The 15 Minute City

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

0:07In February 2023, protesters took to the streets of Oxford, England. Many were wearing yellow safety vests and holding flags and signs with complaints about the local government.

0:24Specifically, they were protesting new urban planning policies being carried out by their city. That's producer Chris Perube. Now, under normal circumstances, a protest like this might get a little bit of local media attention and then disappear. But this one was different. Thousands of people showed up. And it was part of a bigger trend. Last year, there were demonstrations happening in countries around the world protesting against an urban planning concept called the 15-Minute City. These protesters were angry, saying the 15-minute city represented fascism or socialism or some kind of a human rights violation, which was all really over the top.

1:07Because as a planning concept, the 15-minute city is completely inoffensive. In a nutshell, the 15-minute city concept is the idea that everything that a person needs within a city should be theoretically reachable within 15 minutes of their home by either walking or active travel or public transport. So that's cycling, walking, buses, trains. Burgess O'Sullivan is a reporter for Bloomberg CityLab. It's a very simple concept. It's this idea that basically cities are going to be healthier if you integrate all their uses together. Whenever I've tried to explain the 15-minute city to people, their reaction has usually been, oh, I mean, that sounds nice.

1:53How can you argue against having a supermarket or a daycare down the street from your house? But in 2023, the 15-Minute City entered the world of far-right conspiracy theories, and it became the source of protests, hate speech, and even death threats, all of which shows how even a benign urban planning concept can be demonized by bad faith actors.

2:19Okay, so Chris. Yes, Roman. We've been circling this story for a long time, but we're finally getting to it now. Yeah, this story has been in the news for a couple of years and people have actually been asking us to do this story. But now there's been a little bit of distance and it feels like it's the right time for us to talk about the 15-minute city. And so we're going to get into the Internet circus around the 15-minute city. But first, let's talk about where this planning concept originated. So this concept of a 15-minute city, it was first laid out by this guy. Professor Carlos Moreno, Sorbonne University, researcher and creator of the 50 Minutes City concept.

2:57So Professor Moreno, he's this famous urbanist. He's from Colombia, but he's lived in France for a long time. And Roman, you and I talked to him and I found him to be just this really affable guy. Yeah, he's a delight. So much energy. I enjoy talking with him too. Totally. He's got this constant broad smile, this trim beard. He just like brings a lot of positive energy. I am Buddhist by my culture. This is very important for having an inner peace. And at the same time, I am a scientist. So before he coined the term 15-Minute City, for years, Professor Moreno, he'd been thinking about urban planning, and he concluded basically the way that we are laying out cities, it just does not work.

3:40So let's talk about what's wrong with the way we have laid out cities. Okay, so Roman, we're going to have to do a little bit of Urban Planning 101. If you're a regular listener of 99 % Invisible, you probably know these ideas, but we're going to just recap a few and radically oversimplify some things. Is that okay? That sounds good. Okay, so for centuries, towns and cities were laid out in this very central way. Like you would have a town square with shops and amenities in the center, and then people would kind of encircle that. But in the 20th century, that changed with the advent of modernism and the rise of certain very influential architects.

4:18The actual problem is to find again the condition of nature. And the answer is the major problem of today and tomorrow, the proper occupation of the land. OK, so that is the voice of Le Corbusier. Corbu! Corbu! OK. Yes. So he's a fixture on our show, obviously. You certainly know who he is if you've listened to enough 99PI. And one of his major concepts was this new way of laying out cities that he introduced in the 20s, which he called radiant cities. And so his idea was to have cities where people lived in tall buildings, which are separated by green space, and people would live away from the noise and the grime of factory life.

5:02Exactly. And another one of his big ideas is that a city should be broken up into functional sectors. So this is the concept that people should live in one zone and then work in another zone. And all of that culminates with a paper called the Athens Charter, which he published in 1933. Right. So the Athens Charter basically lays out zoning as we understand it today. Like it said that people should live in one part of the city, work in another. And this was just the way things were done. Yeah, and urban planners take up Corbu's ideas after World War II, and this makes a huge difference in how cities are planned.

