Britain’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak attends the second day of the the Conservative Party … [+]
Who wouldn’t want to live within easy walking distance of shops, cafes, schools, theatres, and swimming pools? Those, it seems, who claim that the 15-Minute-City concept is a Stalinist climate lockdown plot to confine people to ghettos and thus easier for global cabals to control.
Such claims were previously made by conspiracy theory believers but, today, the U.K. government appeared to join their ranks by saying in an official document that 15-Minute Cities “police people’s lives.” The document said 15-Minute Cities—the urban planning concept of living close to amenities—would be opposed by this Tory administration.
The concept is derided four times in the Department for Transport’s Plan for drivers.
“We support local amenities and services being accessible,” states the plan but it adds that “we will look to prevent the introduction of area-wide schemes—sometimes described as 15-Minute Cities—that feature excessive traffic restrictions and even permits to ration car use, do not offer transport choice and have failed to secure the support of local people and businesses.”
Conspiracy
Late last year, a conspiracy theory website went viral after claiming that “power mad politicians” in Oxfordshire, England, had voted to “lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming … confining residents to their own neighborhoods.”
This was “Communism,” stated the climate-change-denying website. (The website also claimed that vaccines kill, Brexit is still a great idea, and that Trump and Putin are geniuses worth listening to.)
In reality, there is no lockdown. Instead, Oxford proposed to install six traffic filters as part of a health-promoting plan to encourage people to use their cars less.
Carlos Moreno
The 15-Minute City concept—coined in 2015 at the Paris COP21 conference by Paris-based urbanist Carlos Moreno—is regularly decried by conspiracy theorists, with wild claims that elites are about to mandate the everyday use of bicycles for all.
Cities are ruled by the “imperative to save time,” Moreno has stated. Yet, city drivers frequently travel painfully slowly in their supposed freedom machines because when there are millions of these freedom machines, they can but only impede each other. Driving to reach distant urban amenities is a needless time sink, posits the Panthéon-Sorbonne professor. Motorists, he observes, travel in a “bubble of illusory acceleration.”
Instead of being perfected for cars, cities “should be designed so that within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride, people should be able to access work, housing, food, health, education, culture, and leisure,” added Moreno.
His concept is a distillation of many years of urban-focused research in his adopted France. A mathematician by training, Moreno initially specialized in robotics and artificial intelligence, helping to develop digital control systems for France’s nuclear reactors. He later moved into the design of “smart cities.”
He modeled that no amount of tweaking would enable cars to be part of a truly “smart” city.
Instead, he worked on the concept of a “Human Smart City,” a liveable, car-lite city where proximity was to the fore.
After coining the term “15-minute city” Moreno was invited to give talks internationally. But with this growing profile—and the swift acceptance of his simple-to-grasp defining concept—he became the target of hate. He is often on the receiving end of personal abuse on social media.
“They insult me, call me human trash, Neo-fascist or a rotten Latino,” he told me by email last year. He has critics from the left and the right, but in an all too typical Venn diagram of tinfoilhattedness they share climate denial, downplay of Covid harms, and anti-vaxxer beliefs.
“Their lies are enormous,” he exclaimed.
“You will be locked in your neighborhood; cameras will signal who can go out; if your mother lives in another neighborhood, you will have to ask for permission to see her and so on.”
He added, in disgust, they “sometimes post pictures of concentration camps.”
“The conspiracists see a big global agreement,” he said.
“As the UN-Habitat, the World Economic Forum, the C40 Global Cities Climate Network, and the Federation of United Local Governments, among others, have supported the [15-Minute-City] concept, it feeds their fantasies that I am involved in the ‘invisible leadership’ of the world.”
Trash talk
Moreno has been shocked to see his concept derided by the U.K. government, with the U.K. transport secretary trashing 15-Minute Cities in his speech today at the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester.
“Right across our country, there is a Labour-backed movement to make cars harder to use, to make driving more expensive, and to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want,” Transport Secretary Mark Harper told the conference.
“I am calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities,” he added.
“What is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV,” Harper said.
Earlier this year fellow Tory MP Nick Fletcher had been the first to voice support for the conspiracy theory in the House of Commons. Fletcher parliament that the idea of 15-Minute Cities was an “international socialist concept” that will “cost our personal freedom.”
According to The Sun, Prime Minister Sunak “takes aim at so-called ‘“15 Minute Cities’” to make everyday essentials bike friendly – vowing to make sure drivers are not ‘aggressively restricted’.”
Sunak is expected to mention his opposition to 15-Minute Cities in his conference speech on October 3.
Speaking to me via email, Moreno said today:
“The 15-Minute City story machine is at it again, and this time from the voice of the British Prime Minister. What a sad world we live in!”
Moreno said the U.K. government’s attack on living close to shops and other amenities “raises deep concerns.”
He said the attacks “signify a baffling step back for a nation facing, like all others, the major challenges of this century, primarily the climate emergency. Whether it’s about urban speed restrictions, dedicated bus lanes, LTNs, leniency towards road infractions, or decisions urging cities to stop adopting the 15-Minute City model, these stances overlook the pressing issues of [climate change].”
Moreno fears that conspiracists will take comfort from the U.K. government’s stance and that further and perhaps greater threats will be made to his safety.
“Last spring, my family and I faced harassment, including death threats, from conspiracy theorists fueled by false information,” he said.
“Associating the 15-Minute City again with so-called liberty-restricting measures is tantamount to aligning with the most radical and anti-democratic elements of this movement.”
Moreno “solemnly urged” Rishi Sunak to “reconsider his stance” and “avoid rash statements.”
