A Conspiracy of Fifteen Minute Cities
Urban Planning Concept Derided as Globalist Plot
In their never-ending quest to find a boogeyman under every bed, the nutters of the far right have latched on to walkable neighborhoods as urban “prison camps” run by an invisible totalitarian world government.
To hear these folks tell it, not having car dependency at the heart of land use planning is really about making it easier for residents’ movements to be surveilled and heavily restricted.
Hordes of trolls accompanied by the usual death threats and misinformation have found their way into the professional and personal lives of professors and researchers who once avoided the perils of having a public persona.
The vitriol once reserved for the likes of Bill Gates and Anthoney Fauci is becoming a fact of life for people with the audacity of having ideas, advancing scientific theories, and proposing analyses based on observations about human behavior.
The New York Times recently profiled Carlos Moreno, a scientist and business professor in Paris, whose theories about city planning have influenced municipalities around the world for more than a decade.
The core of Moreno’s approach is that common destinations like schools, stores and offices should be only a short walk or bike ride away from home. With the advent of restrictions brought on by the pandemic the concept became an attractive option, discussed in governments and planning groups worldwide.
Once COVID entered the discourse, the door was open for conspiracy / QAnon types to include the idea of 15 minute cities in the torrent of fear mongering they need to be the center of attention. Carlos Moreno became the evil persona of the moment necessary to provide a focus for the nutter faithful.
From the Times profile:
Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.
Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities. The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.
In Oxford, a variant on the theme of dense nodules of living and working living focused on traffic calming measures to create a safer and less anxiety-ridden environment.
The “war on cars'' remains a long-running distraction used by fans of dirty energy whenever transportation issues related to climate change arise. That plus COVID paranoia was enough to turn out a couple of thousand people to protest the plan, lured by predictions of residents being confined in open-air prisons and fenced off into siloed zones.
An earlier Times article on the acceptance of 15 minute cities described a vision that’s had the effect of altering the landscape of one of Europe’s most fabled cities:
One of the most aggressive efforts has been in Paris, where before the pandemic, the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, effectively declared war on cars in an effort to reduce their planet-warming emissions.
She later made the idea of a 15-minute city a centerpiece of her successful re-election campaign in 2020.
One of her advisers, Carlos Moreno, a French academic, popularized the model of the 15-minute city (or “la ville du quart d’heure”) and outlined three key features during a TED Talk in 2020.
“First, the rhythm of the city should follow humans, not cars,” he said. “Second, each square meter should serve many different purposes. Finally, neighborhoods should be designed so that we can live, work and thrive in them without having to constantly commute elsewhere.”
Not every city is Paris, but every city is eventually going to have to find a way to reduce air pollution and sprawl. I like to think of the 15 minute city concept as just one approach with the proviso that geography should influence adaptations.
Here in San Diego, the focus for the future is playing out at SANDAG, which acts as gatekeeping for data, and should provide leadership when it comes to determining infrastructure needs in the coming years.
Money is an issue when it comes to accomplishing anything future-looking at SANDAG. The organization has fumbled growth opportunities by not being transparent. Status-quo types in local politics have used misinformation and malice to advocate for more of the past’s mistakes. Anything suggestive of not favoring cars is subjected to mumbling nonsense.
One way we can reduce our car dependency is to encourage existing localities to encourage more diversity in development with a focus on community centers serving a wide variety of needs.
The days of middle class shopping hubs and strip malls are coming to a close, and there are boundless opportunities to revamp those sites to better serve the needs of nearby residents.
Changes are coming, and if we can sidestep the distractions of obstructionists, our communities can direct the future in positive ways. At the heart of what I call the “endless suburb” vision is denial of the totality and most aspects of climate change.
When you boil down the arguments of conspiracy and conservative types (the differences are fading fast) it comes down to “me vs we.” The world of “me” is about a simplistic vision ultimately benefiting just a few people while keeping others in line with promises they might have a shot at the top.
There is no utopia, and you should run –don’t walk– from anybody who promises you one.
The world of “we” is as complicated as human beings are, and requires some degree of participation. It also involves trial and error. But the effort can yield great rewards.
Maybe 15 minute cities should include a request for citizens to invest 15 minutes of their time on a regular basis in projects for the common good. We need to appreciate what nature and its observers are trying to tell us. And we need to discount and rebuke ignorance and deception.
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Speaking of ignorance, watch this Congresscritter try to validate misinformation about people peeing in public in Washington DC.
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Sane reminder, thank you.