Shrink the City

Gonna be honest, wasn't expecting a book extolling the virtues of the ~15-minute city~ to unintentionally make me wary of the concept. So much time was spent dispelling counterarguments against it that I learned about problems I'd never even considered and didn't know I'd have issue with until I heard about them here.

I've been a lifelong suburbanite (and arguably lived semi-rural for a decade), so no city has ever been a home for me; they've always been someplace I visit for a day or two before leaving. I do have friends that live in big cities though, and I find that they're always uniquely opinionated about the topic. They take pride in city-life things that I pity them for, and they pity me for things I take pride in for living in the suburbs. It all comes out in the wash at the end, but just know that that's where I'm coming from.

I did appreciate how this being a post-COVID nonfiction book it was able to take into account how, yeah, living in a tight radius is cool until all of a sudden you can't escape because of, say, a pandemic lockdown. And this wasn't a solely Western or eurocentric discussion, planned cities like Brasilia and The Line currently being built in Saudi Arabia were brought up. There is a clear favoritism towards Dutch and Scandinavian-style cities though with their bicycle-first approach to infrastructure. I did find it curious that the author posits bicycle riding as something we all wish we could do if the world around us would allow it when that is far from a universal desire in my experience; growing up, whenever I saw someone riding a bike on the road with cars the adults in my life would point them out and say, "That guy lost his license, you don't wanna end up like him."

As for concerns I didn't know I had going into this, apparently people who live closer to grocery stores visit them more frequently and over time end up consuming more calories than less regular shoppers. There were also some valid points of smaller communities becoming more socially isolated and unwelcoming of outsiders, to say nothing of socieoeconomic stratification. Highly-monitored urban zones in the name of "efficiency and safety" also raise privacy concerns that have me agreeing with libertarians, which makes me feel weird. I didn't always find the author's refutations against these points wholly convincing, so I leave this book feeling more conflicted than I did going into it.

I do think that car-less subsections of major cities are inevitable, but maybe another decade or two off, and only in places that are already sufficiently wealthy and have a local culture that wants it. It might be a "build it and they will come" kind of situation, but I don't think shrinking an urban environment, no matter how well intentioned, should be something done against a populace who didn't ask for it.