Last fall, a block in central Stockholm that looked like a typical city street—lined with parking spots, and with the rest of the road devoted to traffic—became part of a new national experiment. Using a Lego-like kit of parts, residents worked with designers to redesign the space with a new vision of what one agency calls the “one-minute city.”
It’s the hyperlocal version of the 15-minute city, the concept—now being implemented in Paris—that it should be possible for people living in an urban neighborhood to reach their daily needs, from grocery shopping to work or school, within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. The idea of the one-minute city isn’t quite as literal: It doesn’t mean that everything you need is on one block. But it demonstrates how streets might transform within neighborhoods where walking and cycling are prioritized over driving.
[Image: courtesy Vinnova/ArkDes]“What we really aspire is to slow down the pace on streets for them to work more as the public spaces they are,” Daniel Byström, project manager at ArkDes Think Tank, said via email. ArkDes is a national agency that focuses on sustainable urban design, which partnered on the project with Vinnova, the Swedish national innovation agency. “We believe that streets can be more optimized considering the needs of humans and nature. Today, streets are mainly designed for cars, leaving little or no space for other activities. It’s not sustainable.”
The 15-minute city “is made of lots of one-minute cities,” says Dan Hill, director of strategic design at Vinnova. The one-minute city is your immediate environment. “This is a shared space, in which you can take an active part, for which you are responsible, in a shared sense, with your neighbors, and the municipality, the wider city. It’s a space in which you can grow tomatoes or grapes, hold a street party, host a community meeting, play basketball with your kids, bump into a neighbor, feed the birds, or just sit on the stoop and watch the unfolding ballet of the street,” he says.
Working with designers, ArkDes created a set of wooden street furniture called Street Moves that can fit inside standard parking spots to create benches for parklets or parking for bikes and scooters (a long list of other designs will soon be added to the kit, from bird boxes to greenhouses, community meeting spaces, and drop-off points for e-commerce deliveries). Last summer, the team started piloting the project on four different blocks around central Stockholm. Each had an elementary school, and children became part of participatory design workshops to reimagine the street, adding swings, dance platforms, and street painting.
It’s critical to have communities involved in this kind of co-design, Hill says, both to get the best design for an area and to help citizens begin to feel like they own the street. “With community involvement, in the deepest sense, you not only get better ideas, but ownership of the ideas,” he says. “This means you can actually move more quickly and effectively. Many in the urban development sector think that ‘consultation’ slows things down, and it does. But participation doesn’t. Consultation is ‘How do you like my new freeway bypass/library design/community garden?’ You’ve already decided what it is, and effectively you’re selling it to the community. That’s slow and awkward and counterproductive, as you can imagine. Participation is having a discussion—and researching and prototyping—about what to do in the first place. That’s where we need to be.”Recognize your company's culture of innovation by applying to this year's Best Workplaces for Innovators Awards before the final deadline, April 5.