Anarchy and the 15-minute city

what would urban scout do?

From Gods and Radicals by JERE KUZMANIĆ

The birth of an intimate relationship with the urban space

Is there a city where the anarchist feels good? Instead of debating with some big ideas on ideal anarchist cities, utopian federations of farms, factories and workshops, I opt to turn this text into one short opinion piece about something that we may miss in striving for radical social change. Often when talking about urban space, anarchists see only problems, materializations of capitalism and injustice, walls and fences, power asymmetries, and alienation. Anarchist authors, such as Thureau, Zisly or AbdelRahim, often advocate for a return to nature, to rural or even wild idyllic communes. Almost every visualization of anarchy in the foreground will have the cultivation of vegetables in some garden surrounded by greenery. And yet, the whole history of the modern anarchist movement took place mostly on the hot city asphalt, among the chimneys of factories and among the barricades on the boulevards.

When I say this, I do not neglect neither Makhnovshtina, the Zapatistas, nor many other rural movements which have always reached us with greater ease as examples of the success of the anarchist idea. But still, most people today who identify with libertarian ideas live in cities. I don’t want to attempt to prove that one is more valuable than the other, much less that the city is a more anarchist place than the countryside. On the contrary. I intend to imagine if there is something in the city that we can start from, to make those streets and buildings more potent for anarchy, more equal, more cooperative. Could we see the same potential in streets as we see in idyll landscapes of communally cultivated nature?

I don't drive a car. The readership of portals as this one is probably the only population I know to whom this is a perfectly normal statement coming from a thirty-year-old. But the fact is that the car is an integral part of ‘normal’ life. Driving, looking for a parking lot, paying a loan for a tin pet are simply the norm, as are receiving a salary for work, paying taxes and similar seemingly unavoidable compromises with the ‘state of affairs’ nowadays. I personally don't mind not driving a car. I often ride public transport, bike or someone else drives me; friends, girlfriend, Uber, etc. I am thankful to everyone who drives me around, but it's actually a relatively small number of people and situations. If we talk about how much more complicated life is because of that, I will reduce it to a Croatian saying: who wants – finds a way, who doesn’t want – finds an excuse. Walking and cycling are the mother of having a good time with the cityscape you live in.

Recently, the fact that I don’t drive has merged with another thing, and the combination of the two has completely changed my perspective on the city as a space of dwelling, an extension of my living space, extended home, a neighborhood as a community, etc. Namely, I had a baby. My partner couldn't go anywhere for the first month, and parenting is a thing that is learned on the go, so, every day, I ended up roaming around the neighborhood to buy all that we needed – to the shop for diapers, cotton wool, dog and cat food, then to the grocery store with local fruits and vegetables where I get all the food for the household (but now more often for fresh cabbage as a compress for breasts), and finally the pharmacy for hundreds of creams, medicines, potassium, powders, and who knows what else until you realize that you don’t need half of it and you don’t really need both grandmothers and six aunts to hear about medical advice.

So, for days, my routine was preparing a list, taking a mask and bags, then walking to a busy street corner with the shop and the pharmacy, then crossing the street to buy a doughnut and bread at the bakery, continuing down the main street to the public pharmacy for some benefits they offer (in Croatia we have those – you get some stuff for free including a bunch of mixtures and essences made with traditional recipes). After that I would turn into a smaller pedestrian street where the grocery store is, stroll through the neighborhood back home passing by a park or seaside. At each stop, the bags would become fuller. By the end, I would be loaded to the point that the whole neighborhood knew I just came from grocery store while pushing the package of diapers on the floor with one foot because I could not bend down to lift it until someone helped me and put it in my hands.

This walk is a total of some 15 to 20 minutes on foot. Including stops and shopping, it's about an hour and a half long stroll around a tiny area of several streets. It could be shorter, but when at home things are intense with taking care of a newborn, to stop somewhere in the park for two minutes or taking a longer route across the local seafront, a little walk by the sea is a bit of self-care. It may be seen as unfair to the mother of a child who stays at home and does a harder part of the work, but it is good for the mental health of our small collective.

For the first few days, I did it all with some automatism and striving for everything to be done quickly. Then the days continued like that, but I began to relish. I talk to the salesman, comment a little about how the baby is with the woman behind the counter at the pharmacy – who got used to my stupid questions. And I smile about how they always listen to the same album from Oliver at the retail shop.

