The
expression “15 minute city” is a little under ten years old. It was about four to five years ago that it
first began to circulate significantly and it really took off during the time
when people everywhere proved themselves to be incredibly stupid by their willingness
to submit to the all but total elimination of their most basic freedoms because
of their naïve faith in medical experts who told them that they needed to stop
living in order to avoid dying from the bogeyman of the bat flu. Last
month, however, 15 minute cities became big news as mainstream media outlet
after mainstream media outlet began running op-ed pieces about how critics of
the concept were engaged in “conspiracy theory”. At the start of the last week in February I
typed the words “15 minute cities” into Google and pressed the search
button. The top results, both on the
news tab and the main Google page, were articles of this sort from sources like
CNN, The Guardian, and even the
Weather Network. Indeed, the only one of
the highlighted stories not to include the word “conspiracy” in the title was a
piece from Bloomberg entitled “No, 15-Minute Cities Aren’t a Threat to Civil
Liberties”, which, of course, was yet another denial of the “conspiracy theory”
about 15 minute cities. At the time I
did this search these stories and many more were all fresh, having been
released in the previous two days, most in the previous twenty four hours.
Now, if
someone wanted to convince people to take seriously the idea that there is some
sort of nefarious international plot behind the latest buzzword expression in urban
planning, one way to go about doing so would be to get the entire mainstream
media to issue a denial in lockstep like this.
When media companies all begin saying the same thing like a horde of
brainwashed cult members chanting a mantra it is usually best to consider the
exact opposite of what they are saying to be the truth. Indeed, if people like
our Prime Minister, that contemptible lowlife Captain Airhead and J. Brandon
Magoo, that creep who gives off the strong impression of someone who wandered off
from the geriatric ward of an asylum for the criminally insane only to find
himself in the White House were to start using their state pulpits to denounce
anyone opposed to 15 minute cities as fringe extremists we would know with a
certainty from this the supporters of 15 minute cities are up to no good.
So what are
15 minute cities? Are they part of a
sinister plot to rob us of our freedom of motion and imprison us all within our
own neighbourhoods? Or is the idea
behind them an innocent one, aimed at renewing neighbourhoods and reducing
traffic congestion, upon which unfair suspicion has been thrown by the
unsavoury associations of those promoting and defending it?
Back in the
1960’s the term “walkability” entered the vocabulary of those with an active
interest in revitalizing big cities or at least hindering them from dropping to
a lower circle of Dante’s abyss. Making
a city walkable meant making it as friendly and accessible to pedestrians as
possible. The opposite of walkability was urban planning
aimed at maximizing the ease and speed with which one could get around a city
by car which was one aspect of the “urban renewal” movement that had influenced
much or most of the city planning of the previous few decades. The 15 minute city is an adaptation of this
concept of walkability or, to be more precise, a variation of an older
adaptation the 20 minute city. The basic
idea of a 15 minute city is that of a city in which people have access to
everything they would need on an ordinary day in their own neighbourhoods
within a 15 minute walk or bicycle ride from where they live. As
with many ideas that generate heated controversies the heat comes more from the
implications than from the basic concept.
If it were possible to transform a city into a 15 minute city where
everyone has everything he needs within such a small radius from his home without in any way altering anything else
about the city and the lives of its inhabitants this would undoubtedly be
an improvement and a very good one at that. If quality of life in a city were measured
strictly in terms of convenience it would be an exponential improvement. The problem is that it is not possible to
transform a city in this way without making many other changes. Since the advocates of 15 minute cities seem
to be largely motivated by environmental concerns it would be appropriate here
to cite Dr. Garrett Hardin’s First Law of Human Ecology “We can never do merely
one thing.” It is those other things
that would need to be done to transform cities into 15 minute cities that have
a lot of people’s dander up.
