when i visited Paris i stayed in Colombes, a “banlieu”. i stayed there, sure, because i could not afford to stay in central Paris. Colombes was undergoing an incredible construction boom, building on a scale that would be impossible in central Paris, without some kind of revolutionary consensus. 1/

Colombes was being developed at high density, via extremely attractive apartment buildings. (i was very jealous.) it’s 20 mins on the train to central Paris. as tourists we rode that every day. 2/

Columbes itself is absolutely a 15-minute city. it has a town center with a kind of main street, a square with nice restaurants, etc. 3/

does Columbes offer the full set of options of all the Paris metro area? by definition, of course, no (since it’s only one tiny sliver of that!) does it offer a quality of life comparable to central Paris? yes! 4/

there would be different trade-offs for different neighborhoods, but Columbes definitely has advantages that would compensate for its disadvantages, many people would find it preferable to many other fine (and affluent) areas. 5/

hypothetically, might it be better if all of Paris were a 15 minute city, if with the same geographic accessibility of Colombes itself one could access all the options of the Paris metro area? 6/

absolutely that would be better. but there is no path to that, none. 7/

when we are building de novo districts, we can make them as dense as possible to maximize in-district agglomeration benefits. and we should, absolutely, subject to livability constraints! 8/

but it is building such districts that is the only meaningful path to augment high-quality urban at scale. it is not feasible — and not only for disagreeable NIMBY reasons — to take the 15 minute city at the center if historical metros and just add all the housing you need there. /fin

a 15 minute city in Paris is still in Paris. within an hour by public transport, you have Paris’ full scale. the denser the 15 minute city, the more scale you have in 15 minutes. a dense microcity has significant scale, and, like Paris, has the scale of its full metro area within an hour.

portraying the movement towards dense, mixed-use districts and the agglomeration effects of large-scale urbanism as antithetical strikes me as mistaken and counterproductive.

“It’s a great idea, if…done right. Federal lands are a national resource, and the nation needs more housing… What cities like St. George need most—and what they mostly refuse to allow—are modest homes and apartments for…workers and families.” @bcappelbaum.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/o...

(may i suggest microcities? www.interfluidity.com/v2/8772.html or just the sort if districts @holz-bau.bsky.social would design and propose?)

i agree, with respect the protagonists (our antagonists). but i think with respect to the broad, inchoate public, the blob that becomes the marginal voter, the annoyance was very real, and laziness about weighing harms left them vulnerable to salience bias. 1/

during the post George Floyd period, not immediate, say 2022, i remember a conversation with a friend in general intelligent and of good will. he was so annoyed by netflix’s “representation matters” era, by the sense every new films was leavened with clumsy social justice didacticism. 2/

of course i tried to guide him into thinking about priorities, is this *really* the problem that should recruit your political passions. he, genuinely of goodwill, quickly assented no, you’re right, plutocracy and its incentive to sew just this kind of division is a more important source of ills. 3/

but viscerally, immediately, that’s what he went for. and i think he was hardly alone. /fin

some people think it was a kind of ennui that left us open to fascism, citing perhaps Fukyama’s “last man” and a predicted rebellion against that status by those with “megalothymia”. 1/

i think it was not ennui but annoyance that left us vulnerable. people were just annoyed by pronouns and what one might call the microincriminations of “wokeness”. These seemed real, even pressing, while words like “fascism” or “tyranny” or “extermination camps” seemed hypothetical, overwrought. 2/

oops. /fin