All the important stuff in life can be reached in 15 minutes

My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie, instead it was a livestream of a concert. Even better (for me) was that it was a handbell concert. I’m including the link to the video in hopes that it will stay online for a while. The concert is about 80 minutes. This was the closing concert of Distinctly Bronze West. The performers are top level ringers who are looking for a challenge. They prepare the music ahead of time and spend four days putting the concert together. This is an example of massed ringing, about six sets of bells playing together by more than 80 people. Though I haven’t attended a Distinctly Bronze event, I have played a couple of these pieces with my performance group and have also played as part of massed ringing across the US and at international events. The largest such event I attended was 1100 ringers at a national festival back in 1992. I live in generic suburbia. Telling my city from cities around me is difficult – unless it happened to be a city before suburbia reach out and surrounded it. One blends into another without distinction. The other big feature is one must have a car. I must drive at least 1½ miles to get to a grocery store and because I don’t like that one I drive 3½ miles to another one. This is too far to walk. In the past I’ve occasionally gone there on my bicycle, but there are limits to how much I can haul home. There is some public transportation – buses – but I must walk at least a mile to get to a stop. So I’ve never done it. There are two aspects of Detroit being the motor city. First is the love of cars, to the detriment to public transportation. Second, because union jobs paid well the region has the highest percentage of single family homes of any metro region. And houses take up space – the metro region takes up a huge chunk of land. In generic suburbia around Detroit and around many cities in the US a car is a requirement. I continue to live here because my house is in a delightful setting. In contrast, Brother spends more than half of each year in a big European city. He doesn’t need a car and doesn’t have one. He can walk, ride his bike, or take public transportation wherever he needs to go and whatever food and supplies he needs he can transport home. In a time of climate crisis made worse by human actions, one of them being cars running on fossil fuels, I admire the way Brother can live. For me to do the same I’d have to move and there aren’t many affordable places around the US where his lifestyle is possible. So I was quite interested in an NPR story I heard this morning. Host Ayesha Rascoe talked to Julia Simon, NPR’s Climate Solutions reporter. This 7 minute report is part of a series of stories on how we might better live in our world. Simon took us on a walking tour of a Paris neighborhood. She can walk to a preschool in one minute, a bookstore in three, a pharmacy in four, a bakery in five. For longer distances there is good public transportation. All this is an example of the 15-minute city. The goal of this is all the important stuff in life can be reached in 15 minutes, by foot, bike, or transit. Carlos Moreno is behind the idea. He is helping the mayor of Paris foster 15-minute neighborhoods across the city. Old buildings and parking structures are converted to a mix of apartments, offices, and businesses. They are adding parks and bike lanes. Justin Bibb, Mayor of Cleveland, remembers a walkable city when he was a student abroad in London. He’s trying to incorporate these ideas into his city. It isn’t easy. He has to work on better public transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes. This isn’t easy because of another issue we in America have become well acquainted with in the last decade, though it is also a problem in other places. That issue is conspiracy theories. Those spouting the conspiracies used against the 15-minute city twist the idea around to claim that instead of finding all one needs within 15 minutes, the term really means residents will be prevented from going outside their 15-minute community – the place would be an open air prison. Simon said:

Misinformation around climate change used to focus on denying global warming. Now attacks focus on climate solutions, often the idea that climate change is this pretext for stripping people's civil liberties.

And conspiracy theorists, when they feel trapped, make death threats against public officials saying things they don’t like. The 15-minute city can be and is being adopted by European cities. They used to love their cars, but made a policy choice to move away from them. But the idea is having a much harder time in the US because of conspiracy theories and because so much of our suburban landscape is designed around the single family home. And the move to suburbs has a racial aspect – many cities zoned for single family homes so poor (and usually black) people could not afford to move there. Families also opt out of the more sustainable urban living because they think the suburbs have better schools (and in Detroit they’re mostly right). Developing 15-minute cities is a policy choice. Whether we move in that direction and how quickly comes down to political will in cities, states, and the nation. And there doesn’t seem to be much of that these days.