News

Paris, the 15-minute city

October 2nd, 2023

Professor Carlos Moreno is apologetic. He only has a 20-minute window to talk because his schedule is so busy. As it should be for a man who has set himself the task of imagining the cities of the future in a world threatened by rising temperatures, stronger storms, devastating droughts and life-threatening floods.

Moreno is the driving force behind the 15-minute city, an urban environment where inhabitants have access to all the services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has enthusiastically embraced the concept – placing it at the heart of her 2020 re-election campaign – and now the French-Colombian professor’s idea has also been adopted by the C40 global network of nearly 100 city mayors taking action to confront the climate crisis.

Moreno, who is director of Pantheon-Sorbonne University’s ETI Lab, is working with the C40 mayors to adapt his concept to each city’s individual context. He was Hidalgo’s adviser on smart cities for six years until 2019, and says the mayor’s acceptance of the 15-minute city marked the idea’s movement into the mainstream.

Moreno’s idea was driven by his desire to come up with ways of cutting carbon emissions in cities – up to 70% of global emissions come from cities, mainly from buildings and transport – and address the way long commutes are degrading our quality of life.

“People are stressed going from their home to the office. In Paris, at peak hours, we have more than one million people taking the RER (rail network) just to go from east to west or south to north… One of the reasons for these long commutes is the hyper centralisation of offices in the corporate districts in the west and the north,” he says. “The 15-minute city idea involves developing more social interactions and economic integration, relocalising jobs, developing more quiet public spaces and transforming streets so they serve humans rather than cars.”

Paris has become a prototype for this kind of transformation under socalist Hidalgo’s stewardship. “When (Hidalgo) launched this concept as the backbone of her re-election campaign, a lot of people were very surprised because it was an original concept; they didn’t know what it was,” Moreno says. “She said the 15-minute city in Paris is the big bang for proximity.”

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