There Are No ‘Solutions’ in Urban Planning: Against the Idea of a Ready-Made Urbanism and the 15-Minute City’s Uncritical Branding

For several years now, urban planning practices have been marked by the proliferation of catchwords, serving as kinds of brands that promote the idea of easy, ready-made, one-size-fits-all ways to tackle planning problems. Among the most recent is the ‘15-Minute City’—sometimes presented as a saving ‘solution’ to the settlement issues of our time. This article develops a multifaceted discussion of the uncritical use of the 15-Minute City urban model through ten main objections. In a nutshell, these objections emphasize, first, the unavoidable contextual dimension of places when planning for proximity: urban conditions vary greatly in terms of space, society, and local economic and political settings—as forms and patterns of urbanization around the world may be incommensurable. Second, they challenge the idea that representing urban problems in contemporary urban regions, and their planning treatment, can be simplified to the neighborhood scale alone—cities are not just neighborhoods. Third, they point out that the principles of proximity in organizing urban settlements are not new, but deeply rooted in the history of urban planning, both in theory and practice. The ahistorical—and forgetful—dimension of contemporary urbanism, together with its branding rhetoric, emerges as one of its main issues, as well as one of its paradoxes and aporias. After a section reviewing the core of the current debate on the 15-Minute City model, the main body of the article discusses each of the ten objections in detail, grounding them in specific examples. In its final section, the article concludes by embracing a perspective of ‘openness of the city,’ where urban planning is not reduced to simple and quick formulas, but accepts the complex, historical, contextual, intrinsically political, and conflictual nature of “making urbanism,” and its inevitable partiality.