The 18-Minute City, Not a 10 or 15-Minute City

From my childhood, indescribable personal experiences deeply inscribed the two words "death" and "design" into my life. Since then, I have continuously questioned the boundaries between existence and absence, memory and reminiscence in the city. Whenever I discussed the relationship between city and death in my birthplace, conversations inevitably flowed into the realm of personal loss and remembrance. Death was treated as either "too private an experience" or "too abstract a concept," making it nearly impossible to elevate it to the objective discourse platform of the city.

On November 25, 2014, I left everything behind and headed to New York with the two keywords "death" and "design." The journey that began in a foreign land evolved over ten seasons into a simple yet revolutionary blueprint for a future city that no one had attempted before: "building a city where the living and the dead coexist." After 10 years in New York, I quietly declared 'Sim Eternal City' - a meeting of the heart '心' and 'Storytelling in Motion.' This was not merely urban planning, but a new city paradigm where life and death exist as a continuum, with a goal of continuing for another 20 years.

In this process, I named this concept 'Sim Eternal City,' approaching it as a city that combines the Chinese character '心 (heart)' with the mobility concept of 'Storytelling in Motion.' Although I made significant conceptual progress in exploring practical implementation methods, the keyword "death" was so unfamiliar and powerful that I was disappointed that people I met in New York and various cities still focused only on superficial aspects like death and mourning rather than the essential meaning of coexistence between the living and the dead.

Therefore, I began to refocus on the keyword "city" and explore new approaches to urban planning and urban concepts.

Though my insight is limited, cities have been designed around the relationships between human 'time,' 'space,' and the 'people' who live within them. After industrialization, the Conventional City—traditional modern/industrialized urban planning—emerged, and we became accustomed to such urban environments. This model clearly distinguished central business districts (CBD) from residential, industrial, and commercial zones in line with mass production and consumption systems, leading to massive road networks centered on automobiles and suburban expansion. While this dramatically increased cities' population capacity, we now face various limitations left by conventional cities.

• Climate change and rising sea levels: Coastal megacities face flooding risks, while survival threats such as heat islands, heat waves, and fine dust have become everyday realities.

• Increased life expectancy and super-aged society: Demand for elderly care and healthcare has surged, but existing cities, designed around the 'working-age population,' fail to properly ensure mobility and accessibility for the elderly.

• Rapid increase in single-person households: As traditional family-unit spatial configurations dissolve, lifecycle services such as housing, care, and funeral services are being reorganized on an individual basis.

• Community disintegration: Long commutes and fragmentation of urban functions have weakened local communities, leading urbanites to "live in cities without experiencing them."

The Emergence of 10-Minute and 15-Minute Cities—Yet Still Incomplete

Image Source: The urbanist

This policy has become a global exemplar of innovative urban policy, reflecting the era's demands for urban sustainability, climate response, citizen equality, and improved quality of life.

10-Minute City Planned For Seoul, South Korea In 2024

The World Economic Forum is an independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Incorporated as a not-for-profit foundation in 1971, and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the Forum is tied to no political, partisan or national interests.

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However, it has not adequately addressed new megatrends such as the climate crisis, aging population, and expansion of single-person households. It has focused solely on solutions within a single city, failing to properly address inter-city connectivity, physical and virtual mobility, and harmony between city and nature. Moreover, both models have excluded the most fundamental aspect—'the non-ordinary'—death, memory, history—from urban design.

Sim Eternal City: A Paradigm Shift from 15 to 18 Minutes

I propose Sim Eternal City—the 18-minute city. This is not 'simply adding 3 minutes' to the 15-minute model, but a fundamental transformation that reinterprets the city as a narrative space where life and death coexist. I redefine the 18-minute city as a narrative space where life stories flow, not just functional infrastructure. Taking the entire lifecycle from birth to death as the basic unit of design, I rearrange spaces and programs so the living and the dead intersect within the same urban fabric.

Redistribution of 3 Minutes: Time for Memory, Connection, and History

The additional 3 minutes in the 18-minute model are distributed as follows:

1. Time for Memory (1 minute): Moments when individual and community memories naturally permeate the rhythm of daily life.

2. Time for Connection (1 minute): Moments when the living and the dead physically and emotionally interact, experiencing coexistence.

3. Time for History (1 minute): Moments when one experiences the communal journey, reflecting on permanence and transmission beyond personal history.

To elaborate on these three minutes:

1. A City Breathing with Narrative - Encompassing the entire lifecycle from birth to death, rearranging spaces and programs so the living and the dead intersect within the same urban fabric.

2. Redistribution of 3 Minutes—Memory, Connection, History - Through time for memory (1 minute), time for connection (1 minute), and time for history (1 minute), communities naturally experience death and memory in everyday life.

3. Virtual Tree of Life and Square of Memory - Placing a collective memory device at the city center that records and shares narratives of past, present, and future through digital twin and XR technologies.

4. In cities lacking physical memorial spaces and struggling to accommodate diverse mourning practices across religions and ethnicities, funeral and memorial-specific mobility traces the deceased's life routes, unfolding memories through improved technologies and services to achieve communal remembrance.

5. Transcendent Connectivity and Virtual-Physical Integration - Building networks that connect beyond city interiors—linking city-nature, city-city, real-virtual—to overcome physical constraints like climate change and sea level rise.

The Future City Already Present, Just Not Yet Discovered...

If the conventional city was a model for industrialization's desires, the 10-minute city for survival, and the 15-minute city for life's leisure, Sim Eternal City—the 18-minute city designs 'meaning beyond life itself.' The final 3 minutes are redistributed for death and memory, for history that lives and exists eternally. Sim Eternal City—the 18-minute city designs 'meaning beyond individual, community, and city-centered life. It responds to the climate crisis and super-aged/single-person household era while returning death, memory, and history to the center of the city. The city is no longer a stage only for the living. A city where the legacy of the past and the dead breathes, where movement becomes memory, and stories never cease—that is Sim Eternal City.