In a very short time, that routine gave birth to an intimate relationship with the space and the people I met, with whom I shared small bits of daily excitement. Then, at the end, I became not only a Sherpa carrier but also a Maasai trail seeker, where the urban space could have its own ‘tribal’ intelligence. I started to notice nonsense, follow trails of my neighbors and their routines, such as where someone sits at the bar terrace or balcony, when the pharmacy is less crowded, where the older woman who helped me choose cabbage lives, and how the garden of the monastery that used to be the most beautiful in the area is now neglected by nuns. Suddenly, after a long time, the neighborhood has become a neighborhood in the sense it was when I was in elementary school and knew every plot on the way home from school, every buzz and hole on the wall, every child and every dog. All just because I walked for a couple of days in a row along the same route to the same store with the same intention.

It’s that short circuit that has arisen between anarchy and the city. The city is not only a busy asphalt base of alienated businessmen and dehumanized workers, the city is a space of everyday life in which complex human and political moments are intertwined at your fingertips, on a human scale of footsteps – far from the eyes of great systems, institutions and visions.

My spice goes to grocery shop from two farms in Muć, a village some 40 km away. The semi-soft cheese is from a family dairy farm in Sinj, a town behind the hill. A woman at the retail shop gives free pads to the homeless woman. A colleague from primary school who was bullied, called stupid and clumsy, is today a great full-hearted person who works at the cash register of the grocery shop – which he co-owns – and gives fresh vegetables to the poor for free. In my neighborhood there are not just AirBnb apartments, as it is often perceived, and the kids are still kicking balls against garage doors.

Each of these sentences have their own micro-political potential, each one is the seed of some community still to converge. And just as not every food cultivation is a plantation mowing with a combine harvester on the brown sea of nothingness, somewhere else there is gardening with a hundred species of linden verdure, seeds that come from hand to hand, and the real fruits of nature and humans’ work. The city is more than the hustle and bustle itself. The city is just another political nature whose ecosystem has more or less potential for human freedom, growth and development. The problem is that in order to see that potential it is necessary to walk, and for many of us today, this is difficult and it is easier to judge things from heights and distances.

They say the pandemic has popularized walking and the urban concept of the so-called fifteen-minute city – a city where all the necessary things are within a fifteen minute walk. So, now, big cities like Vienna and Paris are competing to make their streets better for pedestrians and cyclists in order to reach this 15 minute goal. But what these trendy planning concepts do not emphasize enough is that it is not just how one goes somewhere but also why. That is the foundation of the rediscovery of pedestrian street life. People in the neighborhood should have the privilege of having a local grocery store, a good public pharmacy, a cooperative bakery, etc. When we have something like that, we need to support and appreciate it, by buying there. I would also buy diapers from someone local and not from the chain retail shop if I had more tailors around like there used to be. A fifteen-minute minute city emerges from such trifles.

Even more so, the idea of a fifteen-minute city should be politicized, placed in a social and intimate political context, devoid of criticism of the urban character of space. A better community and city can be fought for step by step. By not only observing, but also participating in it, being a neighbor, a hood guy and a bag-carrying stroller. Mutualism is the answer to the question of whether there is such a city in which the anarchist feels good. We need a 15-minute city with 15-minute anarchists. So, perhaps the first step in the fight for the city that fits the anarchist notion of good space emphasizes how much we don’t need cars. And how much of the political potential is at our doorstep.

There are 8 Comments

"a city where all the necessary things are within a fifteen minute walk." You mean the closest supermarket?

Anarcho-urbanism is an oxymoron

if you live within 15 minute walk of grocery store, you are one of the few lucky ones.

Sparsely-populated/spread-out villages out in the country which do not rely on automobiles. Theres no reason that this can't happen, it likeily won't in places like the US because of capitalism and alienation.

I dont know if we can say anarchists are really city goers more often than country people, because not living in cities is more compatible with individualism, but yes anarchist scenes are pretty much located entirely in cities.

Were the folks from Wisconsin who were running green scare part of some big town? Just curious...it's hard to imagine they were rural.

Anarchist scenes are small towns, then why would there be a need for an anarchist scene in an actual small anarchist town? ;-)

The way I see it, ideal (not idealistic) anarchist towns would be either primitivist forest camps (like the eco-resistance camps we've seen, that are DEFINITELY NOT HAPPENING ENOUGH THESE DAYS), or small villages deep in the backcountry, that are close but not too close from some provincial town, that serve as "gateways" from the dystopia to the utopia. I imagine the latter would avoid political representation/stigma as much as possible, only presenting itself as some sort of "decentralized eco-village for individualists".

Rejecting private land property as much as possible would be a must, as some people don't realize how self-defeating it can be, and contradictory to eco-anarchy. I know that sonuds dogmatic but that is rather overthrowing a very crucial dogma... The drive for appropriation is deeply ingrained in settler's collective morals and to get rid of this is a revolutionary effort in itself... some people just can't let go of it.

