Breaking all the rules of a '10-minute city'

City planning in a carbon-rich world is strikingly different from what will be needed, and essential, if we are to endure in a carbon-constrained world.

A new book released just this week by Melbourne’s Grattan Institute examines the planning that it claims is “broken”, particularly Melbourne and Sydney.

The book: “City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Brokenand How We Can Fix Them” had been published by Melbourne University Press.

A story in today’s Melbourne Age headed: “Melbourne's planning disaster: jobs boom in CBD while affordable housing grows ever outwards in suburbs” discusses the disconnect between where the jobs are and where people can afford to live.

What wasn’t alluded to, but is a clear implication, is the wider cost to society in the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the constant commuting forced upon people when jobs are in one place and their homes are in another, frequently an hour or more way.

Any reasonable response to climate change demands that we live with easy walking or cycling distance of where it is we work – some people have advocated that we live in a “10-minute world”, meaning that most everything needed for day-to-day survival is within 10 minutes of where we live.

Work fewer hours; save huge amounts of time in travelling

Paul Tranter.

The Four-Hour Work Day is about many things, among them living closer to where you work and so spending far less time travelling.

Providing us with much to think about speed and travel is University of New South Wales Human Geographer, Paul Tranter.

Writing on The Conversation in a story headed: “Not so fast! How car commuting is taking your time”, Tranter argues that for car drivers, the time spend earning the money to pay for all the costs of a car is usually much greater than the time spent driving.

He concludes by suggesting that the improvement of urban health might be a simple as valuing the time of cyclists more than that of motorists.

Growing from a weed to a beautiful flower

The idea for a Four-Hour Work Day sprung from a bed of concerns, almost like a weed, but it now has a certain richness and urgency that demands careful and attentive husbandry.

The Four-Hour Work Day - from a weed
 to a beautiful flower.

That richness and urgency stems from human-induced changes to our climate; the prevalence of putting the economy ahead of human welfare; a blatant disinterest in the state of the earth (at least in keeping it habitable for humans); and equally seeming disinterest in the welfare of the other; an inability to see past, or care about what happens beyond the life of our grandchildren; the embrace of superstition and the inordinate rejection of reason and reality; the adoption of gigantism at the expense of what is small, simple and local; and a apathy toward, or at least a misunderstanding of, what is simply good for people.

A Four-Hour Work Day will not directly resolve any of those difficulties, but it will encourage a restructuring and rethinking of how we live.

Humans have walked the earth for about 200 000 years and we evolved to a point at which, about 200 years ago, we discovered how to unlock the secrets of ancient sunlight, that is fossil fuels, and in that blink of geological time we have understood complexity to such an extent that now have the capacity to end life, as we know it, on the planet.

Interestingly, we have shown sufficient restraint to avoid blowing ourselves up, but appear to be walking blindly into another trap about which many are aware, but with our natural inclination to multiply unabated and eagerness to exploit fossil fuels not being interrupted in any way, we are rapidly depleting the earth’s finite resources and along the way causing irreparable damage, at least on time-scale that matters to humans, to earth’s atmosphere.

A Four-Hour Work Day will simply slow that damage and, in concert, enable us time to recreate a sense of community and along with that build a five-minute life style – a life that puts all that is important on a day-to-day basis  (food, work, leisure, and various services, friends and family) all within five minutes walking or cycling.

Corporations will be replaced by community, growth by generosity, profit by a neighbourhood sense of pleasure and the urgency of the contemporary understanding of work by the more leisurely concept of the artisan who draws comfort from perfecting individual items, rather than being chained to the endlessly grind of the production line.

The sense of camaraderie, frequently cultivated with the purpose in existing workplaces with the prime purpose of ensuring growth, will naturally arise in tight-knit communities that work together to enable the building of resilience, endurance and a deep sense of caring.

We have tried living on the premise that growth will resolve human challenges: it has not and so not we must look toward a different way of doing things, a way that revolve around limiting the number of hours we devote each day to the sustenance of that hypothesis.

Looking for the 'silver bullet' in climate change adaptation

The “silver bullet” in climate adaptation is the Four-Hour Work Day.

Should we want to reduce our impact on the atmosphere, then it is important that we reduce, rather almost eliminate, our reliance on fossil fuels and therein is the critical aspect of working fewer hours.

The “silver bullet” in climate adaptation is
 the Four-Hour Work Day.

With society built around a four-hour work day, the interval between our journeys to and fro would be short compared to what exists, encouraging people to live within an easy walking or cycling distance of their work places.

That would, by its nature, reduce the distance travelled by people to and from work subsequently eroding the need for an extensive, and expensive, road network, easing the pressure on public transport systems, leading to a “five-minute life” – that is a neighbourhood in which everything important and day-to-day basis, including work, shopping, health and educative services, various government services, reaction and leisure – are all within five minutes walking or cycling; obesity would be eased and general health would improve as more people would be physically active; communities and neighbourhoods would be vastly stronger and be markedly healthier, more resilient and stronger as people would simply have more time to be there.

And, of course, just as soon as it became clear that neighbourhoods were enriched through the deeper and more expansive involvement of those who lived there, it would have a self-fulfilling dynamic as it began to “feed upon itself” and the improvement would become organic.

With additional time at their disposal to pursue activities that enhanced life personally, for their neighbourhood and the broader community, people would experience a sense of wellbeing and achievement that had been missing from their lives under the strain of a market-driven, profit and growth based society.