Take, for
example, the plans for low traffic neighbourhoods which Oxford, the city in
Oxfordshire, England that is home to Oxford University, recently announced its
intention to implement on a trial basis starting next year. A low traffic neighbourhood is a concept that
is related to that of a 15 minute city and often promoted together with it, so
much so that the two are sometimes mistaken as being synonymous with each other. The difference is that a low traffic
neighbourhood is designed to keep something out of the neighbourhood – traffic congestion
due to through traffic – whereas a 15 minute city is designed to put something
in the neighbourhood – the necessities of everyday life easily accessible by
walking or cycling. The Oxford city
council has announced its intention, beginning next year, of dividing the city
in to six districts and placing a limit of 100 on the number of times residents
can drive from one district to the next, through certain routes between 7 am
and 7 pm, to be enforced by licence-plate camera and fines. Residents would be able – for a fee – to
apply for an additional allotment of trips through the limited routes.
Now this
does not amount to locking Oxford residents within their districts. If Oxford goes ahead with this – and does
not take it any further – Oxford residents will be able to pass between districts
any time they wish and as many times as they wish if they do so on foot or by
bike, and even by automobile if they take routes other than the more direct
ones upon which the limits are being placed.
This whole thing does, however, give off too much of a vibe of a high-tech,
updated, version of “show us your papers, comrade” and so it is not surprising
that the Oxford announcement was met with a large and vehement protest,
especially since people were already fed up with this sort of thing from the three
years of public health emergency tyranny.
These measures do carry the potential for evolving into the permanent
confinement of people within their own neighbourhoods through mission creep
much like “14 days to flatten the curve” evolved into two and a half years of
lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine passports and mandates. Indeed, not only do they have the potential
for evolving in this direction there is a very high probability that they will
do so.
One reason
for this is because those who are promoting low traffic neighbourhoods based on
the 15 city model are openly motivated by the goal of getting people to drive
less. When the earlier, more general,
concept of walkability was conceived it was part of a response to several
decades of urban planning based on utilitarian principles. The kind of urban planning that involved
houses, small businesses, parks and playgrounds, local schools, libraries, hospitals
and the like being torn down, often through the means of entire city blocks
being seized by governments and handed over to developers, to make way for
large apartment complexes, office buildings, malls, and the like. While large-scale urban planning on
utilitarian principles went back to the nineteenth century, it had exploded
around the middle of the twentieth century due to mas production’s having made
motor vehicles increasingly available and affordable. This factor also, of course, affected the
way the designs of these planners as utility now included such things as
parking lots and freeways. A backlash
against this sort of thing began in 1961 when Jane Jacobs published her The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
which documented the negative side of “urban renewal”. Jacobs did not just write about the subject
but was also an activist who fought against this sort of urban planning both in
New York where she lived when she wrote her book and Toronto where she moved
about a decade later, in both cities fighting against the construction of
freeways or expressways. Among her
criticisms of this kind of planning was that it was making cities into places
for cars rather than for people. Those
who began to promote the concept of walkability owed much of their inspiration
to Jacobs. The promoters of the 15
minute city model would like us to think that they are following in these
earlier footsteps and perhaps in a limited sense they are. Their primary objection to automobiles,
however, is very different.
Jacobs and
those whom she inspired in the 1960s objected to tearing down houses and
digging up parks to make way for freeways and parking lots because these
actions uprooted and dissolved communities and razed the neighbourhoods in which
they had lived in order to replace these with dead, concrete, spaces made for
machines rather than men. The promoters
of the 15 minute city model, such as Anne Hidalgo, mayor of Paris, France, and
her Columbian born advisor, Carlos Moreno, the professor at Sorbonne University
who seems to be the one who came up with the concept, by contrast, don’t want
people driving cars because they want to see a radical reduction in the amount
of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. People like this think that the drastic
reduction in carbon dioxide emissions they want is necessary to save the
world. People who think that the world is at stake
are not people likely to accept or respect limitations on their efforts nor are
they people likely to listen to reason coming from those who disagree with
them. If, therefore, placing limits on the daytime use of high density routes
fails to achieve a reduction in car use and simply diverts heavy traffic to
other routes, the planners will be likely to revise the model – and keep
revising it until they achieve their goal.
Such revisions will move the model closer and closer to something
resembling people being permanently locked into their own neighbourhoods.
