Future Forward

Seyi (00:01)
Hello, hello, hello Reza, how are you?

Reza (00:03)
Hey,

I'm good Shae, how are you doing?

Seyi (00:06)
I am doing very well. It is another episode of Future Forward.

Reza (00:11)
Yeah, Shai, and you know, I have to say that we're pulling a thread that started with your future or five events that shaped, reshaped cities that led to the future of megacities, that led to the future of smarter cities. And then in the last episode, we talked about 15 minute cities. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. But before we do that, I'm going to welcome our listeners. I'm laughing as I say this just because.

Seyi (00:26)
Yep.

Absolutely.

Reza (00:38)
We love pulling threads and now we're pulling threads across our shows, Jay.

Seyi (00:41)
episodes it's like

the fifth episode or the fourth episode we're pulling a thread through so this is pretty cool

Reza (00:47)
Yeah.

Yeah. So welcome listeners to Future Forward. This is a conversation that Shay and I have been having for many years. It used to be Fridays at Starbucks getting our hot chocolate. And we wanted to invite you into the conversation where we talk about cities. We talk about how cities can be more sustainable, how they can be more community oriented, how they can help the communities within them thrive.

And all of it comes from a place of curiosity. We love this topic. And there so many connections in what we're trying to talk about, as you see from these four episodes that we've had back to back. pulling the same similar threads. And we also talk about it from the perspective of picking a topic, talking about the historical context, and then jumping into what's happening today, and then providing our strategic foresight.

predictions for the future, where we think things are going. And we also bring in our 21 laws of cities to help frame the conversation. And, you know, we've talked about 15 minute cities, not just in the last episode, Shay, but multiple times. And I, you know, I, don't think I know much about it beyond some of the things that we've talked about. So I'm very curious to learn more about it. So let's jump in, Shay.

Seyi (02:08)
Yeah, it's, I'm also quite excited to dive into it because it's something I strongly believe we should move more into as we think about the fabric of our cities. And what is a 50 minute city? It's probably the best way to start the episode. And it's this urban design concept where everything you need is just a short walk or a bike ride away within 15 minutes.

And it addresses several urban challenges that we are seeing right now, urgent in some cases, climate change, because we're driving longer distances, which lead to more emissions, social isolation. It is one person in a car in traffic listening to maybe our podcast, but you're still alone, which

in the grand scheme of things in a city where you're walking, you will have some micro interactions. And it's also addressing just the declining quality of life in urban areas, this whole idea. So we'll examine this 15-minute city idea. We'll throw in our laws, as you've mentioned. And whether you're a planner, policymaker, a city dweller, and you just care about the future, we're hoping today's episode offers you

Reza (03:12)
Yeah.

Seyi (03:36)
some ideas about a more livable, sustainable city. as we typically start, I'll start from the historical context. And I believe we mentioned this before as well on some of the earlier episodes of the podcast, that cities evolved around walking. It basically, for most of human history, cities were designed at human scale out of pure necessity. We talked about how

Some of the cities, the hierarchy would put the center of the city in the middle and everything else would sort of fan out, but within walking distance of the center. And ancient Roman cities like Pompeii were remarkably compact, typically two to three kilometers across in terms of the extension across, which is a distance that is easily walkable, 20 to 30 minutes at a regular pace.

Reza (04:09)
Mm-hmm.

Seyi (04:33)
is what you achieve with two to three kilometers. These carefully planned layouts, which featured narrow streets, raised sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, these were all around this idea of people being able to walk to wherever they needed to go. And the planning guide that was used by Romans, apparently in doing our research, we found it was

Vitri versus the architecturer, which specify that cities should be oriented to block prevailing winds while public spaces should be proportional to population. Talk about human centered, Reza.

Reza (05:17)
Yeah,

that is such a... I think we'll find in this episode these patterns that work for human scale. And that's really my comment over here. And you know why human scale, if you remember from, I think it was episode 26, where we talked about the future of architecture and sustainable design and how a human scaled environment makes you feel like what it...

