 this concept of a 15 minute city what's involved in it and could it really be transported? It's really about people wanting to have more of their life more local. First thing on my mind as we talk about this is how quickly can you rebuild a city to fit these criteria? The 15 minute city slogan catches the attention but it's really about reconfiguring the city to make it more people-centric. I think that's a very noble idea and for me it's an old target that we've been chasing as citizens. There are aspects of the 15 minute city that are praiseworthy but the basic concept of a 15 minute city is not really a city at all it's a concept of an enclave of a ghetto of an isolated neighborhood. I think the 15 minute city can't do well without having a different kind of approach of society. What is the worth of spending time with my family, spending time with me? It's not a new concept but I would say that future has already existed in India and it's something that we should be celebrating saying we did right and we should continue to do that right thing in the future. It's an important conversation that we need to be having on both fronts one what does it mean to improve our neighborhoods and two how do we make sure we're doing this in the fairest and most equitable way to undo the damage that our proficient has done in the past and I think those are hard conversations but I think they're really important conversations. Some of the debate around the 15 minute city is really about its definition and the degree to which it's really a proposition which only treats accessibility at the very local scale and ignores the metropolitan or an offer that complements metropolitan wide accessibility by a much greater degree of local possibilities for accessing services maybe also jobs and other opportunities. We've enjoyed our new local life for three four days a week but we still have to travel to main activities and we might travel farther away. They would be like this idea of small healthy neighborhood but then the city might actually be much much bigger than when it is now. I think the volume of travel for work will decrease but not by very much and the volume travel for leisure will increase and I think it might mean that people access the center of cities three days a week not five days a week. Accessing a city in South Africa is not a matter of choice it's a matter of survival. If you want to survive you have to be the city center. Can we or should we design cities that have a lower degree of movement intensity in many ways sustainable urbanism and compact urban form is an answer that would say yes it's important that we are overall reducing the need to travel being closer together having greater degree of integration greater complexities and breeding through that better social relations. Thousands of years of human history tell us that there's a fundamental desire whether we change our movement from work movement to leisure movement there's a question and what mode we're on but the idea that people are going to move less because they're going to do things virtually that has not been proven through you know many thousands of years of history so we shouldn't be planning for that. The view that we can then duplicate real movement with virtual movement is a fantasy for less well educated members of this world. We still need a lot of people to move to make this local life happen in terms of delivery service but also you know there will still be a lot of people who will actually move around to make other people to stay local not to move. If you think about some of the fundamental definition of a 50 minute walk or a 50 minute bike ride you may have a territory which is in the region of one to four kilometers square and if you take that in a proper urban dense environment we may be talking about anything between 20,000 people to half a million people and these are of course territories with enormous difference and also with enormously different opportunities to provide mix social mix and of course in the end opportunities for human well-being and for human engagement. A low-income adult wakes up in their small apartment and then they go to a job somewhere else. They find opportunity with people who are wealthier with people who are better educated. They find possibilities. The child lives in a 15 minute city. The child lives in their housing project. They go to their highly segregated school. They live in a world that is no more integrated than a poor rural village. That's what I see. That's what I hear when I think about a 15 minute city. I think about a world in which the rich have isolated themselves from the poor and the poor are cut off. We have in multiple locations in India where you have extended geographies that work as a metropolitan area and people do travel between these cities for work but keep in mind that it's only one person in the family who might do that the rest of the family does still live in a very small diameter in the city. And therefore I think it's a it's we certainly must look at these smaller areas. There is not a contradiction between the 15 minute city access in the compact zone and the 13 minute territory for metropolitan areas. The hybridization is in reality the hybridization by the polycentric urbanism the polycentric territoriality. We need to be looking at both of these scales and not just those scales but multiple scales at the same time where we can both zoom in and understand the very specific localised needs at the hyperlocal and understand the importance of being very strategic in terms of our growth and development or decline and the kind of efficiency of our broader transit systems. I can't imagine from the British perspective how you might possibly create a planning system that put into 15 minute areas of the city the diverse nature of the population in a way that would create equality. The danger is that what you create is a very large series of walled-end clays for the rich and huge deprivation for the poor. And I am very worried that a focus on enabling upper-middle income people to walk around in their nice little 15 minute neighborhood precludes the far larger issue which is how do we make sure our cities once again become places of opportunity for everyone. I am only interested in urban planning concepts that fundamentally solve that and I cannot see how the 15 minute city does anything on that. There's a certain ghettoization that can happen not because the rich and the poor do not live in proximity but because of active measures by public agencies to relocate the poor and I think that's something that we need to address. In multiple cities we've seen that rather than in-situ development for a variety of reasons the poor have been relocated to ghettos outside the city. So it's not so much a slum clearance program but a slum relocation program if you will. It just happens to be you know one slum to the other slum. And there of course there are issues because you know people in such areas do not now have access to jobs and they end up being forced to travel much longer distances. So I would certainly vote for there being measures so that there is greater mix of income levels. I think it's really important to focus on on the areas which already have lacking services and in the area which services are there there are problems related to the diversity of people in any case. So who need what what are the basic services and this is something you know urban planners are asking themselves since probably the beginning of planning. This is a new vision this is a new paradigm for developing this urban polycentrism based on the social mixity and the mix of the urban functions and to protect people. In fact if you wanted to fight against identification we need to intensify the social users the social link the new economic model the new business model and to deploy different the resources and of course we need to have a very very important program of the social housing in the different districts. All cities should be archipelagos of neighborhoods but those neighborhoods must be connected otherwise they are not places of opportunity. If the city's dense enough there are many places that you can walk to because there's so much going on one of the obvious things to do is to move away from low density development on the outskirts of cities of several million and go back to density. I don't see a concern with mix of various kinds of activities but income levels I certainly think is a concern and we need to fix it we need to ensure that historically the way Indian cities were mixed in in multiple places they continue to be so the city is an environment to be in rather than to travel through and that's a fundamental logic and also reminds us that the city in itself is a transport solution it helps us create accessibility without the need to move over long distances. I think we lost many of our fantasy many of our utopias we don't have utopia at the moment we have more like dystopia I don't want the hyperloop and the flying taxis if you don't solve the problems on the ground at the moment. I think we're getting somewhere and I think some of those hard conversations are probably just at the beginning and I think it's important that we stick with it and we muddle through the hard things because we don't have the option of getting paralyzed to the point of inaction these issues we're facing are just way too great