There is
another difference between the original pushback against the large
building/parking lot/freeway type of urban planning and the advocacy of the 15
minute city today which supports the conclusion that the concept is inherently
flawed in such a way that its implementation, however, good the intentions of
those behind it may be, would inevitably lead to urban life becoming more
tightly controlled. Prior to the
invention and mass production of the automobile every city was a city in which
every neighborhood had its local store, school, etc. so that there was no
necessity for long daily commutes that were impractical before motorized
transportation. Transforming cities
that were like this into cities where many if not most people live in one
district, work in another, and do all their shopping in yet another and where
the city’s infrastructure is designed to facilitate the fast motor vehicle
transportation that makes such an arrangement feasible required city
governments to expropriate private property and spend massive sums of money in
imposing a redesign upon their cities dreamed up by engineers who had been
given an unprecedented amount of centralized control over what their cities
would look like. In other words, the
kind of urban transformation to which people like Jane Jacobs’ objected, in
which older, traditional, more organic communities were bulldozed down and
paved over to make way for concrete and asphalt edifices designed for machines
rather than the people the machines were themselves built to serve, required
government to insert itself far more actively and visibly in the everyday lives
of urban inhabitants than it had before, which meant that this was a step away
from a more free mode of life and towards a more controlled mode of life.
Any serious
attempt to transform a city into a 15 minute city would require a further step
in the same direction. This is
because the model calls for all necessities to be available to people within a
15 minute walk or cycle ride from their home.
Obviously, if a city has to be transformed into a 15 minute city then
these necessities are not already available this close. Therefore, to remake a city according to
this model would involve moving businesses and services into neighbourhoods that
don’t already have them. A government
that wants a certain type of business in a neighbourhood has to do a lot more
to achieve its goal than a government that wants to keep a certain kind of
business out of a neighbourhood. If a
city, for example, does not want strip bars and casinos next to elementary
schools, then all it has to do is pass a zoning restriction. If,
however, a city decides that it wants a bakery in a neighbourhood that does not
have one, a simple change to zoning laws would not in itself accomplish this. Somebody has to put the bakery in there. Either the city would have to build and
operate a bakery itself or, if it was dead set on having one, it would have to lure
a private baker in with some sort of incentive.
A bakery is only one type of business.
To turn a city into a 15 minute city its government would have to do
this not merely with bakeries but with every sort of business and service it
deems essential, and in every neighbourhood.
While those
promoting the 15 minute city model claim to be the heirs of Jane Jacobs they
are in spirit far closer to the city planners she fought against in New York
and Toronto. As different as the two
kinds of urban planners are in their attitude towards automobiles, they are
united by a common belief that if you get the right urban engineers, with the
right ideas, and sit them down together in a drawing room, they will be able to
come up with a design for a city which if enacted would produce maximum
happiness for the maximum number of the city’s inhabitants. If, however, freedom is essential to human
happiness, and it is, then this sort of thinking is counterproductive because
it can only move cities in the direction of being more planned and less
free. Those who make pitches for the 15
minute city concept like to try and sell it to us as a restoration of an older,
simpler, way of life. That way of life,
however, belonged to traditional communities which possessed at least one
quality that was more conducive to happiness than that in modern cities and
which cannot be reproduced artificially by planning. That quality is that of being organic. This is a quality that comes about in a
community naturally, when families live together in the same place, working in
the same businesses, shopping in the same stores, worshipping in the same
churches, for several generations over the course of which a sense of social
oneness grows. This cannot be
reproduced artificially by planning and attempts to do so will only produce
ugly caricatures of natural, traditional, communities.
One does
not have to speculate about sinister motives behind the 15 minute city concept
– and without such speculation you do not have a “conspiracy theory” – to have
serious misgivings about the idea.
Urban planning of this nature cannot recreate true organic communities,
inevitably requires an increase in government control and a decrease in human
freedom no matter how benign the motivation, and, being wedded to an
environmentalist ideal of eliminating carbon emissions that has in recent years
taken on the characteristics of a cult of fanatics is set on course to evolve
into something far more unpleasant.
