The Aretian Urban Analytics and Design partners, Ramon Gras Alomà, Jeremy Burke and Fernando Yu, recently wrote an article for El País, one of the foremost newspapers in Spain, in collaboration with Carles Mascarell Vilar. In this article, they discuss the concept of the 15-minute City coined among others by Carlos Moreno. They also describe the new challenges that cities and communities alike will be facing in the 21st century such as globalization, robotization, Artificial Intelligence, and sustainability. In this article, they answer a few questions targeting the demand for urban concentration and prosperity, and the demand for better and more egalitarian public services in cities and rural areas. They also explain the role of Aretian in the identification of key ingredients and dynamics necessary to the good development of cities that can withstand the challenges mentioned above.
Read more about it here.
The article quotes several Harvard and Aretian research studies proving the correlation between city form (topology, morphology, scale, entropy, and fractality) and urban performance metrics. The Aretian co-founders also mention the scientific methodology they have developed, allowing the alignment of urban and economic development in order to guide better planning decisions by having a deeper understanding of how different types of urban design impact human behavior and can increase the quality of life of residents.
Recently, Aretian developed a scientific paper studying how well the model of the 15-Minute City fares within different city types. Each city typology presents advantages and disadvantages in general, but one type, the Fractal City, best supports the goals of the 15-minute City model. Other city typologies are categorized into the Small World (Brussels), Random (Los Angeles), Organic (São Paulo), Atomized/Fractured (Rotterdam), Organic/Concentric (Buenos Aires), Radial/Concentric (Paris), Multiple Grids (Boston), Organic/Fractal (Munich), Linear City (Madrid), Garden City (Canberra) and Monumental City (Rome). Each typology presents advantages and disadvantages, in fields varying from the quality of education, to better access to healthcare. The article emphasizes the inherent virtues of the Fractal City model, in combining a distributed and egalitarian network of services with the exponential benefits of geographic agglomeration of knowledge-intensive activities in enabling the knowledge economy to flourish, thus generating prosperity.
