15-minute cities are either for lockdowns or liberations
For better and worse, urban planning is going viral. A real-life James Bond villain endorsed walkable infrastructure, and all hell broke loose.
Humans learn to trust or distrust a source based on our experience with that particular source or others similar to them.
If your business partner has a track record of scaling profitable companies, you’ll be inclined to trust them with financial forecasting. But if that same partner embezzled corporate profits and bankrupted one of the companies, you might never trust them again—even if they only cheated once in 20 years of working together.
Our level of trust in a source isn’t always based on clear right-vs-wrong or good-vs-evil scenarios. After a game between football rivals New England Patriots and New York Jets, ask a fan from each team what they think of Patriots coach Bill Belichick. Those two fans will have diverging thoughts about the NFL’s hoodie celebrity.
A person’s own affiliations (or tribes) play a huge role in first impressions about any topic. Sports coaches, music genres, restaurant options, photography styles—anything if filtered through our own bias.
In early to mid 2020, covid vaccine commentary was headlining every news show and publication. Many political leaders reminded audiences that they did not trust the message if it was delivered by Donald Trump. Two prominent examples:
“If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it, absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, I’m not taking it.”
Kamala Harris, Vice Presidential Candidate on CNN
"Frankly, I'm not going to trust the federal government's opinion and I wouldn't recommend it to New Yorkers based on the federal government's opinion.”
Andrew Cuomo, Former New York Governor in official press release
This has everything to do with designing happy, healthy communities.
15-minute cities: lockdowns or liberation?
Most Americans live in a region where they can reach all their normal needs in a 15-minute drive or less. Not counting the car commute, most people in cities or suburbs don’t have to drive longer than 15 minutes to get to the grocery store, restaurants, shopping centers, schools, churches, parks, and other neighborhoods to visit friends.
The term “15-minute city” was coined several years ago by Carlos Moreno, a scientific director at Panthéon Sorbonne University-IAE in Paris. Urban issues are Moreno’s specialty. His simple premise was a thriving city would have multiple areas within it where people can reach all the things in less than 15 minutes by walking or bicycling.
Congress for the New Urbanism published a detailed summary of 15-minute cities that’s sure to please urbanists and designers. The term is newish, but the fundamentals are quite old. Here’s Moreno’s TED Talk where he unpacks the concept in his own words:
15-minute cities (and a whole bunch of related ideas) have been swirling among urbanists, land use planners, and traffic engineers between then and now. There hasn’t been any unusual level of controversy about proposing separated bicycle paths or pedestrian plazas. That is, not any more than the usual resistance, because “we’ll have to drive slower, and it might take a minute longer to drive.”
But then covid lockdowns spread across the globe, and everything planner-y and urban-y changed.
In the U.S., different states had different approaches to restricting movement. In the spring of 2020, I drove 200 miles for a family emergency, wondering the entire drive if I’d be pulled over because I was technically defying lockdown rules for my area at the time.
In the summer of 2020, I was speaking on a virtual conference panel about emerging transportation technology and Mobility-as-a-Service. One of the hot topics was data privacy. China had a type of MaaS platform, and they implemented a red-yellow-green system where the Chinese government controlled who traveled, when they traveled, and where they traveled.
Pre-covid, Americans only associated that type of lockdown with sci-fi movies. During covid, the world was watching governments threaten or use force to contain people.
WEF as a polarizing messenger
“You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”
That was the opening phrase of a now notorious marketing video by the World Economic Forum. It’s such an over-the-top intro that people unfamiliar with WEF struggle to believe an organization would play right into the “well whaddya expect from those elite globalist” accusations.
For the most part, WEF is out in the open with their views of social order.
“I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.” Ida Auken, Danish Member of Parliament
WEF’s founder and chairman Klaus Schwab never helps in matters of globalist controversy or conspiracy theories. Here’s a Vanity Fair excerpt from DAVOS MAN: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman.
[Klaus Schwab] recognized early on that [WEF] had to distinguish itself from the run-of-the-mill business conferences, where people sat around talking about money. In defining a high-minded mission—“Improving the State of the World”—Schwab turned attendance into a demonstration of social concern.
He reinforced the value proposition through relentless networking, making Davos an indispensable venue for business. He enticed multinational corporations to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of serving as “strategic partners,” securing access to exclusive lounges and private conference rooms inside the Congress Centre. There, executives encounter one another along with heads of state, investors, and other people capable of improving the state of their balance sheets.
Schwab choreographs bilateral meetings at which heads of global banks and energy companies can personally beseech presidents of countries for preferential tax treatment and access to promising oil fields. Consulting giants and software companies make plays for government contracts by speaking directly with the decision-makers. Top executives can fly in and meet a dozen heads of state in the course of four or five days, sitting across tables in soundproof rooms, beyond the purview of securities regulators, journalists, and other hindrances.
