Thoughts for October 9, 2022
Good afternoon. Topics are the 15 minute city, peace proposals, and RePlanet.
The 15 Minute City
I’ve discussed this before, so forgive some repetition. The 15 minute city is a concept in urban planning that a person’s common needs—shopping, retail, school, work, recreation, etc.—should be satisfiable within a 15 minute walk of one’s residence, thereby obviating the need for a car. The concept can be attributed to Carlos Moreno, a Colombian-born academic, and its implementation is best exemplified in Anne Hidalgo’s successful 2020 platform for mayor of Paris.
The idea gets a lot of credence in various high status circles: here is a write-up from C40 (a climate change initiative from large cities around the world), an implementation site where I don’t know who maintains it, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Local Governments for Sustainability sustainable mobility initiative, the Congress for the New Urbanism, the World Economic Forum, Dezeen (an architecture/design magazine), and Deloitte. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
One gets the impression from these articles that the 15 minute city is another substance-light urban planning fad, like smart cities or ecocities, that we won’t hear from again after a few years. And that’s probably true. But the idea draws from the much more durable principle in academic urban planning that a walkable, carfree city is a superior form of living. The contemporary iteration gives two justifications for this. First, as many of the sources listed above should attest, there is the perception that walking, biking, and public transportation are environmentally superior to driving. As far as I can tell, this is true, though the environmental benefits of not driving are often greatly exaggerated. The second justification is that dense, walkable cities are deemed to be more aesthetically pleasing than car-based cities. I will leave the merits of this point to the reader’s judgment.
But whatever the merits, the 15 minute city is conceptually deeply flawed. Alain Bertaud explains why. He looks at three kinds of establishments. For restaurants, most reasonably dense cities are already 15 minute cities, in that there are many kinds of restaurants within easy walking distance. This happened through the free market, not because any mayors or urban planners meticulously decided where bakeries, coffee shops, and restaurants should be located, though in some cases, such as under New York City’s elaborate system of zoning, urban planning is a barrier. For public entertainment, Bertaud considers that, by its very nature, there cannot be many world class operas. The idea that everyone will choose to see a local performance in a local school doubling as a performance venue, rather than seeing a world class opera, in order to save a car trip is ludicrous.
But where the idea really fails is in the labor market. Very few people, even in dense cities, live a short walking distance from their place of employment. The reason for this is simple. Given a large labor market, it is more rational both for workers and employers to specialize than to take jobs for which they are less suited just to save some commute time. An employer will cast its net over the entire city, looking for the most suited employees. Likewise, a job seeker will look over the whole city for a good job; restricting to what is nearby makes little sense. In his book Order without Design, Bertaud makes similar points and explains that, for instance, the satellite cities around Seoul, South Korea failed to function as self-contained labor markets for exactly this reason.
My mental model for the agglomeration benefits of large cities comes down to access, which is the number of destinations that one can reach in a reasonable commuting time; a 30 minute radius, known as Marchetti’s constant, is a good rule of thumb. Access can be considered as density times mobility (travel range). Car travel tends to give higher mobility, but because cars take up more space, density necessarily goes down. So there is a complex tradeoff. There are some places, like Manhattan, where it makes sense to make the tradeoff in favor of high density. But in most places, travel range makes more sense. It is for this reason, and not because of a conspiracy by car and oil companies, that the automobile is the most common mode of transportation in rich countries.
But in the Manichaean worldview of activist urbanists, there is no tradeoff. There, walking, biking, and public transportation are good; cars are bad. Density is good, low density (or “sprawl”) is bad.
Trying to force this sort of localism on the public would require a level of central planning that would make Gosplan blush. Alternately, it can be pursued as Hidalgo is doing in Paris: closing off streets to through-traffic or to car traffic in general. Since such policies are not likely to be accompanied by any increase in density, we get the worst of both worlds for access: restrictions on density and restrictions on mobility. The result will be reduced opportunity and reduced wealth.
It is inevitable that there will be some neighborhoods that are wealthier and more politically influential than others. As Ed Glaeser explains, a 15 minute city design methodology will exacerbate this problem and lead to ghettoization in the poorer areas; since transportation is to be restricted, they will have less access to high quality schools, retail, employment, etc.
Finally, the ecological aspects need to be addressed. Although Moreno and other advocates of the 15 minute city try to present the idea as positive, the effect of this and other attempts to restrict mobility will be to harm human wellbeing in the name of the environment. It’s a bit like trying to sell population control as a positive thing with euphemisms such as “female empowerment”. Given that there are so many options on the table that are good both for human wellbeing and the nonhuman environment, bypassing them and going to solutions that pit the two against each other makes no sense.
Here is a better approach to urban design. Focus on real needs of the public, such as access to good jobs, crime, pollution, and health care, rather than trying to impose a utopian vision that does not address the needs of the public.
