What is a 15-minute city?

Could this new vision for city-life become the new normal?

An artist render of the 15-minute city courtesy of Paris en Commun

The mayor of Paris recently announced something radical: A promise to remove over half the city’s parking spaces.

In other cities across the world this would have make her a very unpopular politician.

In Paris it’s a promise that won socialist Anne Hidalgo her re-election earlier this year.

This drastic proposal is just a small part of her mission to turn Paris into ‘the city of fifteen minutes’, a vast city-wide project that would affect nearly every aspect of urban life.

The guiding principle for the 15-minute city is simple.

The grounding principle for the plan is to ensure every Parisian lives within a 15 minutes’ walk or cycle from essential services such as grocery shops, parks, cafes, sports facilities, schools and even workplaces.

To do this, Hidalgo aims to make key thoroughfares in Paris inaccessible to motor vehicles, turn traffic-choked intersections into pedestrian plazas and create bike lanes on every street.

The driving force behind this idea is Carlos Moreno, a smart city professor at Paris-Sorbonne University. Moreno views his plan as an alternative to today’s…