The OneMinute City

hello my name is dan hill i’m a designer

and urbanist i work for the swedish

government

i’m sitting in a street in stockholm

sweden i’m actually sitting in uh

what two weeks ago as a parking space

actually and

sitting in a parking space then would

have been a particularly perverse form

of protest

perhaps but now it’s part of a project

that i’m uh helping with here where

we’re prototyping a new use for

these spaces more diverse uses of these

spaces it’s something we can start small

with on the scale of parking bays

but actually scale up until we transform

all of the streets in sweden to be

healthy sustainable and vibrant

all 40 000 kilometers off why streets

well streets are the basic unit of

cities buildings are everywhere most of

the other spaces and cities are

everywhere one way or another in rural

and town environments

but the street itself is distinctly

urban as jeanette cedi khan the former

commissioner of

transport from new york city once said

what is a city if not its people and its

streets

the two are inextricable one meaningless

without the other

i work at vinova the swedish

government’s innovation agency and we’re

leading this project with archdas the

swedish

national center for architecture and

design it involves multiple agencies

multiple cities

multiple streets public private and

third sector actors

and what we’re working towards is

generating uh

two things really a loose kit of parts

physical elements for transforming

streets from

motor vehicle dominated spaces into

biodiversity socially diverse places

parking by parking bay

and then a participative structure

alongside that a way of making decisions

about those things

we call part of this project street

moves which are these simple wooden

structures

which are made from swedish timber

actually and in glulam

and they’re easy to deliver and deploy

on the street

and for communities to adopt and adapt

the second half is called frantisgata

and it involves participative design

with school children in stockholm

each of the streets that we’ve chosen to

begin with are outside of school and so

the streets themselves in this model

have been designed by

the street itself which in this case is

the residents and users of the street

in other words the school children so

the school children have been heavily

involved in designing what happens here

and of course it’s then up to them

as in the true users of the street that

select from this kit of parts this sort

of menu of options

and they decide okay it’s playgrounds

it’s swing sets

it’s barbecues it’s benches it’s beaches

it’s sort of up to them

all of these things are held by us the

government as a sort of library our

kitter parts again

that uh um have certain conditions

around sustainability and safety

obviously

but how they get used and which items

get used and how they adapt and evolve

that’s up to the street itself and in

sweden we have around 40 000 kilometers

of street actually that’s

something like 600 square kilometers is

roughly six times the size of paris so

imagine

kind of holding that in your hand if

this was a model of sweden

and extracting the streets from it and

holding it as an addressable space

that’s the scale of the project that

we’re potentially looking at so that

shift away from cars is many things

there it’s really

increasing diversity diversity of

applications diversity of uses

diversity of the people involved in that

because previous transport planning

built around the car was highly gendered

usually based around the idea of getting

men to and from work

this reverses all of those logics it

also begins to suggest a different way

of driving what the city is about

no pun intended so instead of efficiency

metrics being what we’re shooting for

actually recognizes that

cities really are about inefficiency as

much as anything most of the wonderful

things that we

live in cities for the reason we move to

cities are really nothing to do with

efficiency

of course on one level efficiency has to

make certain things work like a subway

a basic level needs to be efficient

that’s fine but really it’s a kind of

plumbing it’s a sort of infrastructure

and you don’t tend to move to a city for

the plumbing plumbing’s fundamentally

important

but still it’s not the reason we moved

to cities in the first place

we moved to cities to start a band

write a book form a business uh fall in

love

hang out in a bar on a friday night

watch the football in a quiet back

street

outside a pub play football with your

kid in the park those are the kind of

things that we

build cities around actually in reality

in our lives

none of those things are about

efficiency at all this is

completely oblivious to the smart city

movement to the use of data to the

traditions in urban planning which have

been highly optimized highly optimized

around optimization

that this is an entirely different

culture that’s beginning to come in now

it’s behind

programs like barcelona’s super blocks

behind the paris

15-minute city plans that um and

algo and others are leading there

incredibly powerfully i think

and it’s behind these small projects

that you see here in stockholm beginning

to suggest

what is the city about what is the

street about it’s not about traffic it’s

not about efficiency

it’s deliberately about inefficiency

about conviderality

about commerce sure about community

about connection all of these things are

to do with the street and they’re all

connected of course

so we’re creating a space for that to

happen and off that we can begin to

rebuild a different way we put cities

together

and this is where again is why i’m

standing in a forest as opposed to the

streets i was standing in earlier

how do we create these kind of

conditions leads to me again with this

idea of the one-minute city not the

15-minute city