5:35So suddenly we have zoning, we have residential areas where you can only build housing, and then areas where you can only build factories, and then areas where you can only put up offices and businesses. And that's something that really takes effect post-war, along with a second major trend, which is the rise of cars. The automotive city is a very short period in the history of cities. This, again, is Professor Carlos Moreno. Massive production of cars has started when Mr. Henry Ford has produced the first Model T. The worldwide presence of massive cars is just after the Second War. What was the impact just in seven decades of the presence of car?

6:25So we've just spent an entire year talking about Robert Moses and how American cities became centered around freeways and driving. I mean, post-war cities around the world became more car-centric and urban planners were building more roads and highways all the time. Exactly. So with zoning, people are getting separated from things like work and school and, you know, movie theaters, leisure. and more and more people are taking cars to get to these places. And to be clear, this really is a phenomenon we're seeing in North American cities after World War II. This is not necessarily the case everywhere.

6:58Right, absolutely. So Professor Moreno, he's looking at these developments and he's thinking, OK, this is not sustainable. So in 2016, he pitches this concept called the 15-minute city as a climate change solution. Basically, all the important stuff should be 15 minutes away, on foot or by bicycle. Yeah, and I feel like this is really straightforward. Like this idea predates him, certainly. Like many older cities are just naturally like this already because they were laid out before cars and zoning. It's a very simple concept. And something that Carlos Moreno would admit too is that it is not a new concept.

7:35This is the direction in which planning has been moving pretty much from the late 20th century, starting back in the 60s with people like Jane Jacobs. That's Fergus O'Sullivan again from CityLab, invoking the patron saint of walkable cities, Jane Jacobs. And by the late 20th century, a lot of these ideas were becoming best practices in urban planning. So Professor Moreno, he takes all these ideas and he basically just gives them a new package, right? And that's why I think the idea of the 15-minute city really resonated with people in this fresh way. What I think Carlos Moreno's idea did that revolutionized this is it allowed people to sit at the center of that idea.

8:16Because when you talk about a 15-minute city, you can sit there and say, okay, what's within 15 minutes of my home? I do have a supermarket. I do have a pub. I don't have a hospital, etc. You can work through it and immediately it becomes humanized. You think, what do I need? What do I have and what do I lack? And to be clear, it's pretty unrealistic to have everything within a 15-minute walking distance. And Professor Moreno totally acknowledges this. But at least, ideally, you'd have the most essential stuff close by. This is not a question to build a Louvre museum every 15 minutes. This is not a question to build a cancer hospital every 15 minutes.

8:56So, I mean, the concept sounds nice, it sounds simple, but how does it actually work? So there's no one-size-fits-all version of this. But there are some key policy ideas that have become associated with the 15-minute city. And one of them is reducing strict single-use type zoning, right? So we're no longer going to have residential areas and business areas. Instead, you would make sure that people are living a lot closer to where they work. We want to mix the users for having in the same area offices for working, areas for living, green areas, parks, public spaces for people, cultural activities, medical services, leisure activities in order to offer a diversity of services.

9:49So less zoning is one policy. Another might be restricting car traffic in certain areas. So you can pedestrianize roads or you can say cars are not allowed in during these hours. You can have congestion pricing. There's lots of versions of that. Rather than saying cars would be banned, cities would be rethought so that cars no longer have such a dominant space. Instead of saying, you know, you have six car lanes converging on a roundabout, you just have two. And then the rest could be opened up and it could be paved and you could have greenery, you could have sports facilities. So I think it's basically about taking the vibrancy of the town square, that vibrancy that we all recognize if we sort of go to tourist places, and having it everywhere, all the way across the urban fabric.

10:38So there are a few more ideas Carlos Moreno has mentioned in connection with the 15-minute city, like more affordable housing, better public transit. But really, the 15-minute radius thing and reducing the centrality of cars, you know, that's the crux of the philosophy. And as O'Sullivan pointed out there, there are cities that actually already do this. There are cities that are already kind of close to being the 15-minute city, especially in Europe. And this is just trying to replicate what a lot of older European cities are like. Yeah, but then the 15-minute city also gives them kind of some language to what it is that they're doing, right?

