323
Why has the ‘15-minute city’ taken off in Paris but become a toxic idea in UK?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
323 points (96.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9604 readers
904 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because Paris is its own jurisdiction.
Paris' mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is incredibly unpopular in the rest of the Parisian Metropolitan Area (whose government is right-wing under Valérie Pécresse). Much of these areas are still car-dependent beyond belief with bad-to-awful public transit, meaning they are progressively getting cut-off from car-hostile Paris. Paris is completely unaffordable to live in, so it is normal for the working class to have a 1h+ commute into Paris.
This understandably breeds resentment from most people who have never heard of the term "induced demand" or think that the lack of rail transit it Hidalgo's fault.
This is not just Paris too. France as a whole did not change municipality boundaries since WW2. So usually legal city is just what in the rest of Europe we would be the city center. You often can not really tell the difference between the city and a French "suburb" on a satellite picture.
As a result it is rather easy to kick cars out of the city, as the residents do not need them and are just annoying for them. It also leads to bad connections to the outer parts of what really is the city, which pisses off the residents and that leads them to vote facist.
Affordability is a really important part that is not talked about enough. Walkable cities are better for people and the environment but they need to be affordable for it to matter.
Walkability generally means higher density and higher density means lower cost. The only reason why walkable places are generally less affordable right now is that they are scarce. If everywhere was walkable that wouldn't be a problem.
If only the law of supply and demand had some guidance to offer us on how to make walkable areas of cities more affordable...
I think Vienna has a great model to follow for making housing more affordable.
That does sound like a great model. Reading between the lines gets at what I was insinuating, too. Vienna built a lot of housing in good places. If walkable cities are expensive, it's because they're in high demand. We can lower the cost by making more of them.
Absolutely, much more housing is definitely needed. Not-for-profit housing already exists in the US, but there's very little of it. Not-for-profit housing units fill up very fast because they are usually less expensive, and once in the units, tenants tend to want to stay. This leads to long waiting lists for the limited Not-for-profit housing that already exists. Much, much more must be built. Changing restrictive zoning laws should help this, but I think federal and state governments are going to have to get involved as well, providing financing or subsidizing financing for Not-for-profit housing organizations to build or acquire properties.
Interestingly the public transit in paris and its metropolitan area is entirely under the authority of the "region", that is to say Pécresse.
There are massive investments in infrastructure throughout the area though. With metro lines being created and prolongated all over the place at huge expanse. Obviously this doesn't happen overnight.
Except for 25% of the accomodation which is sponsored by some public organization.