I can agree that quality is very important, as is the density of the “15 minute city”. If the 15 minute city is just a single-fam-home dominated small suburban town, then yeah, your critique is abs on point, they are just shitty suburbs under a new name. 1/

You want agglomeration benefits both at the metro area level and at the local/district level. You want the 15 minute city to have the scale of a real city, albeit not of a “superstar city”. The one-hour metro area is the superstar city, the 15-min city offers a great quality of everyday life. 2/

The combination of these levels offers most of the benefits of superstar-city life (most people even in “legacy” superstar cities live farther than 15-mins from important amenities) while making it practical—politically, physically—to scale via urban forms conducive to high-quality human life. /fin