You may have heard talk of them lately. You may even live in one.
A fifteen-minute city refers to a quasi-utopian model of contemporary urban living. The concept behind it is that through the wizardry of urban planning, design, and managed development, city centers can be transformed from grinding, dehumanizing hives to neighborhood hubs with easy access to essential services like hospitals, banks, grocery stores, and laundromats, all within manageable reach. Fifteen minutes is then the magic number, a kind of optimum travel time from one’s home to that service. Realized to their full potential, each center can function as a car-free zone served by pedestrian paths that would provide health benefits for anyone traveling from home to grocery store on foot or by bike.
Jane Jacobs laid out similar ideas over fifty years earlier in her most widely known work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Yet even though they are often held up as ideals, such projects remain perpetual works in progress. Still, there’s nothing wrong with trying. Paris, Barcelona, Milan, and Portland are among some of the cities currently working to implement the fifteen-minute concept, all to varying degrees of success.
But the very idea of community is complicated and brings with it issues of inclusion and exclusion, who gets to decide what works best and for whom, and who ultimately is served by certain policies and plans.
Gordon Chapman-Fox, aka Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan has been training his focus for a few years now on a very specific bit of terrain, namely the “new towns” of Warrington and Runcorn. Developed in the 1960s, both were part of a larger effort across England to expand housing opportunities for folks still living in areas ruined by the bombings of World War Two. Through his prismatic vision, Chapman-Fox has made a series of evocative, warmly nostalgic, and bitterly scathing musical statements across four albums and an EP, concerning some of the recurring troubles associated with municipal stewardship – the ambiguous impact of industry on a community, the persistence of alienation and isolation, and the betrayals and broken promises of public policies.
His latest album, Your Community Hub, released on the Castles in Space label, like all of his other WRNTDP work, continues his critical interrogations.
While the surface of YCH ripples and percolates with Chapman-Fox’s vintage synth sounds, the overall impression is decidedly grim. A chilly pall of mourning haunts the opening track, “A Shared Sense of Purpose,” with its minor key, glacial arpeggiations, and sighing pads. When the drum pattern kicks in about halfway through the fog, there’s no uplift, only a sense of unrelenting repetition and drudgery, a suggestion of lives measured out in rigid patterns and schedules. That flatline trajectory continues with “Rapid Transport Links.” The name might suggest something fleet and gossamer and futuristic, but the clogged-artery-heartbeat of the rhythm and the spacey, echoey keys and melancholy synth choirs make it clear that nothing is moving – and that if it did once, well, it stopped a long time ago.
The conceptual impact of YCH is further bolstered by Chapman-Fox’s graphic design work. All his album covers in the WRNTDP series faithfully recall design work of the ’60s and ’70s: monochrome color fields supporting black-and-white photo inserts with titles in sans-serif fonts. Something that appears bold and spare and modern but feels anti-septic despite itself. And as on the other albums, the song titles on YCH speak of a deep despairing emptiness, a hollowness behind the façade, the cruelty of lives cheated. They say one thing while the music indicates something else altogether.
“Cul-de-Sac,” the album’s longest track, opens with a gentle, major key motif, but it isn’t long before things take a turn and the initial floating, pulsing pads become wistful and forlorn. The track hovers then stalls out, adding layers that only repeat what’s already in place, turning what seemed possibly light and buoyant into a miasma of quiet desperation.
Tempos quicken somewhat with the shorter tracks but do nothing to lift the mood. A steady, arpeggiated line runs through “Summer All Year Round,” but a dense, shifting layer of synth pads hovering above it keeps any hope for ascendance at bay. The relentless, thudding bass notes and swarming fills of “Pedestrian Shopping Deck” build a growing sense of muted panic that conjures images of a lone consumer lost in a parking garage while, unbeknownst to them, they’re watched and followed by a stalker. And the repeated, descending, minor-key notes and rising, spectral pads of the closing track, “A New Town With An Old Sense Of Community,” bear the heaviness of defeated finality in every trudging note.
If you listen closely to this album, you might hear beneath its tainted nostalgic exterior the sound of a community – and it might even be yours – getting systematically screwed over. Yet for all its heaviness, it’s Chapman-Fox’s melodies, arrangements, and clear-eyed anger that make Your Community Hub worth seeking out. It masterfully folds time and brings the past right up flush to the present, as if Kraftwerk were fronted by the core members of the Frankfurt School. (Damian Van Denburgh)
a closer listen 