?? Get my new book for just $0.99!

No burying the big news this week, because our new book is finally out!

If you’re in the US, you can buy the hardback via Amazon, or all the usual channels. But I also want to highlight a special offer as a thank you for letting me into your inboxes over the past three years as I’ve been writing the book here in public.

For this week only, you can buy the Kindle version of the book for just $0.99 / ￡0.82 / €0.93. Order your copy below:

Kindle US | UK | NL | DE | AU

The early reviews are in, and people’s experiences are everything we hoped for:

“Part insights, part celebration of those creating the future—this book lands with scoops of perception that are truly enjoyable to explore.”

“Get this book for your team because, like the authors did when writing it, you will want to discuss what you pick up with others!”

“The insights and reflective questions in each chapter spark the imagination and you find yourself continuing to ponder the possibilities long after you have put the book down.”

“Great content for business leaders as well as young people looking for a path. I'm giving my copy to my college-aged children to help guide their career paths to industry opportunities to make a difference.”

Next: can you help us by adding your review?

As you probably know from your own book buying, an abundance of Amazon reviews tells new audiences that the book is worth their time.

If you could take take 3-4 minutes to review the book, explaining what you liked (and anything you didn’t!), how you plan to use it, who would benefit from reading it … we would be forever grateful.

Thank you ??

A reminder: for this week only, the Kindle version is just $0.99 / ￡0.82 / €0.93.

Available here: US | UK | NL | DE | AU

Still not convinced?

If you’re still on the fence, I want to use the rest of this week’s edition to demonstrate how the ideas in the book will give you new perspectives on the stories that you’ll be reading much more about in the coming years.

You might have been reading recently about how far right climate deniers have rounded on the idea of the 15-minute city. From CNN’s How ‘15-minute cities’ turned into an international conspiracy theory,

Type “15-minute cities” into social media and be prepared for a barrage of claims the idea will usher in dystopia, people will be fined for leaving their “district” or it is “urban incarceration.”

The concept, however, is pretty simple: Everything you need should be within a roughly 15-minute walk or cycle from your home, from health care and education to grocery stores and green spaces.

The aim is to make cities more livable and connected, with less private car use – meaning cleaner air, greener streets and lower levels of planet-heating pollution. Around a fifth of the world’s human-caused, planet-warming pollution comes from transportation, and passenger cars make up more than 40% of this.

…

The idea of 15-minute cities fits neatly into the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, partly because it is easy to spin that way.

“The conspiracy theorists are right that you can’t make a real city out of self-contained enclaves – those would just be villages,” Carlo Ratti, an architect, engineer, and Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, told CNN.

But it misinterprets the idea, he said. It “gives people the freedom to live locally, but does not force them to do so.”

In the book, we explore the idea of the 15-minute city, but through a different lens that I remain surprised more people aren’t talking about, even as the idea gets a new burst of scrutiny.

You can read our thoughts at length below but in short, the primary driver (pun intended ;) of the 15-minute city won’t be expensive top-down efforts to reposition the physical elements within cities such as schools, hospitals, shops and other amenities.

Instead, the key to unlocking the 15-minute city will be the widespread use of electric micromobility vehicles that literally travel further, faster –?meaning that people can access more of their cities within the all-important 15 minutes.

So more freedom, not less.

Non obvious? Yes. A useful perspective on how to create better, more liveable cities? We hope so.

A reminder: for this week only, the Kindle version is just $0.99 / ￡0.82 / €0.93.

Available here: US | UK | NL | DE | AU

Buy it, skim it, highlight it, talk about it…but please also review it!

Book Excerpt: The 15-Minute City

What if every long journey in the city was cut to 15 minutes??

When Carlos Moreno met with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo as she prepared her reelection campaign, he was expecting his ideas to “be a paragraph down the bottom of the campaign leaflet.”