Seyi (05:25)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Reza (05:43)
what synapses it fires in your brain and how it makes you feel emotionally is important. yeah, even from back then, even from this historical perspective, they understood the effect of this. Yeah.

Seyi (05:49)
Yeah.

The of that, the value

of that, exactly. And as we've mentioned in a few episodes as well, the Industrial Revolution came and absolutely changed this consideration for human scale. And it got worsened by the introduction of the car, the automobile, which completely transformed urban landscapes. We started to build highways.

favored parking lots over actual grass and sprawling suburbs because we had to move further away to get to the things we needed to feel like we were living in a city. So this shift happened and in 1961, another person we've talked about a fair bit on this show, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities where

She challenged this new prevailing wisdom around urban planning, which was more car-centric versus human-centric. She observed successful neighborhoods that thrived with mixed uses, residences alongside businesses, schools close to parks, walking, eyes on the streets. And she felt cities, the good cities, the thriving cities.

I'd created what she called the ballet of the good city sidewalk, which ties directly to the Pompeii example we just gave with the sidewalks playing a prominent part in how the city was designed. And Reza, I'll let you touch on the law. This totally applies to in terms of law five in our laws of cities.

Reza (07:31)
Yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, so this is really about urban density, really meaningfully changing how a sustainable city can operate and how it actually benefits the city because of that and mixed land use. Sorry, I brought up urban density. What I meant to say was mixed land use is really the law over here that improves that urban vitality.

And Jacob's recognized that separating where people live from where they work, where they shop, where they play, it really undermines the very fabric that makes a city vibrant. So, yeah.

Seyi (08:28)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah.

And the big part of it was that she kept fighting to change policy. think we always talk about what's going on. And in Jane Jacobs's case, she recognized that policy would play a big part because what she was fighting against was zoning practices that had changed things. Zoning practices championed by...

planners like Robert Moses, someone we've also mentioned a few times on this show, who sliced through vibrant neighborhoods with expressways. The car became the main consideration in the design of cities. And we talked about this a few episodes ago as well, of this east side of downtown idea where the expressway splits the vibrant downtown and the east side becomes

the expressway or the rail lines, and the east side becomes the part of the city that is undesirable until gentrification hits again and the cycle continues. And so the idea of the 15-minute city is really a return to what Jane Jacobs was preaching, updated for the century we live in. And interestingly, as you can imagine, it wasn't

Reza (09:36)
there.

Yeah.

Seyi (09:55)
purely Jane Jacobs idea, it came from this idea of neighborhood units which was proposed by Clarence Perry in the 1920s and in the 1980s what we started to know as the traditional neighborhood development which was the direct offshoot of the work that Jane Jacobs had done. So I'll pause here and any comments you have.

Reza (10:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, two things that this comes to mind. You know, this return to the this human centered way goes back to what we were talking about in the episode, you know, where about about mega cities and how cities are systems and how their system overloads. And it's like we have overloaded our cities or these feedback mechanisms and the system of a city is not working anymore.

Seyi (10:37)
Yeah.

Reza (10:46)
So we're going back to what we know makes a city system work. And so that's my observation over here. And it's fascinating that, you know, these neighborhood units that Clarence Perry proposed came from the 1920s. again, prescient thinking about what is human scale design and how it makes humans feel in the city and how that's coming back or how it came back in the 80s. We lost our way it seems, and now it's coming back again.

Seyi (10:50)
Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (11:16)
I love these sort of echoes from the past that keep coming back and reminding us of what makes a city vibrant.

Seyi (11:20)
Absolutely.

Yeah, it means we knew what to do at some point and then we strayed away from it. as our cities, I'll dive into today, as our cities face challenges, again, I mentioned some climate change, economic inequality, social isolation, we end up going back to another law and I'll quickly read this law, but then...

keep going on, it's the one you mentioned earlier Reza, it's law two, which is that urban density drives efficiency. And Newman and Kenworthy showed this clear relationship between urban density and energy consumption. This was in 1989. And the example I gave of, we used to walk before, but now we drive everywhere, is so apparent when we can do a comparison of two cities, two thriving.

