Recent urban policy debates have heralded the “15-minute city” as a solution to a host of environmental, social, and economic challenges facing our cities. In an urban world where cities have been designed by and for men, however, can the 15-minute city promise to improve the lives of women, girls, and other marginalized groups without deeper transformations? If not, what other solutions might address issues such as entrenched economic inequalities, fear and violence, and a lack of attention to the specific needs of women?
What is a 15-minute city?
The 15-minute city is “an ideal geography where most human needs and many desires are located within a travel distance of 15 minutes” by foot, bike, or mass transit. This optimal radius would include homes, workplaces, shops, schools, social services, as well as green space and other leisure sites. The 15-minute city has been proposed as a way to combat urban sprawl, over-reliance on cars and the fossil fuels that power them, and the social isolation that stems from a lack of community connections.
While the concept of 15-minute cities has recently been promoted as the work of one man, it bears a strong resemblance to decades-old feminist calls for urban planning that prioritizes mixed-use space, the proximity of home and work, and effective public transportation.
The genesis of these calls dating from the 1970s, was the urgent need to make cities work for women. Then, as now, women worked outside the home in ever-rising numbers, yet were still responsible for the majority of unpaid domestic care labor. Sprawl, car culture, and single-use zoning made it impossible for women to reap the benefits that urban life offered. As women precariously juggled the demands of their double days, cleaving the city and its suburbs into separate residential, commercial, and leisure zones added a huge time burden to women’s lives. A feminist, or non-sexist, city as architect and famed urban critic Dolores Hayden labeled it in the 1980s, would help usher in a radical transformation in how we organize care, contributing to women’s equality and liberation.
How Cities Have Failed Women
Despite the promise of freedom from traditional, small-town gender roles, cities have consistently thrown up roadblocks to women’s attempts to become full and equal participants in the social, economic, and political life of cities. By almost every metric we can use, women have been systematically disadvantaged by urban planning and politics, compounded by longstanding gender norms that circumscribe women’s activities in the public sphere. As cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson explains, women were seen as a problem for the growing cities of the industrial age. Women’s increased presence on public streets disrupted carefully encoded rules about class, race, and gender that decreed a “respectable” woman’s place in the home.
The condition of urban women in the Victorian era may seem irrelevant today but consider that the advice given to women to keep themselves safe from predators on the streets has changed little in 150 years: don’t go out alone, don’t travel at night, use private transportation, dress modestly.
Now we add: “Text me when you get home;” the technology has changed but the message has not. Consider also the ways that urban transport systems are designed to ferry a breadwinner in and out of the city on a 9-5 schedule. Decades of research have shown that women’s travel patterns are very different, involving non-linear, multi-stop, and non-peak journeys, often encumbered by kids and shopping. Yet many major urban transit agencies are only just beginning to institutionalize changes that accommodate these varied schedules and needs.
Women with higher incomes, in heterosexual relationships, who are cisgender and non-disabled have been able to take advantage of processes like gentrification to better access urban amenities such as proximity of work and home, care services (usually provided by low-income, racialized, and migrant women), and public or active transport. Many others have been left behind. Disabled people confront a largely inaccessible urban environment that presents mobility challenges; people of color face extreme danger when viewed as “out of place” in certain public settings; and lower-income women are pushed into remote, unsafe, and environmentally compromised neighborhoods due to absurd housing costs and gender discrimination in the rental market.
Beyond the 15-Minute City
In my analysis, the 15-minute city, as it’s currently promoted, will continue to incrementally improve the fortunes of privileged, professional women who can make use of proximity to juggle paid and unpaid work, leisure, and family life more smoothly. However, a feminist view on urban policy insists that we ask whether any given policy or design will benefit those who have been most marginalized and disadvantaged.
Will a domestic worker who cleans the homes of wealthy people be able to travel from her neighborhood to theirs by bicycle in 15 minutes, while dropping her toddler at day care and her older kids at school? Will an elderly woman with limited mobility find an affordable apartment near her doctor, adult children, and friends?
The answer is not a definitive “no;” there is potential in the 15-minute premise for these and other women. But without placing their needs at the center, we are missing the opportunity for a larger urban transformation of the kind called for by feminist and proto-feminist thinkers for over a century. Feminist demands include dismantling the gendered (and racialized) division of care labor by putting as much of this work as possible into the communal, collective sphere. They resist the heteronormative assumptions of urban planning that continue to create housing and transportation systems for an increasingly rare traditional nuclear family. They insist that as we organize into collective, care-centered, proximate neighborhoods, we guard against displacing those who need such spaces the most by emphasizing non-market housing and the right to stay put. This will require preserving and expanding social housing options, as many in the US are advocating for. Social housing is a feminist issue: women-headed households, and especially women of color, make up the majority of public housing tenants, and women benefit more from the proximity to urban services that social housing offers.
There are other burgeoning international examples of gender equity planning in many cities. The area of Aspern in Vienna is perhaps the most famous community purposefully designed to meet the needs of women, and it has been going strong since the 1980s. In Bogotá, the district care system is a recent intervention that deliberately places sites of care—everything from child care and schools to health care to communal kitchens and laundries to education programs for adults—in a walkable or transit-accessible block. Poor, Indigenous, and Afro-Latina women were consulted in the process of designing the plan. Barcelona’s “superblocks” plan is connected to the city’s gender-sensitive “planning for everyday life” approach, which reclaims urban space from cars for green, safe, pedestrian, and family-friendly areas nestled among residential blocks with commercial streets connecting them. Proximity is a feature of all these plans, but it is not the sole principle at work: care, equity, representation, and justice are central. It is these principles that have the potential to create a truly feminist city.
