Shrink the City

“Whittle’s enlightening debut surveys ways in which cities around the globe have created compact neighborhoods where residents’ daily needs are quickly accessible on foot or by bicycle—a concept known as the 15-minute city… . Deeply researched and winsomely written … an invaluable overview of the cutting edge of urban planning.” – Publishers Weekly“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. The 15-minute city—which we call the walkable city and others just call the well-planned city—is the proper way for humans to occupy space. This book and the movement it describes are only necessary because, for almost a full century, logic was turned on its head, and the perverse ideals of distance and speed replaced those of proximity and access. Shrink the City is a lovely and useful guidebook to bring our civilization back to a scale at which it will stop stinking so badly.” – Jeff Speck, city planner and author of Walkable City“An exciting and accessible read [that] weaves together the anecdotal with thorough research and academic investigation.” – SNACK magazine“Shrink the City makes the case for creating smaller cities within big cities. Whittle describes a series of small, densely occupied circles within cities that would allow people to mingle naturally and get to know one another in their neighborhoods. Today, many city dwellers don’t have easy access to parks, libraries, theaters, restaurants, schools, and so on. Putting the ideas in this book to practice would cut down the time it takes to get to these places, enriching the lives of city residents, and transforming megalopolises from discouraging human interaction to encouraging familiarity and friendship.” – Dickson Despommier, author of The Vertical Farm and The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future

Glasgow-based writer and editor Natalie Whittle is a freelance contributor to the Financial Times, where previously she held editing roles across the magazine and arts sections of FT Weekend for fifteen years. She founded Outwith Books, an independent bookshop and writing space in Govanhill on Glasgow’s Southside that was open from 2019 to 2022.