11:13So a couple of cities actually jump on the bandwagon right away. They say, we want to be 15-minute cities, right? One of them is Shanghai, and one of them very famously is Carlos Moreno's hometown. It's Paris. So in 2014, Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor. And a few years after that, she made the 15-minute city pretty central to their city planning. And she actually named Carlos Moreno as an advisor. So Paris started implementing a bunch of these policy ideas, like partly under the guise of having a more livable city and also around the concept of fighting climate change. They reduced car lanes and they increased the number of cycle lanes into the city center.

11:56They pedestrianized certain areas. They made other areas much, much less car accessible. And they have tried to increase the green areas by as much as possible, partly because like so many places, Paris is suffering from extreme heat in the summer and they're desperate to try and cool that down. And I got to say, there is a visible difference in the city, right? Like you see a lot more people on bikes. You see areas where cars cannot go in Paris now. A lot of green spaces where people can walk. So Paris took up the 15-minute city as this kind of organizing principle. But something happened in 2020 that really just thrust it into the spotlight of global urban planning.

12:37I think the reason it came into the media and into public discussion with such powerful force was due to the pandemic. It's very much that lockdowns, suddenly everyone is concentrated in their local areas. And because kind of everything had changed, we were rethinking everything about cities. Like, why do we live next to each other? What is work for? And one of the things that was super clear as people were walking more and trying to find ways to interact, that it was really nice to be close to amenities. Yeah, and lots of mayors and urban planners, like, they start taking this up too. They're hearing this from people.

13:15So in the wake of COVID, we're seeing lots of cities passing resolutions and saying, you know, we want to be 15-minute cities. We want to be more like 15-minute cities. So Buenos Aires, Busan and South Korea. It's not just big cities, though. It's not just global capitals. There's also some fairly unexpected places that want to become 15-minute cities. Like what? So one American city that developed a plan to become a 15-minute city was Cleveland, Ohio. OK, I mean, I've spent some time in Cleveland, Ohio. It's not especially dense. It's not that walkable of a city as I remember. No, totally. But Cleveland's planning commission, they set up a pilot program to change the city's zoning with the goal of, you know, becoming a 15 minute city.

14:00And another municipality, I was surprised by this. It's a Canadian city I never would have expected to take this up. It always comes back to Canada with you. I am guilty as charged as resident Canadian guy on 99 % Invisible. The 50-minute city has become a very worldwide popular movement. In North America, for example, in Canada, in Edmonton, close to Toronto. Respectfully to Professor Moreno, Edmonton is not close to Toronto at all. That is wrong. It's like days and days' drive away, right? Yeah, I looked it up. It's like a 36-hour drive if you do it straight. Okay. But I have to be honest, I was surprised to hear Edmonton was planning to become a 15-minute city because it just kind of sounded like a tall order to me.

14:52Like, it's one of those places where, you know, in theory, you can get around without a car. Lots of people do. But it's not super walkable in places. It's a lot more challenging. It's not impossible, but the default is obviously the car at this point. So this is somebody who I would say knows a thing or two about getting around at Edmonton. Hello, my name is Erin Rutherford. I'm a city councilor in Edmonton, Alberta, and I represent Ward in the northwest of the city. So when Aaron joined the city council, Edmonton had just approved a new city plan that was based around the 15-minute city because they saw their population growing really fast, actually.

15:32They were adding a ton of new cars on the road, and it just didn't seem like a good idea to keep going in that direction. So under the new city plan, the city would be more walkable. It would be broken up into districts. They're saying districts across the city of Edmonton. And I'm guessing the residents of each district are going to be 15 minutes away from various amenities. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So the idea was that each district would have a park and a school and all the things you need within a close proximity. Seeing the trend of more people having to go further and further for work, for the services that they need, because our city's footprint was growing and growing out rather than up.

16:13How do we ensure that we're also building a climate resilient city and a city that allows people to not have to drive an hour one way in traffic? So by 2022, Paris, Edmonton, according to Moreno, dozens of places around the world have taken up this urban planning concept. But as we know, from here on out, things get very rough. So when we come back, how the far right made the 15-minute city and Carlos Moreno into the boogeyman.