If you’re already prone to distrust WEF as a source, reading sensational quotes by Schwab will only harden you. In November 2022, Schwab sat for an interview with a Chinese government media outlet to talk about their approach to citizen governance.
I think [China is] a role model for many countries. I think we should be very careful in imposing systems. But the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.
He speaks like a politician, so it’s unclear what exactly he was referring to. But it’s a CCP-run interview of a man who often talks about ways the citizens of the world need to act together. You could imagine why people might be shocked at the timing of his complementary words. Some have different impressions of modern Chinese systems, especially those who watched Chinese lockdowns live on social media.
Anyone with internet access knows technology can be used for good or evil. “You’ll be able to leave if you’re healthy” or “You’ll be able to drive if you have an electric vehicle” can swiftly become dystopia. Again, I’m not describing a fever dream, but a natural follow-up to what was displayed beginning in 2020.
One way to avoid being described as a James Bond villain is to stop dressing and talking like a James Bond villain. Like it or not, the messenger matters.
Now, in 2023, something that began as a great idea—bicycle urbanism, basically—has been distorted into a nightmarish future of total government control. There is a growing number of people who are convinced 15-minute cities are a conspiracy to control and restrict movement, rather than create and expand mobility freedom.
Residents of Oxford, England are not happy about their City Council’s plan to implement a 15-minute city plan that includes “filters” to restrict movement. The plan includes a process for residents to apply for up to a certain number of car trips per year. After that, they have to ask permission for additional trips for a fee. Travel would be monitored and enforced by cameras.
Enough people across the world are familiar with WEF and Klaus Schwab, that an endorsement by that organization of anything puts people on the offensive or defensive. Thousands of words have been typed by environmental groups about how WEF billionaires and celebrities fly in on private jets to meet annually while the world is told to ride a bike.
If the arch nemesis says something is a good idea, then it must be awful. Here’s a recent viral video of a 12-year old girl summing up the fears of a forced 15-minute city.
To be clear, I wholeheartedly support the 15-minute city concepts. Human-scale design delights me. But it’s important to understand why there’s suddenly so much skepticism about central planning schemes to put people in districts.
Some countries do want complete control over their population. Other countries (the U.S. included) have politicians who seem to crave that type of power, even if current laws don’t allow it. A 15-minute city can be a device to lock up a community or liberate it.
Part of me wishes WEF would start endorsing subsidized sprawl:
Residents forced to live in zones that have housing only.
No food or pleasure centers, just housing.
All non-residential uses confined to non-residential zones.
Planning department responsible for determining whether or not spacing between zones is adequate.
I’m pretty sure that top-down, central planning message would rally the anti-WEF base to oppose subsidized sprawl in communities across America. People would be setting up block parties left and right. They’d be organizing group cargo bike rides to protest car-first land use regulations. Tactical urbanism would become a tool of the free, demonstrating their distrust for WEF-endorsed car dependency.
What this means for American urbanism
It could be that the 15-minute city and 20-minute suburb end up getting marketing rebrands to avoid association with someone else’s interpretation of human-scale design. Or, maybe this will fizzle away and the next “we know best” thing will fill the news.
A walk-friendly, bike-friendly neighborhood can be a place of liberation or lockdown. That’s going to depend on the city and country. If Americans are careful to steer clear of mandating healthy habits, then we’ll be in a much better position to nudge behavior in a direction that frees people from cars (if they wish to opt out of cars).
Communities can be planned and designed to give mobility options rather than force residents to be dependent on cars for all our errands. Remember, half of America’s car trips are less than a few miles long. That’s a 15-minute bike ride!
Our cities and suburbs are fixable, and we can make it happen without draconian surveillance and physical control. And we certainly don’t need a bunch of billionaires wagging their fingers at Americans, telling them how to live. That’s not helping anyone.
“Some countries do want complete control over their population.” This is a good quote. Politics is full of people attributing false intentions to their opponents. Human-scale design should be objectively better but people are subjectively attaching a false intention behind it and throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The problem with these sorts of schemes is that they necessarily put in place the mechanisms by which those who do want to control every aspect of people’s lives -- now have the tools in place to do it.
This was a big point that the founders of the US had in mind when they separated the powers of government. The idea was to remove the ability for a small number of people to control the masses.
In our current system, all of these new flashy things sound great, but they never come about for the practical or useful reasons that are presented. They are only presented that way.
I find it interesting that the answer to so many things these days is, surrender your freedom, property, hell your sense of self being, and everything will be better. You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy -- right?
The issue posed is “Climate Change” the answer to this is to live in compact centrally controlled cities. But you’ll still be free, mostly...
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” - Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) circa 1960s