Moreno, a professor of complex systems at Paris-Sorbonne University, is the mastermind behind the “15-minute city”—the notion that city residents should be able to get to the places they access daily—from workplaces to stores to schools and universities to health-care providers to cultural and green spaces—within a quarter of an hour. In a TED Talk where he lays out his novel idea, he argues that our cities are “bubbles of illusory acceleration.” While we think of megacities as fast paced, the mundane reality is that cities are characterized by long, wasteful commutes that damage the environment, are terrible for personal and collective well-being, exacerbate inequality, and entrench injustice.

So, Moreno asked: What if this changed? What if we could exponentially increase the range of services we could access within 15 minutes?

Moreno’s ideas became central to Hidalgo’s successful reelection campaign and her vision of Paris’s future. Walk around the newly renovated Minimes barracks, a 1920s complex in the Marais district of Paris, and you get a sense of what that future might look and feel like. The public housing complex features commercial office space, a number of small artisan workshops, a nursery for childcare, a health clinic, and a café staffed partially by people with autism. The central courtyard, formerly its parking lot, has been converted into a public garden. As a result of the Paris 2024 Olympics, similarly ambitious developments are underway in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, described as “the most youthful and cosmopolitan department in France.” The Summer Games in particular have provided the inspiration for the Paris 2024 organizing team to focus beyond building venues to the longterm legacy of the city. Already declaring that 85 percent of competition venues will be located under 30 minutes from the Olympic Village, the city is making significant investments in public transportation and zero-emission transit options that will transform it for the long term.

Paris may seem like an extreme example. After all, most cities can’t rely on the boon of Olympic-level development budgets, but there is another way to create the 15-minute city, beyond reconfiguring the structure of the city to ensure amenities are physically present in local districts, as in the Minimes barracks. Making people more mobile enables them to access a greater range of their cities’ amenities in less time. This approach is far more practical for most cities given the next generation of “micromobility” vehicles. While the past 15 years have seen impressive urban transportation innovation—from the original bike-sharing schemes to scooters and dockless access—the next decade will see those innovations supercharged (quite literally) by electric motors that enable these vehicles to travel farther faster. The 15-minute city looks very different to someone riding an e-bike than to someone who gets around on foot or by traditional public transportation. Micromobility means people can get the benefits of localism and of a bigger city within Moreno’s all-important 15 minutes.

Paris is far from the only city attempting to create radically more accessible local neighborhoods. Barcelona’s Superilles (Superblocks) are partially self-contained local areas that promote public transport and pedestrians ahead of cars. Portland, Oregon, aims for 90 percent of its residents to live in “20-minute neighborhoods.” Shanghai’s Urban Master Plan 2015–2040 also refers to the “15-minute community life circle” as an important objective of the city’s social development. Future residents of The Line, the wildly ambitious 170-kilometer-long car-free city planned for the Saudi Arabian desert, will find their local amenities within just five minutes, and the longest end-to-end journey across the city will take just 20 minutes. Given the continued pressure on urban populations, it is hard to see this trend reversing. Cities where people can move freely will thrive, while those where mobility is constrained will struggle.

Instigator: VanMoof

Imagine a video montage with a sequence of images depicting smoking industrial chimney stacks and traffic jams reflected on the surface of a sports car, all accompanied by the sound of horns and car crashes. As the video continues, the body of the car slowly melts, the liquid slipping away to reveal an electric bicycle. The visual story is now revealed to be an advertisement as it closes with the message: “Time to ride the future.”

Created by Dutch e-bike manufacturer VanMoof, the ad never aired in France. The Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité (ARPP), which regulates which ads can run, banned it on the grounds that it creates a “climate of anxiety,” simultaneously validating and censoring the core message of the ad.

VanMoof is just one player in the broader micromobility revolution—the global shift away from cars toward bikes, scooters, and microvehicles, both shared and private.

It’s easy to see why car manufacturers might be scared of this behavioral shift … It might explain why to date there have been almost no bike commercials broadcast worldwide. But with this market stranglehold starting to loosen, it’s only a matter of time before more voices can be heard. There’s a new day dawning indeed.

