The One-Minute City

The 15-metre city outside your front door is as important as the 15-minute city around you. This careful emphasis on the small scale, and the slower dynamic, suggests an engagement with the most potent of spaces that surround us. The street is the basic unit of city: all systems converge on the street, all culture plays out there, one way or another. Yet the urban planning cultures of the Acceleration-era tended to largely ignore the street, in favour of overpasses and underpasses, flyovers and roundabouts, all dedicated to speeding up, and scaling out, pushing the city’s edges out to the range of the car moving as rapidly as possible. The One-minute City is loosely described by the space outside your front door—and that of your neighbours adjacent and opposite, suggesting numerous tight circles of engagement overlapping in the street, around your block or house. Here, you have the most regular and direct participation, responsibility, and interaction, merely propped up on propinquity. Depending on your context, this is the immediate environment defined by a one-minute stroll or roll. (Of course, if it takes you a minute to get outside, perhaps think of this as the 15-metre city!)