Reza (11:56)
Yes.

Seyi (12:20)
cities thriving in different ways, but thriving cities of today. And it's Atlanta and Barcelona. And the reason why we've picked these two is because they have similar populations, but vastly different density patterns. Atlanta consumes significantly more energy per capita because of the sprawl. And

It is stock. Atlanta has a density of 1,800 people per square kilometer, which consumes nearly 11 times more gasoline per person than Barcelona, which has a density of 17,500 people per square kilometer. So it's just purely about 10 times more people in the same size area.

Reza (12:44)
Yeah.

And genetics. Yeah.

Seyi (13:12)
And the average Atlanta resident drives 25,000 kilometers per year. And I apologize, I'm using kilometers, but hey, I'm all about my Britain right now. I'll exactly my metric system. So you'll have to do the conversions yourself, but 25,000 kilometers per year compared to just 7,600 in Barcelona.

Reza (13:27)
your metric system.

Seyi (13:42)
It is a lot less about lifestyle choices we make, it is about the urban form we have created. And the density alone isn't sufficient. The 15-minute series solves more than the density problems. But if you have any comments you want to share here Reza, please go for it.

Reza (13:48)
Exactly.

Yeah,

think the contrast between Atlanta and Barcelona really brings to light this law that we brought up about, you know, we even have a law around urban form, but that density is causing that much driving that leads to this unsustainable way of living. So thanks for bringing up the example. Keep going. This is great. Yes. Yes. Overload.

Seyi (14:14)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, the overload again, you touched on it. The overload

becomes apparent because of how we've shaped the urban form and forced people to utilize resources quite unsustainably. but again, we accept that density isn't the only thing that matters here. But the 15 minutes TD sort of helps to...

Reza (14:32)
Yes. Yes.

Seyi (14:54)
maintain enough density for us to use things sustainably. And 15-minute city was popularized a few years ago by Professor Carlos Moreno with the aim to redesign neighborhoods where we can, as I said at the beginning, meet our daily needs within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Which, as you can imagine, if we go back to the Atlanta and Barcelona examples, a 15-minute walk or bike ride would

Absolutely reduce car dependency. It would promote physical activity, which again, I think we've talked about just the need for that. It would support local businesses because you're buying from within your neighborhood and this eyes on the street idea that Jane Jacobs promoted. You would have to walk to places or even bike and you get to know your neighbors and consequently foster a sense of community there.

Reza (15:26)
Yeah.

Seyi (15:54)
And this was made seriously apparent during COVID, but shortly before that where the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who again, we've also mentioned on this show before, she embraced this with a plan to create 15 minute cities within the city of Paris. And the push

Reza (16:10)
you

and

Seyi (16:23)
was accelerated during COVID. It was this push that actually got her reelected, I believe. And then COVID accelerated it and it made the residents and the dwellers in the city of Paris more resilient during COVID because they still had the ability to walk to the things they needed in contrast to those of us who needed to drive everywhere and

Reza (16:28)
Mmm.

Seyi (16:52)
everything shut down. Paris didn't fully shut down during COVID because it was already transforming into this more resilient 15-minute city idea. So I'll pause there because I know we have a law that applies but I'd also love to get your comments Reza.

Reza (16:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is what we talked about in the last episode, Shai, about how we reframe the idea of implementing something in a city with the outcome that you want, the immunity-oriented outcome that you want. And she reframed it to, 15 minutes to essential services, whether it's your work or where you shop or what have you, or see your doctor, school, et cetera.

Seyi (17:11)
Absolutely,

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (17:35)
And

it's that reframing and thinking about it in a way that allowed it to be successful because you can get your head around it as a citizen that this is going to be beneficial to me. So I think that was the real unlock for me. I love that you've used that as an example. And the law that we picked, mean, there's so many laws that we can apply over here, but the one that we believe is really the one that addresses it is law six, which states social equity

Seyi (17:44)
Yeah.

