IN December 2019, I was in Paris during one of the longest transport strikes the city had experienced in recent history. The strike, which was organised by the French rail union, put public transportation across the city to a halt.
Almost all metro transport and regional lines stopped running. Only two of 16 metro lines – the driverless ones – were operating as usual. For a city of 2.2 million people, surely the two lines weren’t enough.
As a result, the city was almost put to a halt, with people confined to their neighbourhoods, while work, school and daily activities were disrupted.
I myself was confined to Montreuil, a French Communist Party-administered commune in the eastern suburb of Paris, isolated from other parts of the city, leaving my room only for short walks around the neighbourhood and to get my daily needs. Little did I know I would face a similar situation months later in Kuala Lumpur, due to a virus.
The strike ended in early 2020, but its impact lingered. The strike brought to light the commuting pattern of Parisians, their over-reliance on public transportation to go to work and school, visit parks and cultural centers, socialise, and buy their daily necessities.
But it also showed that even without the metro lines, life continued. Throughout all the wreckage, the city was still functioning, but with limitations of course.
Coming out of this disruption, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced the “15-minute city” plan.
The 15-minute Doughnut
Mayor Hidalgo’s plan, in a nutshell, is to make each neighbourhood within the metropolis to be self-sufficient.
The idea was first pushed by the Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno. Instead of having a central business district, where most work and commercial activities are situated, and housing gradually pushed away from the centre according to their affordability, the 15-minute city is an urban form where people can live, work and play within 15-minute walking or cycling distance.
This would significantly reduce commuting time, over-reliance on cars and public transportation, and would lead to a less polluted city while improving social and economic vibrancy, as well as quality of life of the inhabitants.
Mayor Hidalgo pledged to make Paris such a city as part of her re-election campaign. This to me, sounds like the perfect solution to our woes.
Soon after Mayor Hidalgo made that pledge, the Covid-19 pandemic struck Western Europe and many other countries outside of China, including our own.
Cities all over the world were forced to shut down. Everyone became confined to their own homes, only allowed to leave to get their essentials. Some were not even allowed to do that; food and other basic needs were brought to them instead.
Businesses and commercial activities stopped and so did social activities – no work, no school. Cities across the globe slowly turned into ghost towns.
In managing crises such as this, the 15-minute city would’ve been advantageous.
If each neighbourhood within a city is self-sufficient - having enough infrastructure such as workplaces, schools, hospitals and markets, providing utilities, goods, and basic needs – lockdowns and movement control initiatives can be easier to implement.
Residents would not need to worry because whatever they need would be available within walking or cycling distance. In fact, compact urban forms such as this can even help mitigate the spread of viruses, as there will be no such thing as rush hour – traffic on roads and crowding on public transports – no overcrowding in hospitals, schools, markets and so forth.
This is not the only compact city idea that has been floating around recently.
In 2019, Amsterdam announced the “Doughnut Model” for the city.
Building on top of the circular economy concept (an alternative to traditional linear economy, circular economy aims at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources), the model, developed by British economist Kate Raworth, focuses on creating a safe and just urban environment that promotes social wellbeing and environmental sustainability.
The “Doughnut” consists of three layers: 1) the inner circle represents the social foundation of the internationally agreed minimum social standards of living, including access to adequate health, resources, peace and justice, 2) the outer circle of the “Doughnut” represents the ecological ceiling of the planet, where exceeding it will be detrimental to life and livelihood, and 3) a safe and just space between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling, where humanity can thrive.
On top of creating the building blocks towards a circular economy and transitioning towards a new economic system, the Doughnut model also pushes for the designing of mixed-use districts and buildings. This will enable a more efficient use of space, while at
the same time minimise the effects of transportation and overall negative climate impacts.
In addition, the mixed-use districts also have the potential to be more cohesive, as well as encourage and facilitate more collaborative and sustainable behaviour.
Both Paris and Amsterdam, and many other cities around the world, are currently struggling to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. Some are still under a lockdown, while some are beginning to relax restrictions to restart their economy and social lives.
However, the new normal, a term overly used these days, is more than just practising physical distancing and self-hygiene. It also requires us to relook at how we’ve been managing our cities – their people, resources and economy. We need to resist our zoning and scale-economy reflexes. The two models borne out of the two cities are surely worth looking into and adapted by others.
A mere dress-rehearsal
In 1980, the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa released Kagemusha, a period film about a petty thief taught to impersonate a warlord and act as his double. Grand in its scale, the film featured epic battle scenes, with spectacular set pieces and explosive colours.
The film received many accolades both in Japan and internationally, winning the Palme d’Or prize at Cannes and being nominated for the Academy Award. When asked to comment about the film’s scale and success, Kurosawa nonchalantly said that the film is a mere “dress-rehearsal” for what’s to come.
True enough, five years later, Kurosawa released Ran. And true to his claim, the film, which literally means “chaos”, dwarfed the previous one.
The storyline was more expansive – Kurosawa combined the legends of the Japanese warlord Mori Motonari with Shakespeare’s King Lear to tell a story about an aging warlord whose three sons turn against each other and him.
The battle scenes were grander, the set-pieces were otherworldly, and the colours were bursting out of the screen.
The film, one of Kurosawa’s final works, is considered to be among his finest. Cinema is no longer the same after Ran.
In the same vein, Covid-19 is also a mere dress-rehearsal.
The pandemic is just a small taste of the looming epic-scale climate crisis and other major outbreaks that are to come, should we not make the necessary changes into how we are currently living. Kagemusha and Ran changed cinema for the better, but Covid-19 and what’s to come next will not change life for the better.
As we are still struggling to get out of the current crisis, we need to acknowledge that our previous ways were practically inhuman. They didn’t create the social justice and equity we deserve, and they didn’t respect the environment as they should.
The current crisis is a systemic crisis; it shows our lack and inaccessibility to public goods, and it highlights the flaws in our urban form and economic model. It is time for us to change them, and to imagine a different future.
Our future should include local neighbourhoods that are self-sufficient and self-sustainable.
It should be a place where people can live, work and play without increasing carbon footprint unnecessarily.
It should be an integrated urban fabric, where all life’s essentials are just around the corner. In order to achieve that, we need to empower local neighbourhoods to be more autonomous, and to promote local sovereignty.
As Malaysia is dealing with Covid-19, we are already seeing state governments taking charge of their own territories.
We need to take a few steps further and create our own 15-minute Doughnut Cities.
Badrul Hisham Ismail is the Director of Programmes at IMAN Research.
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