Illustration by Rich Hauck.
Picture this.
A family settles into a neighborhood.
The young children don’t need a long ride on the bus because their elementary school is a few blocks away. Similarly, their parents walk to work or maybe bike or hop a city bus for a short trip downtown.
The family buys their essentials at the small grocery in the neighborhood business strip, which also has a few shops where they can get a haircut or grab lunch or a cup of coffee. There’s a small restaurant, a pub and maybe a dry cleaner or a bookstore.
The neighborhood doesn’t have everything the family needs, but, most days, the basics of life are within easy reach—within, let’s say, 15 minutes.
That’s the basic approach of an urban planning concept called the “15-minute city,” which states that residents should be able to access most daily necessities within an easy walk or bike ride.
When I first learned about the 15-minute city, I thought to myself, “Hey, I resemble that remark.”
My house is a five-minute walk to my office, a 10-minute stroll to many restaurants and maybe 12 minutes to the Broad Street Market. Also under a quarter-hour: the YMCA, the river, City Island and all of downtown.
In Harrisburg, 15 minutes goes a long way.
I realize that this lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. I like the fact that my survival doesn’t depend on a fragile, 4,000-pound machine, without which I’d be utterly helpless. I find that liberating.
Many urban planners have embraced the 15-minute concept, or something like it (20 minutes, 30 minutes), as a foundational part of their design approach. As we remake our cities, they say, we should emphasize walking over driving, density over distance, mixed over single use.
Livability is at the core of the 15-minute movement: easy access to food, shopping, jobs, friends. Compare that to what most of us now have—gridlocked traffic, vast parking lots and ugly strip malls, which collectively waste our time and eat at our souls.
For Harrisburg, the 15-minute concept makes sense. Much of the city is already very walkable and amenity-rich, but would be even more so with high-density residential development, especially downtown, while slimming and slowing down overbuilt, dangerous roads like Forster, Front and State streets.
Ultimately, though, what wins me over is this—that’s how our cities were originally built. Cities like Harrisburg were designed, more or less, as a collection of interlocking, walkable neighborhoods.
Many corners had small grocery stores, eateries and bars. A school or a church was a few blocks away. In the neighborhood center, a collection of storefronts housed a variety of shops: cafés, bakeries, boutiques, maybe a doctor, dentist or realtor. Many neighborhoods even had small movie theaters or department stores.
Then came the 1940s and ‘50s car culture and, with it, attempts to retrofit cities into the new paradigm. It was a very, very bad fit.
Old neighborhoods were ripped to shreds by road expansions and highways. Entire blocks were razed for surface parking lots. Service and gas stations popped up nearly everywhere, displacing houses and businesses.
In Harrisburg, you couldn’t drive a block or two without running into a gas station or auto repair. There was one at Front and Verbeke. Two stared each other down across 3rd and Reily streets. Another occupied a prime corner of what’s now part of the Capitol Complex. There were dozens of stations downtown, Uptown, Allison Hill, everywhere.
The urban fabric was torn apart and, not surprisingly, quickly broke down.
Therefore, the so-called 15-minute city isn’t anything new. It’s just remaking what once existed—and worked so well for a long time. It’s putting a city back together, reassembling it, restoring it to something closer to its original state.
Auto-centric planning may work for the suburbs (or may not, I’ll let you argue that one). But cities weren’t designed for huge, movable machines; they were designed for small, movable humans. Cities were created specifically so that people easily could get from point A to point B to point C on foot—maybe aided over longer distances by bike or transit. And, simply put, that’s how they work best.
Lawrance Binda is publisher and editor of TheBurg.
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