While ambitious urban planners try to make 15-minute cities a reality, the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen has gone one better. What’s life like when everything you need is just a stroll away?
It’s not often that the worlds of town planning and traffic management become mired in controversy, but in recent years the innocuous concept of the “15-minute city” has sparked outrage in online forums, among cynical politicians and on the streets of British cities such as Oxford. The originator of the concept, urban planner Carlos Moreno, has even received death threats. All of this has hinged on the spurious conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities were part of some shady global population-control agenda, rather than a desire to simply create more pleasant neighbourhoods.
If the concept of having all your basic amenities within 15 minutes’ distance was enough to provoke such hostility, what would the conspiracy theorists make of a five-minute city? Fortunately, they have failed to notice that Denmark has already built such a place: Nordhavn, an emerging new neighbourhood of Copenhagen. If they visited today they might be disappointed, or perhaps converted.
