of newspaper articles you’ve read about it. Moreno’s book adds a bit of historical background and some case studies, but it’s written in such an annoying way, and with so few concrete details, that it is more likely to put you off than to inspire you with practical ways to implement his ideas in your own city.

Part of the problem is obviously that Moreno is a mathematician and computer scientist by background and is not a native speaker of English, so the book is written in a heavily French-accented version of International Academic English, something that might be show more tolerable in an academic paper but starts to grate quite seriously in a 250-page text. But that’s relatively minor compared to the sensation the book gives you of being mired in an endless PowerPoint presentation, full of bullet points and buzzwords and illustrated by a selection of repurposed slides from other talks. You keep thinking that he’s going to get onto some actual details of how to implement changes in cities, but no, it’s yet another vibrant, dynamic, networked, sustainable, revitalised paragraph of good intentions…

Read Jane Jacobs and project a few 21st century notions about teleworking and the like onto her text and you’ll be much happier and probably better-informed about the background to Moreno’s ideas for urban planning. show less