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