Reza (18:05)
underpins urban sustainability. And, you know, the thing over here is that if you're not deliberately planning, these 15 minute neighborhoods can become an exclusive enclave, right? You can do it for the wealthy. You can make it like this, you know, cool neighborhood and everything is connected. But you have to do it in a way that addresses the whole population of the city. So Copenhagen provides a really good example over here.

Seyi (18:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (18:34)
They prioritize the mixed income housing, the universal access to high quality public services, no matter what neighborhood it is in. And so it consistently ranks high on quality of life indexes, indices, because they're prioritizing that social equity. It's not just, we're gonna do the 15 minute city in this around dismay because it's a wealthy one.

Seyi (18:52)
Yeah.

Reza (19:00)
When you move out to the Benlews, I'm pronouncing this all wrong, but you move out to the suburbs, you know, don't really care about them. Like why should they have 15 minute cities? And then it really drives this stark difference in who the haves and have nots. And that's not really sustainable. That's not a thriving community.

Seyi (19:05)
Yep.

It's not, it's not. I'll, I'll please for those of our listeners who haven't listened to the previous episode before this one, you should go listen to that one because Reza is pulling a thread on one idea we talked about around measuring what matters in, in cities. And so up until the car and the solutions to the car problem different from the 15 minute city.

picked metrics or measures that were all around keeping the car, but improving sort of the experience of the car. So I'll use congestion as an example. Congestion was a metric. And if you were not thinking about what problems am I solving for the residents of the city?

Reza (20:06)
Alright.

Seyi (20:19)
and you're thinking, congestion is the problem, you will try to address congestion. When the real problem you're trying to solve for the residents of the city is the point you made, access to essential services, that's the real problem. Can we get access to essential services instead of making it easier for them to drive to those essential services? Bring the essential services closer to them so they can walk or bike to it, essentially. Yeah.

Reza (20:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

fantastic. I

loved how you did that. That's exactly it. It's the sort of that outcome that you're driving.

Seyi (20:49)
Yeah.

Exactly, exactly. And so as we think about even the cities, the good examples you gave in the last episode, and I will sort of pick on Austin a little bit as a bad example here to tie it to the point you made about haves and have nots. Interestingly, and sadly, the parts of Austin, Texas that are walkable,

are not affordable for the vast population of the city. They're just not. And there's the need to drive a lot if you, for example, if you work on what is now becoming a more gentrified part of Austin, the East side of downtown, you cannot afford to even grab lunch there, honestly. And if you work there,

Reza (21:26)
So true. Yeah.

Yeah.

Seyi (21:51)
you're probably having to, if you're not working at the some of the high income earning jobs in the city, you're not living downtown and walking to east of downtown unless you're earning enough to live downtown and not a lot of us earn that kind of money. So the idea here is that

Reza (22:07)
Yeah.

Yes.

Seyi (22:20)
We absolutely need to, I'm so glad you brought that up with the law, make sure even as we implement the 15 minute city, we still bear in mind the equity and inclusion that is required to make it a sustainable and thriving city. Thank you so much for highlighting that, yeah.

Reza (22:43)
Yeah,

I loved how you brought the Austin example. really brings light to it.

Seyi (22:46)
Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll, I'll dive into strategic foresight, some of which we've already sort of touched on with the law and the example you gave. And I'll start by highlighting a point that as I was researching this, popped out to me and it's that the future of the 15 minute city should represent the past that we talked about at the beginning.

Reza (23:19)
Hmm.

Seyi (23:19)
with

the examples of Pompeii and the consideration that was given to making it walkable, even as the hierarchy. And yes, they didn't have vehicles then, but you could have built a vast sprawling city that people still had to walk long distances on sustainable distances. But no, there was a consideration for

Reza (23:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Seyi (23:48)
being able to get to the cities. And it goes back a more recent past. Yes, I mentioned Pompeii, but a more recent example is the neighborhood units that we've also mentioned that Clarence Perry was working on. And to be more precise about that, this idea of neighborhood units was a concept in 1929 by Clarence Perry in his regional plan for New York.

Reza (24:17)
Mm.

