How the ’15-minute city’ will transform work

Even before the coro­n­avirus cri­sis, a key top­ic of debate among town plan­ners was how to cre­ate a sus­tain­able, healthy urban envi­ron­ment that is easy to get around by either walk­ing or cycling.

To this end, Paris may­or Anne Hidal­go, who has been lead­ing a rad­i­cal over­haul of the city’s mobil­i­ty cul­ture since tak­ing office in 2014, embraced the notion of reshap­ing France’s cap­i­tal into a 15-minute city.

The con­cept, which was devel­oped by Sor­bonne Pro­fes­sor Car­los Moreno, advo­cates the cre­ation of a city of neigh­bour­hoods, in which work­ers find every­thing they need in terms of work, retail and leisure with­in 15 min­utes of their home.

In a work con­text, this would see offices added to neigh­bour­hoods that lack them so peo­ple could work clos­er to where they live. There would also be local co-work­ing hubs, enabling them to come togeth­er for meet­ings and to col­lab­o­rate when nec­es­sary.

The secret to new home working?

But this rais­es the ques­tion of whether Hidalgo’s 15-minute city could be one pos­si­ble answer, in an urban envi­ron­ment at least, to wide­spread con­cerns over the intan­gi­ble cap­i­tal of inno­va­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty being erod­ed by remote dig­i­tal work­ing.

The prob­lem is the often ad hoc shar­ing of knowl­edge, ideas and skills, which is com­mon­place in most offices, is very hard to repli­cate on dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms, such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

In fact, the impor­tance of such infor­mal social inter­ac­tion in enabling inno­va­tion was illus­trat­ed clear­ly in research pub­lished last year by the US Nation­al Bureau of Eco­nom­ic Research. It revealed that the num­ber of patents filed in 1920s Pro­hi­bi­tion Amer­i­ca fell by between 8 and 18 per cent, depend­ing on the state, because impor­tant social hubs in the shape of bars were closed.

As Bri­an Kropp, chief of human resources research at advi­so­ry and research firm Gart­ner, points out: “The mag­ic of inno­va­tion occurs when peo­ple with very dif­fer­ent ideas come togeth­er to cre­ate some­thing new and dif­fer­ent. This means that to inno­vate, you need peo­ple with exper­tise to be in the same place.”

How the 15-minute city will change how we live

So, with such dynam­ics in mind, what work­place shifts are we like­ly to see in a post-COVID world and where does the notion of Hidalgo’s 15-minute city fit in?

Ian Mulc­a­hey, urban plan­ner at design and archi­tec­ture firm Gensler, believes many of the ideas behind the con­cept reflect the cur­rent zeit­geist and are like­ly to make them­selves felt over time, whether active­ly planned for or not. While most urban envi­ron­ments in Europe at least were orig­i­nal­ly based on the idea of the 15-minute city, in that it was pos­si­ble to walk across their cen­tres in that time (about a mile), things changed when urban design became car focused.

This sit­u­a­tion has result­ed in present-day inhab­i­tants spend­ing most of their time in what Mulc­a­hey terms as “two 15-minute vil­lages”, the one in which they live and the one in which they work. Into the future, how­ev­er, he expects these two vil­lages to increas­ing­ly merge.

Cities will move away from their cur­rent role as large employ­ment cen­tres sur­round­ed by dis­persed res­i­den­tial com­mu­ni­ties. Instead as employ­ers repur­pose and, in many instances, down­size their offices and more high street stores become vacant, there will be an increas­ing shift towards city-cen­tre liv­ing.

At the same time, ameni­ties, which include co-work­ing spaces, will improve marked­ly in the sub­urbs, with peo­ple choos­ing to live in one envi­ron­ment or the oth­er, depend­ing on their pref­er­ence and life stage. This sit­u­a­tion will go hand in hand with a shift in the tra­di­tion­al office func­tion.

Mulc­a­hey explains: “There’s cur­rent­ly a weird ana­logue debate going on that peo­ple will either work from home or in the office, but we see more of a blend­ed envi­ron­ment, where they’ll work in both, but also in tran­sit and in places like co-work­ing hubs and the foy­ers of art gal­leries. Things are already grav­i­tat­ing that way, but ulti­mate­ly it’s about mov­ing from rigid work­places to a range of dif­fer­ent work styles based on what peo­ple need to do.”

Repurposing the urban environment

Josh Bersin, pres­i­dent and founder of enter­prise learn­ing and tal­ent man­age­ment con­sul­tan­cy Bersin & Asso­ciates, agrees. “Hybrid loca­tion work is the future,” he says. “We’ll see peo­ple work­ing in many places on any giv­en day, with high-qual­i­ty video con­nec­tiv­i­ty and high-qual­i­ty meet­ing spaces offer­ing the mix that will get the most out of us.”

But this sce­nario does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean the office is dead, in an urban envi­ron­ment or else­where; in fact, far from it, says Mulc­a­hey. Instead he believes: “It’s about repur­pos­ing the office and using it for what it’s real­ly good at: bring­ing peo­ple togeth­er to col­lab­o­rate, inno­vate, learn and share. I don’t see that dis­ap­pear­ing.”

Gartner’s Kropp takes a sim­i­lar view, say­ing office space is on the verge of a big redesign as it starts to take on “a dif­fer­ent job”.

“Com­pa­nies are cur­rent­ly think­ing hard about what they want their cor­po­rate office space to become and I believe it will be quite dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent,” he says. “It won’t be a place where employ­ees go to do every­thing; it’ll be a place where they do spe­cif­ic things like meet cus­tomers or engage with their local com­mu­ni­ty, and their desk at home will be used to focus on tasks that can be under­tak­en alone.”

This means office head­quar­ters, even in large urban envi­ron­ments, are like­ly to be small­er, no longer con­tain­ing banks of desks. They will instead be pur­pose-designed and con­sist of an appro­pri­ate mix of meet­ing rooms, social areas, and col­lab­o­ra­tion and learn­ing spaces.

“Employ­ers are appre­ci­at­ing that col­lab­o­ra­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty is hard in a vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment. So offices will assume a dif­fer­ent pur­pose and become all about build­ing social and cul­tur­al rela­tion­ships, which are always at the heart of inno­va­tion,” Kropp con­cludes.

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