Peace Proposals
Elon Musk, who is usually a pretty smart guy, attracted mostly negative attention with this.
I think that Musk is coming from a position of genuinely desiring peace, and not a pro-Putin or anti-western perspective, and that he thinks that this proposal will help make peace happen. But there are some major problems. First, if we accept the logic behind Russia’s claim to Crimea, we open the door to no end of the revanchist conflicts that the Westphalian system of nation-states is meant to avoid. Second, neither side has expressed any interest in peace along these lines.
He later added
The situation is indeed dangerous. But most observers, such as in this article by Eliot Cohen, understand that Musk’s approach is not the safest. If the Western alliance were to yield to threats, then it sends a clear message to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators that nuclear blackmail is an effective tool. Thus we will see more nuclear blackmail and a more dangerous world. See also, Munich 1938.
Amidst the crisis, President Biden remarked,
“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,” Biden warned during remarks at a Democratic fundraiser in New York where he was introduced by James Murdoch, the youngest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, according to the pool report.
He added: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
This remark is rather puzzling to me. First off, the Russian attitude toward nuclear weapons is quite different from that of the United States. They have invested more in low yield, nonstrategic weapons, and they expect that they could use them without triggering the kind of escalation that would lead to a full exchange with the West.
Second, if the threat is really this dire, why is Biden making remarks at a fundraiser, rather than addressing the nation from the Oval Office like President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Perhaps the Armageddon remark is a threat rather than a mere prediction. Perhaps the choice of the fundraiser as a venue is to keep the affair low key. It will probably be many years before we know.
Joshua Treviño wrote a useful analysis. He points out that the most dramatic line from Kennedy’s address was,
“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
This statement represents a unilateral security guarantee on Western Hemisphere nations with which the United States was not allied, and as such was a bold move. As Treviño argues, this moved helped resolve the crisis peacefully because it foreclosed escalatory moves by the Soviet Union, such as a demonstration launch. Treviño argues that Biden should do the same in Ukraine, blocking an escalatory path that the Russians are reportedly considering.
All this is coming because the war is now going very badly for Russia, and Putin may feel the need to take desperate action to save his own skin if nothing else. The last few weeks have seen dramatic Ukrainian victories in Kherson and Lyman, though offset by losses around Bakhmut. This piece by Bryan Frydenborg is a useful, though I think overly optimistic, assessment of the situation. As of this writing, the likelihood that Ukraine will have recovered Sevastopol (major port city in Crimea) by December 31, 2023 is only 15%; significantly higher than it was more than a month ago, but still an indication that this war has a long way to go. Still, Ukrainian victory now looks like the most probable outcome, a happy contrast to what I predicted back in February.
I recommend the Institute for the Study of War for daily updates. It has been my most important source of information. ISW covers other important timely issues thoroughly—right now they are also providing daily updates on the anti-regime protests in Iran—and also has longer form publications on topics such as Chinese military doctrine.
We now know that forced deportations, murder of civilians, torture chambers, child rape, and genocide are so widespread that it is hard to imagine that these are not deliberate policies from the Kremlin. And this pattern of behavior from the Russian Federation, and from Vladimir Putin in particular, is not new to this year. They are also responsible for war crimes in Syria; an unprovoked attack on Georgia; brutality against Chechnya—which may have been justified by a false flag terrorist attack organized by Putin and the FSB—the murder of journalists and regime critics, sometimes overseas; an extensive campaign of cyberwarfare against other countries, including the United States; and numerous other atrocities, all while overseeing one of the most corrupt regimes in the world.
It is foolish to imagine that the war could be ended at this time through a negotiated settlement, because diplomacy requires two sides that are willing to be reasonable. Vladimir Putin is an evil man, more of the character of Slobodan Milošević or Saddam Hussein, and not a reasonable person with whom civilized countries can do business. The only acceptable outcome to the war is an unequivocal Ukrainian victory and the curtailment of Russia’s capacity to do evil in the world.
RePlanet
The other two items today have been bummers, so I would like to conclude with some some discussion of RePlanet, an NGO which is doing good work.
RePlanet’s agenda looks a bit like the Ecomodernist Manifesto, and there are a few people who are involved with both. They advocate the following points.
A good standard of living for all people, particularly those who are now in poverty.
Clean energy, with particular emphasis on nuclear energy.
Agricultural modernization, which includes alt-proteins, GMOs, and removing meat subsidies, opening the potential for rewilding.
Not only are nuclear energy and agricultural modernization good policy, they are probably the two most important things that can be done now to improve the environment. And they enhance human wellbeing, rather than come at the expense of it.
RePlanet is pretty new, and their website right now is still rather thin. But I’m looking forward to more work from them, and I hope that their example of human-affirming environmentalism will spread.