User:CRCLe5me/sandbox
Early Prototypes and Related Models
Although the 15-minute city was popularized by Carlos Moreno in 2016, earlier conceptual frameworks incorporated many of its key features. Notably, in 2014, ecological designer and urban theorist Marcus Busby developed the "Garden City of Today" (GCoT) model. The GCoT proposed a decentralized, polycentric, and multi-scalar urban layout based on fractal geometry and permaculture design principles. It advocated walkable neighborhoods with integrated greenspace, food sovereignty, and localized employment hubs.
In 2014, the GCoT model was submitted to the UK Government’s Garden Cities Prospectus and the UK’s Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), and shortly afterwards, presented to the Urbanism Department of the Mairie de Paris. Correspondence with Philippe Cauvin (Head of Urbanism) and Dr. David Crave (Urban Ecology Agency) confirms the department’s interest and direct engagement with the design. The model’s principles prefigured many tenets of the 15-minute city—particularly spatial proximity, ecological regeneration, and urban self-sufficiency—while introducing a recursive, polycentric structure to avoid single-core urban dependency.
The GCoT was also presented as a scaled, city-level masterplan. Its spatial hierarchy and service radii match the 15-minute and 5-minute walking catchments defined in the Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU) 2021 framework on the 15-minute city. These proportions are visible in the original 2014 GCoT diagrams, such as those publicly posted to Flickr and shared via Twitter/X.
The Flickr image titled “GCoT 15-minute City” illustrates a polycentric city plan with clear local centers, green belts, and service nodes — all drawn to scale and consistent with CNU metrics for neighborhood walkability.
The GCoT design received positive feedback from academic figures in complexity science and urban morphology, including Prof. Michael Batty (UCL), Prof. Pierre Frankhauser (Université de Franche-Comté), and Prof. Nikos Salingaros (University of Texas), each of whom acknowledged its theoretical rigor and relevance to emergent urban design paradigms.