The Pitfalls of the 15-Minute City The concept, touted as "hyper-local," can fail to take into account local conditions and historical inequities in American cities. March 8, 2021, 11am PST | Diana Ionescu | The concept of the "15-minute city" has been adopted as an aspirational buzzword by city leaders across the United States, but "there are dangers of applying a model conceived in Europe to many North American cities," writes Feargus O'Sullivan for Bloomberg CityLab. Urban designer Jay Pitter calls transplanting the idea potentially "presumptive and colonial," arguing that "it doesn't take into account the histories of urban inequity, intentionally imposed by technocratic and colonial planning approaches, such as segregated neighborhoods, deep amenity inequity and discriminatory policing of our public spaces" that are deeply embedded in American cities.