You'd also need a kind of social center. A big fireplace, a bread stove, a kitchen, a well, a amphitheater... anything that can bring people on a same ground and allow for conversation between anyone in the village. What do you have that can stand in the place of the church or the city library, or coffee shop, or the shopping mall?

I would like that more @s in NA realize how important deserting their urban milieus for such endeavors can be. Big cities I know are tempting for the youth, and so be it! Let the youth have their experiences over there... but you know how these cities become giant traps, to landlords, "better careers",academia and, well, scenes. As you get older, you realize how shitty lifeless environments, that look like open gigantic graveyards.

This can be greatly beneficial for anyone to reach a balance between the human cosmopolis and the fauna, as humans may have healthier lives surrounded by a living environment instead of lifeless things like concrete and machines that area in themselves a source of oppression.

which is part of the reason why i live in the house I grew up in...

however, it should be pointed out that buying a single acre or less costs very little in taxes, and you could use the plot of land as a front or a gateway to some sort of forest utopia your talking about. My advice is avoid building a house on that plot because the state sometimes comes by and checks and make sure your specifications are all the same (the assessors...)

anarchy is a truly criminal act! I reject any versions of it that aren't.

if anyone is saying that "renting" is somehow more "anarchist" than "owning", that is a rather shallow understanding of capitalism, and makes exactly zero sense.

Renting is entirely dependent on ownership, however, those who desire fewer attachments will be drawn to renting

An excerpt from “Land and Freedom” by green anarchist writer seaweed ( I know, it’s several paragraphs long)

“Cities are not habitats.

City folk can, indeed must, participate in a push against urban living, because city ways are one of the roots of our predicament and it is city inhabitants who will suffer the most in the coming years.

Obviously, hundreds of millions of people can’t move out of cities overnight. So perhaps bringing some wilderness to the city might be part of the route back home. Cities must be de-citified. It will take insurgent imagination and imaginative insurgencies. Cities can become partly abandoned, partly re-created into a collection of autonomous villages and zones.

Cities don’t end where the suburbs dissipate into farmland. Rural living is but the flip side of the same coin of urban civilization. Rural people also work and shop and pay rent or mortgages and live out atomized lives. Their habitats are invaded, plundered, polluted. Country folk are also incarcerated, carcinogized, monitored, and punished.

Our destruction of urban life entails the destruction of rural life. The goal is a geography where villages and clans and groups of friends dominate the social landscape, not vast tracts of farmland that feed cities or country estates that the privileged and lucky retreat to. The direction is toward the creation of healthy habitats and the healing of sick ones that can sustain all the life forms that live within them.

Imagine your city neighborhood without cars. The sounds are returning: birds, leaves rustling, children laughing and squealing. The smells are returning too. In springtime and summer, the perfumes of buds and blossoms and new growth fill the air; the haze from automobile pollution is beginning to dissipate and the sky is visible again. It’s so much safer to be outside without huge machines whizzing by at 60 kilometres an hour. Most of the roads are breaking up from the new shoots pushing through the pavement and concrete. There are footpaths everywhere. Even bicycles seem strangely out of place.

Parks have become community gardens and orchards. Creeks and small rivers are beginning to form and re-form here and there. Someone claims that a salmon was spotted moving up a regenerating creek during spawning season. Life is returning!

There are over a hundred people in your vast community garden. But in every place some food is also wild crafted, gathered and fished and hunted, depending on where the city was located and on the level of knowledge of its inhabitants. Gardens need fences and constant attention. As subsistence skills spread and grow, gardens and orchards contract, making room for the expansion of dream and play time, for the nurturing and blossoming of carnal and ludic adventures.

Tomorrow is music day in the field just outside the garden. There will be a bonfire with wild meat and fish and herbs shared. What used to be a dead zone, a polluted, homogenized, top down city, a habitation without wildness, an irrational density of atomized people, is turning into a fascinating collection of autonomous neighborhoods and villages.

But there are places inside the former city area where no one enters anymore. These are the dead zones. They are so polluted and ugly and unsafe to be in that long ago we piled up a mountain of rubble around them to make sure that everyone knows to stay away: a chemical factory, a prison, places of psychological ugliness and ecological sickness. Some physical areas of cities will likely be abandoned, not just the urban ways that sustained them.

Whether cities were just a bad experiment and shouldn’t be repeated, or whether they were an imposition of forces opposed to genuine living, re-forming them can’t be part of the solution. Transformation will be the healing medicine this time. We need land bases to begin experimenting with. “

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