Seyi (24:18)
Why am I mentioning that specifically? Because by 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote the book, she had a reference point. And then Professor Moreno in the more recent past here, just a few years ago, he had two reference points for this idea that we should make

Reza (24:30)
Yeah.

Yes.

Seyi (24:49)
a i.e. maybe a mini city within a city, but a unit that is centered around like a school with shops sort of at the perimeter of that unit, parks within that unit, curved streets within that unit so people are walking and it's less conducive for cars is maybe the idea there. And that this

Reza (25:06)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Seyi (25:19)
unit, it wasn't arbitrary in the past. It was based on the comfortable distance for a mother to walk with her child to school.

Reza (25:30)
my God, that's so moving just to hear that. don't you think, Shay, don't you think that's that's the core of a community? Walking a child to school, just, you know, visualizing that in my head moves me to think that this is how you design a sustainable community.

Seyi (25:33)
It's...

It absolutely is.

Yes.

and a thriving community, a mom, a dad, the distance that they can walk to take their child to school. And I see this in the neighborhood around my kid's An image is popping into my head right now of a dad who happens to also be a teacher at the school walking with, as we drive past, because we're about a 15 minute drive away.

Reza (25:52)
Yeah.

Seyi (26:18)
He walks his kids to school and that time is just precious as I can imagine. Yeah. So we designed before to cater to that. I was thinking about strategic futures, strategic foresight for 15 minute cities. And that is really the crux of it for me. Yeah. Absolutely.

Reza (26:26)
Please.

Yeah.

It's based on the past, it's based on this very

human-centered vision.

Seyi (26:47)
approach

to urban planning. So I'll pause there because I know you shared some comments but I don't know if you have any others.

Reza (26:51)
Yeah.

Yeah,

no, I, you know, again, it's just like you mentioned about this teacher walking their kids to school. I had a former colleague who was who had moved to Austin and he was trying to make a decision of where he wanted to live. And his decision making criteria was based on where where where he could live, where he could walk his kids to school every day. And I and I now and I'm now looking back on

Seyi (27:20)
Mm. Mm.

Reza (27:25)
what he said and realizing, boy that was a fantastic decision to make because I often see him walking his kids and I wave out to him when I see him and I'm like, man that's so much nicer to be walking your kids to school and I'm here, I'm like fighting traffic, you know, all the crowds to get my kids to school.

Seyi (27:31)
Yeah.

Yep.

Reza (27:48)
That's a great, yeah, it really sits in my mind. It's not something I'm not gonna forget. So thank you for using that example.

Seyi (27:52)
Yeah, yeah.

It stayed with me since I dug into it as well. And again, one of the things, even as we share these idyllic concepts, which aren't that far off because they've existed before in the past, we do recognize that it is going to be difficult to reshape our urban form to cater to this. And so...

I'll touch on a few implementation challenges that I can imagine will exist to get us there. And a big one is just rethinking governance in cities. The policies around what we focus on should truly start to move towards a more human centric idea. And it will come from just listening to what the people in the city want. Law 12 is what pops up for me here.

Reza (28:49)
Yeah.

Seyi (28:49)
where participatory governance leads to better outcomes. If we involve communities in deciding where the schools will be, what schools we shut down versus invest in, it will shape our local environments and maybe get us to the 15 minute city. Another one is that digital inclusion will be important because even as we sort of...

form these many units within the cities. As you mentioned before Reza, we should be careful not to make it just for the haves and exclude the have-nots. It should be totally inclusive in its implementation. And then as the Austin example shows, we will have to make housing affordable. Otherwise, we will just worsen the inequalities that already exist and...

Reza (29:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Seyi (29:45)
If you think about it, it's a direct link. If the wealthy have opportunities to walk their kids to school, engage with their local community at the expense of those who drive long distances, the unhealthy impacts of that will just further widen the gap for people if they're not get, simple example, if they're not getting exercise.

because walking is exercise. If they're not getting exercise, but they're sitting in their cars and having to eat breakfast in their cars. A friend was telling me about, again, similar story to yours. They were looking at cities to move to, they were in San Francisco. And one of the considerations was that he wanted his kid, he still drives his kid to school, even as they've moved to Austin, but he wanted his kids to be able to

Reza (30:14)
Yeah, it is.