—VanMoof blog

While the VanMoof team may be overly optimistic about how much of a threat auto manufacturers probably feel coming from bikes, there is no denying people are hungry for the benefits that micromobility can offer. In the United States alone, data from the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) suggests that the number of shared bike and e-scooter trips grew 60 percent to 136 million by the end of 2019 (just before the start of the pandemic). The mobility app Grab, Southeast Asia’s first “decacorn” (a startup valued at over $10 billion), offers shared bikes and e-scooters, as well as rides in traditional cars. Some automotive manufacturers are even joining the trend. Citro?n as developed Ami, an “urban mobility object.” This electric vehicle is so small that it is classed as a “light quadricycle,” which means it doesn’t require a driving license to operate and can be driven on Parisian streets by teenagers as young as 14.

This shift has been more than a decade in the making. For a brief moment in 2017 and 2018, city dwellers around the world were spoiled for choice when it came to getting around heir cities. Whether you were in Hangzhou or Hamburg, Lima or London, you didn’t have to walk more than a few blocks before stumbling across a scooter or bike from a seemingly endless list of startups such as Bird, Bolt, Circ, Dott, Hive, Jump, Lime, Lyft, Mobike, oBike, Ofo, Tier, and many more. However, when the tide turned, it went out quickly. Operators ran into huge logistical challenges dealing with damaged or stolen units. Regulators had to step in as sidewalks became clogged and stories emerged of riders being seriously injured or even killed. The micromobility utopia, it seems, was not just an e-scooter ride away.

There are signs, however, that this may be changing, as support for micromobility continues to be strong. The pandemic showed city dwellers a more open, uncrowded, and occasionally unspoiled side to the urban experience that many want to keep. As a result, Hidalgo announced that 50 kilometers of “coronapistes”—temporary bike lanes on some of Paris’s major routes established during the city’s lockdown—would be made permanent. Milan, Brussels, Seattle, and Montreal also all announced cyclist-friendly moves. In many dense urban cities in Asia, where city traffic often moves at a glacial pace, the challenge is different. While cyclists have long shared the road with cars, they rarely have dedicated traffic lanes, and the heavily polluted air makes the option of biking far more dangerous and less desirable. In these cities, improved mobility isn’t about bikes and scooters. Instead, it’s about creating more mass transportation options that are emission-free, efficient, and affordable.

Efforts to address climate change are driving a renewed interest in micromobility. In China, Tencent announced plans to build Net City, a car-free district in Shenzhen. And the C40, a group of 40 city leaders, published a report that singles out increasing the amount of protected space for pedestrians and cyclists, and elevating the 15-minute city as an important part of global urban recovery.

Perhaps new evidence of micromobility’s comeback can also be found in VanMoof’s success. Its main struggle has been keeping up with demand, after selling more bikes in the first four months of 2020 than in the previous two years combined. The company raised over $180 million across 2020 and 2021 in order to expand production and “break down more barriers to cycling.”

Just as digital transformation in commerce has changed people’s relationship to shopping, a more convenient urban landscape is poised to change people’s expectations just as radically—and become the future normal. Billions endure the challenges of moving around cities today because of the economic and cultural opportunities that they offer. Empowering people to easily get to the places they want or need to be within 15 minutes will reduce their environmental impact, strengthen communities, and improve lives.

Imagining the Future Normal

• How could our days change if everyone spent less time commuting from one place to another and more time doing other things?
• What if microvehicles became the dominant mode of transport and more people no longer felt the need to own cars?
• What could we do to ensure the benefits of micromobility could be distributed across all socioeconomic groups and communities as a potential equalizer for society?

A final reminder: if you're going to be at SXSW then we'd love to see you at our?featured keynote this weekend, or the more informal?Non-Obvious 7-minute meetup, or our book launch party!

Alternatively, DM me if you'd like to discuss bulk orders and/or other events, either in Austin or elsewhere.

Let's do this :)

Henry