The 65-year-old Franco-Colombian travels the planet to provide after-sales service for a concept he has been experimenting with since 2016, the “quarter-hour city”, particularly in Paris, within the scope of the Olympic Games.
“The price of success”, confides to AFP the man who has just published the last of his twelve essays on the subject.
“At the start, people told me ‘it’s nice, but it will never work, because no one will be able to work close to home’”, rewinds the scientific director of the “Entrepreneurship-Territory-Innovation” chair at the university. Pantheon-Sorbonne.
The Covid-19 pandemic has reshuffled the cards. While cities have been designed since the post-war period to always go “faster and further”, confinements have forced “to think in short distances”, he explained to Le Monde in 2020.
In addition to "desaturating" cities and limiting carbon-intensive commuting, in response to the climate emergency, the quarter-hour temporality aims, according to Carlos Moreno, to respond to six essential needs: "to live, to work, to 'educate, care for, flourish and provide for'.
Rainbow method
"We have developed the territories with infrastructure, but not the quality of life. But today, the zoning urban planning which separates residential space from office districts, commerce and industry, no longer works", analyzes the university professor, from the world of mathematics.
In four years, the idea of “happy proximity”, which frees up time for oneself and decentralizes work rather than generalizing teleworking, has spread like wildfire.
Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Seoul, members of the C40 network of megacities committed to the climate, have taken it up, as far as Saint-Hilaire-de-Brethmas (Gard), 4.600 inhabitants.
In Paris, PS mayor Anne Hidalgo, close to Carlos Moreno, endorsed the concept during the 2020 municipal elections, and has since claimed to have increased the number of cycle paths and uses of the same place, such as schoolyards.
The LR president of the Ile-de-France region Valérie Pécresse followed suit in 2023 with the idea of a “twenty-minute” region, echoing the “half-hour territory” developed by Carlos Moreno for less dense areas.
“Nothing impossible escapes political will”, likes to repeat the academic, who assures “not to play politics”, even if his heart beats on the left.
Its methodology is based on city mapping.
"The west of Paris - its La Défense business district and the company head offices - will be colored in +work+ mode, the east in +housing+ mode, and HLM for the north-east, the center in cultural facilities and if we mix, we obtain a +rainbow of quality of life+", explains this apostle of territorial rebalancing, who wishes to combine "ecology, economy and social".
"Cosmopolitan"
Acknowledged by the UN Habitat Program, the World Health Organization and the IPCC, his work has also earned Carlos Moreno multiple prizes in town planning and architecture even though he is not, recalls -he not without malice, “neither town planner nor architect”.
On the downside of fame, the man has also been the target of conspiracy theorists, who accuse him of wanting to lock people in their neighborhood.
Nothing predestined this son of a peasant from the Andes Cordillera to such a journey, who fled Colombia at the age of 20 for France where he obtained refugee status.
“He is a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world with a totally atypical career,” recognizes Christine Leconte, president of the National Council of the Order of Architects. “It allowed mayors to question their political role in the future of their city,” she applauds.
"He's friendly, but the quarter-hour city is anything but his concept. He did the marketing for it," says Jean-Marc Offner, president of the Sciences-Po Urban School.
“If we follow our reasoning to the end, we no longer need a city. But a city is not the sum of 30 villages, it is also a source of employment,” he continues.
“Moreno is an outstanding communicator, who has thrown a wrench into the pond by alerting people to the need for proximity in cities,” greets the general director of Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Dominique Alba, who sees this as “a new way of looking at the cities”.