Seyi (30:43)
comfortably eat breakfast at home before jumping in the car because before they moved here, they were having to just quickly throw something in the microwave and they would eat it in the car to avoid traffic. You don't want that. You don't want that. So as much as we can, we should make housing affordable to enable the 15 minute city across social strata in a city.

Reza (30:46)
Mmm.

rush. Yeah.

No... No...

Yeah, know, Shay, I have two threads to pull over here. One is when we talked about megacities and we talked about nodes as opposed to sort of trying to continue to grow cities in ways that, you know, you're just sort of expanding it out as opposed to finding ways to create these nodes. And this is very similar to this idea. you know, can these nodes make you feel more local, more connected, more...

Seyi (31:17)
Please.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Reza (31:41)
involved in the governance of the city more willing to participate, more included. That's the one thread that comes back. And then the other one, like even as you talked about this friend that, you know, felt like they were rushing and they wanted to change, you know, change that. It reminds me of the episode that we did with Chris Tamjidi and he talked about the importance of being outside, the importance of exercise and how that changes the emotional state. And in ways that we're designing cities that

Seyi (31:46)
Yeah.

Yes.

Reza (32:11)
makes a worse state for us. And we're just adding stress to citizens. And I think that that is what these patterns recognize. They're human scale. makes, you know, how you feel. So there's a lot of relationship between, you know, how we design these cities, how it makes us feel and the success of that city, you know, being sustainable and thriving.

Seyi (32:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. couldn't. Yes. I'm so glad you tied it back to Chris's episode as well. Again, all these episodes, the theme should be clear to our new listeners and our old listeners probably see where we come from already because it does matter a lot. And as we close this episode out, I think Reza, I'll borrow from you what you just said. If you take nothing away from this episode, think about, take this one thing. Think about your city.

cities we live in and any redesign, any projects, any initiatives that we're working on, let us tie it back to how does this impact the life of a father or a mother and their child as they try to get to the things that are essential in their lives.

Reza (33:21)
Mmm.

Yeah, I love that. Shea, as we say when we usually are meeting, that's a three-pointer. That's like three-pointer at the end of the game. That's the call to action. Just, I can't, like that's stuck in my mind. So well done.

Seyi (33:33)
That is the end.

I'm glad

to hear that. Yeah, we, for our listeners, Reza and I always end up with a three-pointer and some of them are trick shots that end up as three-pointers as well. So welcome to the inside joke that we always have. And you've become part of us, of our conversations already anyway. So yeah.

Reza (34:03)
Yeah, so with that, fantastic episode. As always, so much fun talking about these topics and exploring them. I hope listeners that you enjoyed it too. always ask, we don't have a mailbag today, but if you have a mailbag, send it to us, hello at futureforward.fm. You can send it an email, you can make a voice note, send it to us. We'll play it on the podcast.

Seyi (34:11)
front.

Reza (34:32)
And then take time to share it with someone that you think that will enjoy this. We continue to grow our audience and we love seeing that people. This is really, you know, in the times that we're in, Shay, we were just talking before this episode, this is like, this is a little bit of a light. This is hope. This is us imagining a better future that we can have. And, you know, I can't tell you what a difference it makes to have, you know, have this discussion with you because it puts me in this mood of hope.

Seyi (34:47)
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Reza (35:00)
in this dark time that we seem to be in. And so for our listeners, I hope you can share this with others. Please rate and review. That helps the podcast be found by others, as well as like and subscribe. It helps our Overlord algorithm to help share with others. We don't mind the algorithm sharing of people that care about this. But yeah, with that,

Seyi (35:03)
It's the same. It's the same.

working enough, Diva.

Reza (35:29)
Thanks for listening and look forward to seeing you on the next one.

Seyi (35:34)
Yes, bye for now.

Reza (35:36)
Bye.