but the one-minute city immediately

outside your front doors not inside your

property

but outside in the shared space there

whether it’s the stoop outside an

apartment block or whether it’s the

literally the space outside your front

door and how do we create a kind of a

shared ownership of that a response

shared responsibility or shared

maintenance but in the best sense a

shared care

and a shared culture around those things

the one minute city is where the change

can be most participative perhaps

i remember being struck by this almost a

decade ago when i was walking around

schoenberg in berlin

and i was there with a colleague and he

pointed out how green and diverse the

streets were in terms of their planting

and the reason for that was actually the

municipality apparently so he said

had run out of money and had stopped

planting in the street

and what happened in the space left by

that act of removal was that people came

forward and started planting themselves

this was sort of semi-legal or gray area

if you like as is often the case in

berlin

um there wasn’t really a permit for that

kind of thing or an understanding of it

but

what happened was the apartment blocks

or the people in them started planting

outside their blocks and of course

therefore

every bit of planting was different

because every apartment block is

different i rather the people in the

apartment block are different

some people planted herbs some people

planted vegetables some people planted

ornamental flowers someone spelt their

name of the cafe out in the flowers for

instance and that sense of diversity was

wonderful to see you sort of got a sense

of the people

living in the blocks in the street

itself it was kind of a portrait of the

street but told in flowers or herbs if

you like

if the municipality had planted those

things in the street it probably would

have been the same planting up and down

the street because that’s more efficient

it’s easier to maintain

the same planting everywhere but that

isn’t again what our city is

so in this sense it was an interesting

kind of standoff

about a good one a positive compromise

between the city

and its people the citizens if you like

it wasn’t officially

sanctioned by the city again they sort

of turned a blind eye to it

but it enabled people to come forward

and the city came in and did the heavy

lifting of the maintenance the things

that

citizens themselves can’t or shouldn’t

do actually and the citizens themselves

could take

care of these daily needs this tending

process this relationship with the

street again the one-minute city

the one-minute city then of this idea of

the shared garden the shared park the

shared playground the shared space for

drop-off points for e-commerce or

scooters or mobility

the place for a bar the place for a

theater the place for a little coffee

kiosk the place just to stand in the sun

and talk to each other

that one minute city again absolutely

not about efficiency and all the better

for it so what was going on in

schoenberg was again at one level

efficiency the plumbing if you like

absolutely efficient

the city comes in and does those sort of

things but the city above that as

citizens the people

actually they’re doing the inefficient

things on top of that platform

that’s the very powerful idea there and

again it relies on a sense of

maintenance being a positive thing

a sense of care actually of nurturing

again as with a garden

there’s a kind of maintenance involving

gardening but clearly we don’t

tend to think of it as such it’s more to

do with verbs like growing and nurturing

and things like this

there’s very inspirational work to us at

least by ron finley in los angeles

who has been planting gardens in vacant

parking lots he’s calculated there are

something like 26 square miles of

vacant parking lot in los angeles that’s

around 20 times the size of central park

which could carry a base load of about

724 million tomato plants

so that’s an extraordinary thing to do

particularly in places where there are

food deserts otherwise

so there’s a social justice and a

political element to this simple act of

gardening in terms of

flipping the street inside out taking it

away from the idea of efficiency

parking space basically making the

street into a giant parking lot

and turning it instead into a playground

a theater

a place for coffee or conversation and

culture or indeed a garden

the streets are our fundamental public

infrastructure the locus of our primary

challenges has been well demonstrated by

the events of this momentous year

sasky assassin once said that the street

is the space of indeterminacy

and this year’s complexity and ambiguity

at scale has made that perfectly clear

we started street moves in front of well

before kovid19

which i hope in some senses means it’s a

more considered response to the issue in

effect using some of the dynamics and

tools of tactical urbanism

yet backed and facilitated by the state

ensuring that its pop-ups do not simply

pop down

it’s a time limited trial as cities do

not tend to commit to these things just

like that

and it’ll be interesting to see how it

waxes and wanes in response not only to

kobe 19

but to climate and culture weather and

welfare

last words activists and seattle mayoral

candidate nikita oliver

who said reflecting on the black lives

matter protest occupying her city

streets and indeed ours

it’s one thing to take a space it’s

another to turn that space into

something functional that actually

serves the community

this strategic project for sweden

streets at once the scale of a parking

lot

and all 40 000 kilometers of street in

the country

is an attempt to figure out how to do

that in public

so watch this parking space and perhaps

ask yourself how you can contribute to

the one minute city around you

thank you

you