Strong Towns & The “15-Minute” City
I have an awful lot to say on this subject, but the basic takeaway is that I am in favour, generally, of the “Strong Towns” approach to city planning. Links are below, but the broad strokes are essentially trying to make small, incremental improvements, not being afraid to fail or do unpopular things with genuine intent, and being mindful of sprawl and unnecessary expansion where infilling and brownfield developments can work instead. The “15-minute City” is a concept that’s related but not the same: you should have access to most amenities in your community within a 15 minute walk, bike ride, or transit ride. Importantly, it does NOT mean you can drive to these amenities within 15 minutes, which appears to be a very common misconception. Using that definition, Medicine Hat is very much NOT a 15-minute city on the whole.
Many large cities do these things naturally. In old, metropolitan places like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec City, Hamilton, and Halifax, every neighbourhood has naturally developed amenities in a bubble. No matter where you live in the core, there are things like pharmacies, grocery stores, hair dressers, clinics, restaurants & cafes, live music venues, clothing / retail shops, theatres, etc. Similarly, infilling and density comes naturally, and buildings are constantly renovated and repurposed. Large newer cities like Calgary, Regina, and Edmonton are considerably younger and tend to have smaller downtown cores and more suburban sprawl. In smaller cities like Medicine Hat which saw population expansion much later, there is very little “core” and large, spread out residential areas with only a few concentrated commercial hubs like Dunmore Road or the corporate jungle in the Southlands.
From the 70’s through to present, we’ve built out not up, and have created several residential deserts where walking to buy something like milk is completely unreasonable. The overwhelming majority of residents live in these places, and are forced to drive for the most basic of amenities. We almost completely abandoned a grid, and built everything for decades into a series of courts, crescents, greens, bays, ways, and closes. This makes developing transit extremely cumbersome, makes way finding a nightmare, and leads to very awkwardly shaped lots and intersections. Just drive through Ross Glen or Southridge to see the mess in action. Remedying this takes a deliberate effort. I firmly believe we need to stop moving our development outward in a series of single-family homes where new conduit and utility infrastructure is needed - at a cost that will never be recovered - and be more deliberate about densifying our core. It’s too late for developments like Desert Blume, Southlands, Taylor, and Ranchlands, but we don’t need to continue doing it.
The concept of densifying directly affects older areas like downtown, the Hill, Flats, and Riverside the most. Many of the more “suburban” style developments I’ve already mentioned are difficult to infill or densify without starting over completely. In the core, though, there are many homes that are already built with secondary suites, and buildings already set up with mixed commercial / retail and residential. Plenty of them don’t comply with current building code, but they’re safe and present an opportunity for densification nonetheless. There are also lots of derelict buildings that could be developed instead of sitting empty and owned by folks with no real interest in investing in our city’s future.
I feel the need to also unfortunately address the various conspiracies surrounding these ideas, and there are many. Again very broadly: there are lots of folks who think what I’ve outlined above is an insidious plan to eventually outlaw cars, confine people to certain areas, and/or fine people for leaving said areas. None of those are true, but they’re pervasive. One needs only read a comment section related to anything from bike lanes to sustainable development to EV charging stations to inevitably see portions of these conspiracies mentioned. Key buzzwords / phrases like Davos, Oxford, Agenda 2030, George Soros / Klaus Schwab, Great Reset, QAnon, digital ID, surveillance state, and many others serve as dog-whistles to other folks who buy into these various theories. Go ahead and google any one of those terms to see what I mean. To most reasonable people, any cursory amount of reading on what the ACTUAL Agenda 2030 / 15-minute Cities / Strong Towns suggestions are will seem reasonable. They may not agree completely on details and implementation, but I think it takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to make the jump from having a pharmacy and dry cleaner in your neighbourhood to being on permanent lockdown with financial consequences for driving across town.
I genuinely think people should read source material and make their own decisions instead of regurgitating what they see on social media, and this issue is no exception. Recently, there has been a very concentrated effort by a handful of local individuals to spread these kinds of conspiracies, which is disappointing at best and harmful at worst. I’ll have another blog related to appropriate discourse and interactions with elected representatives, and one of the many topics will be how the folks who spread misinformation deliberately can potentially lead others to be violent or threatening. While I understand that conversations around how tax money is spent can be emotional and divided, threats of violence or vandalism and personal attacks on people’s families are always inappropriate and concerning. More to come on that!
There are some very helpful links below, and I think it will become very apparent from reading through them that there is no dystopian confinement plan for our city. Rather, I think the current council and administration are trying to foresee and drive population growth, and understand how infrastructure and development planning can help the future be more sustainable and accessible for everyone. I’m excited to see more detail around some of these concepts - and they’re very much just concepts at this point - in the future. And of course, I’m hopeful I can be around the horseshoe to help see some of them to fruition!
https://shapeyourcity.medicinehat.ca/strong-towns-community-action-lab
https://shapeyourcity.medicinehat.ca/transportation-master-plan
https://www.facebook.com/MHlocalconvos/
Hopeful of a progressive future,
— Adam
