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Living in a city means accepting a certain level of dysfunction: long commutes, noisy streets, underutilized spaces. Carlos Moreno wants to change that. He makes the case for the "15-minute city," where inhabitants have access to all the services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity — and shares ideas for making urban areas adapt to humans, not the other way around.
This conversation was part of the Countdown Global Launch on 10.10.2020. (Watch the full event here: .) Countdown is TED's global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world. Get involved at
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fact of the day: The match was invented after the lighter
For real?
Really?
a very passionate speaker!
4 problems I instantly see:
1. no one want to live near a noisy factory,
2. hospitals require huge capital investments for surgery and complicated procedures (same for any factory), thus require centralization, (maybe could make them so you use 1 big one only in really bad cases which would be minority and mb works.)
3. winter and bikes are not a nice experience, if its walking distance its alright.
4. you would need to fix housing cost problem so that you can live next to work place.
1. doesn’t apply here, noisy factories would be outside the 15 min walk distance.
2. doesn’t apply here, hospitals wouldn’t need to be within the 15 min walk distance
3. yes, but then you’d just need a good winter cleaning team.
4. that is the biggest problem here. the rent in such an area would be unbearable unless it’s really just a small town/community. maybe if it looks like this everywhere then it wouldn’t be as much of a problem.
#3 try checking out the channel Not Just Bikes video that premiered just an hour ago
This concept was created for cuties like Paris where most economic activity takes place in the service sector. There are no factories in a traditional sense in Paris.
You just need a megablock to live in
I’m legally blind and can’t drive so this sounds like a dream
how did you comment-?
@Charles Desroches iPhones are accessible. You can use the text to speech feature or the zoom feature. I’m legally blind (not completely blind) which means I still have some usable vision. But even fully blind people use the internet.
Previously this concept was not possible because companies needed offices to crowd all their workers in one place and those offices needed to be in the most bustling place in the city to attract talent and be competitive. Now this appears to be less of an imagination since we have proved that a lot of office workers can work remotely, which should hopefully shift retail and other services towards more sub-urban areas or people to start local businesses. Of course, this would not be possible without a push from governments. Only when governments are able to let go of large, polluted, crowded and unsustainable cities, will we see some real change.
All this upgrading and now one task is so complicated to be the whole at the beginning step that it takes all DAT a couple of days to arrange one appointment or service… It amounts to having to be every professional yourself.
Most of the time people, or at least I, spend travelling is to and from work.
For jobs that cannot be done remotely, it doesn’t sound so practical for everyone to live within a 15-minute walking distance of their workplace.
I don’t know about other cities, but in mine you can already get to everything you need in your daily life in a 15 minute bike ride. That includes a school, restaurants, a grocery store, an apothecary, a gym, etc. Though of course some things are not that close, since you can’t place universities or hospitals everywhere.
The caveat is that you need to live near the city center, which is the complete opposite of what most people want, especially those in their thirties and up who’ve started a family and want nice, green and open areas for their kids and pets, and who have the income to afford it. Apartments in the city center that are close to everything mostly appeal to younger adults and the elderly.
What you’ve also got to consider is that the biggest factor to being able to bike everywhere is living close to your workplace, and most people can’t live that close to their job. And if like me you live in a cold climate, traveling by bike in the winter is awful, and on very snowy days you can’t walk either unless you want to push through knee-deep snow.
industrial zones at <15 minute walk from everywhere... Yeah!!!
And hours from one industry to the other...
Should we tell this guy about the existence of modern towns?
depending where you live, cities may or may not have implemented the exact concept of a 15-minute city but are a naturally favourable environment for the sustainable growth and mobility inside it. Romero talks specifically about Paris implementing this concept for the first time at a larger scale as a measure to curb congestion and make the goal of carbon neutrality a reachable one in the next decades.
All I believe is that the plans for future cities must be good and well and must be kept away from corruption etc.
BTW loved your idea sir
thank you whoever wrote subtitles
What kind of hellish accent is that!?!?!
Does he know about the Dutch? On a bike we can get pretty much anywhere in 10 minutes on a lot of our cities