The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, reviewed

We look at this challenging book by Carlos Moreno. You can see more about The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet here.

The 15-Minute City reviewed

There are a lot of good case studies in this book, of positive initiatives in cities from all over the world. The author looks at cities in South America, Africa, the US and Europe. This ensures that there is a wide range of examples and different perspectives. Carlos Moreno, the author has a good perspective and it is a valid proposition that for a variety of reasons having a wide range of the services we need within 15 minutes of us seems like a good idea.

As more and more of humanity move to live in cities this does raise challenges and important questions about how, and why we live the way that we do. This is not say that there are great reasons to live outside of big cities. As Moreno illustrates though, even in large cities there are still ways that we can organise urban life better. This book is interesting and thought provoking, definitely worth a read.

More about the book

A fresh and innovative perspective on urban issues and creating sustainable cities

In The 15-Minute City: A Solution for Saving Our Time and Our Planet, human city pioneer and international scientific advisor Carlos Moreno delivers an exciting and insightful discussion of the deceptively simple and revolutionary idea that everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home.

This book tells the story of an idea that spread from city to city, describing a new way of looking at living that addresses many of the most intractable challenges of our time. Hundreds of mayors worldwide have already embraced the concept as a way to help recover from the pandemic, and the idea continues to gain speed. You’ll learn why more and more cities are planning to make cars far less necessary for contemporary city-dwellers and how they’re planning to achieve that goal. You’ll also find:

• Strategies for cities to recover and adapt to benefit residents, saving them precious time
• Techniques to change the habits of automobile-dependent city residents and maximize social benefits of living in a human-centric city
• Scientifically developed, research-backed solutions for enduring urban issues and problems

Deeply committed to science, progress, and creativity, Moreno presents an essential and timely resource in The 15-Minute City, which will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in modern and innovative approaches to consistently challenging urban issues that have bedeviled policy makers and city residents since the invention of the car.

More about the author Carlos Moreno

Born in Colombia in 1959, Carlos Moreno arrived in France at the age of 20. Today, he is a University Professor, an international expert in the human Smart City, an expert in cities and territories of tomorrow, and a Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor. An exceptional career that this humanist scientist likes to call a “path” and that is illuminated by passion from start to finish: a passion for innovation, creativity, exploration – but also a passion for exchanges, connections, and bonds forged with others. Carlos Moreno has traced his path at the crossroads of many worlds: teaching, research, business, industry – exploring various disciplines and fields, convinced that innovation is born from their interaction.

Teaching, research and scientific experiments

From 1979, Carlos Moreno quickly integrated into French scientific life. In 1983, he became a teacher-researcher at the IUT of Cachan / Université Paris Sud and worked within the Laboratory of Computer Science and Robotics (LIMRO). He was then a pioneering figure in robotics, a nascent discipline at the time, which mobilized knowledge from computer science, electronics, mathematics and which questioned scientists on the interface between the robot and its environment.

This work in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence gave rise to two lasting convictions in him: on the one hand, systems must be thought of in terms of complexity – as defined by French thinkers such as Henri Laborit and Edgar Morin – that is to say that any entity can only be understood in relation to its environment and that it must be studied in the context of its relationships and interdependencies; on the other hand, it is by applying this “complexity” to the real world that value can be created through innovative services and uses. He also participated at this time in the birth of one of the first French technology transfer centers in Ile-de-France, CERMA in Cachan.

In 1990, he joined the University of Evry – after having participated in its creation – and became a University Professor. Within a joint CNRS unit, the Laboratory of Computer Methods (LaMI), he founded and directed the “Distributed Reactive and Adaptive Systems” team and developed numerous links with the world of industry. At the end of the 90s, the creation of the Evry Génopole gave the opportunity to scientists, research engineers and entrepreneurs present on the campus to work together, in a spirit of decompartmentalization that Carlos Moreno would never cease to promote from then on.

Currently, he is scientific director and co-founder of the “Entrepreneurship Territory Innovation” Chair IAE Paris-Sorbonne, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

“Exploring a system through complexity consists of understanding it in its context and studying its vitality through the relationships between its constituent elements, the energies that produce them and the changes that occur to maintain a balance, extract knowledge, operate an evolution, construct a rupture, anticipate a death or predict the emergence of new situations.”
Carlos Moreno

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