16:57so we're back with chris perube and now we have to talk about the messy conspiracy part unfortunately yes so in 2020 the 15 minute city is becoming popular with urban planners and all these places but around this time there was also a major spike in awful political rhetoric so roman i mean you remember what it was like in the summer of 2020 it was a brutal time yeah absolutely and some of the rhetoric, especially like far right rhetoric, it was spilling over into the conversation about urban planning. That there were a lot of conspiracy theories around lockdowns. There was a lot of people found lockdowns enormously stressful and then were tending to see the underlying politics of that as inherently sinister.

17:42And I think actually that was the springboard. anti-lockdown activism bled into anti-15-minute cities activism. So that's Fergus O'Sullivan again. He's a reporter at CityLab, who says these online posters were taking this concept and their imaginations were just running wild. So they were starting to make these giant leaps in logic. I suppose the idea of people have heard 15 minutes and then think that cities are going to be portioned into 15-minute zones that are going to be controlled and that you will therefore need some to pay a fee, pay a toll, have some kind of permit to get in and out of these zones.

18:25And of course, there's no part of the 15-minute city that says anything about this whatsoever. I mean, there's congestion pricing. Maybe it's kind of mixing with that as an idea. But like there's nothing about the 15-minute city inherently that involves anything remotely like this. So then how does this conspiracy form and then spread? Well, it's not clear who started it exactly, but it bubbled up from kind of the usual far right corners of the Internet, some very unpleasant websites that I had to visit to research the story with people saying, you know, this 50-minute city thing, it sounds a lot like lockdowns.

18:57And as this is happening, people are making all these leaps in logic, right, that you're going to need a permit to leave your neighborhood and things like that. You know, you can attribute some of this to ignorance, but a lot of this is just bad faith because there's nothing in the policy that says this at all. Totally. But there are these conspiracy theorists who are kind of twisting it and they're actually taking it to an even more extreme level than licenses to leave your neighborhood. It is a kind of potentially a form of tyrannical authoritarian control. Even some people assess some sort of harbinger of a world government.

19:33Yeah, it always comes down to that of people getting paranoid about a world government. So this conspiracy theory, it's picking up momentum. Eventually, it all gets kind of lumped in with this idea called the Great Reset. So, Roman, do you know about the Great Reset theory? Right. I know about this. Yeah. So in 2020, the World Economic Forum during the pandemic, they proposed this project they call the Great Reset. They're having these conversations everybody's having like, oh, should we question some assumptions? What if we did things differently? You know, what if we had a more sustainable world?

20:04Things like this. But they package it as The Great Reset and they make these videos promoting it, one of which is narrated by King Charles. We have an incredible opportunity to create entirely new sustainable industries, investing in nature as the true engine of our economy. I mean, they immediately run into this branding problem because The Great Reset is a really ominous sounding title. Yeah, especially when it's coming from the World Economic Forum and the British royal family. Like, yeah, that sounds not great. And if you're inclined to think there is a plot to start a one world government, this might contribute to that.

20:45And some of these right wing people on the Internet are suggesting global elites are using COVID as a way to initiate the Great Reset. Right. Like this is where their thinking is going. And then those ideas start to go mainstream. It jumps from these far right social media echo chambers to the general population. And that's because of a pretty notorious right wing Internet guy named Jordan Peterson. So, Roman, how much do you know about Jordan Peterson? You know, I don't honestly know a whole lot. I try to avoid him as much as possible because everything I've sort of encountered has been pretty loathsome.

21:20Yeah, no, this is a good plan for your mental health. So Jordan Peterson was a professor of psychology at my alma mater, actually, the University of Toronto, where I went to university. The fighting Leafs. The varsity blues, but thank you. So he doesn't teach there anymore, actually. So over the last decade, Peterson has become pretty notorious. He has these ideas about masculinity, you know, and refusing to use transgender people's pronouns. Very famously, he advocated for the all meat diet. So, you know, believe it or not, I'm not a huge fan of the thoughts and works of Jordan Peterson. Yeah, it doesn't sound like you have a lot in common besides your alma mater.

21:58No, no. But New Year's Eve 2022, Jordan Peterson tweets some charts about the 15-minute city and the Great Reset. So he's amplifying this, right? And he adds a quote saying, they're great. No, I'm not going to do his voice. I'm sorry. I wouldn't know if you did. It's a very Muppety sounding. Just trust me, it's very Muppety sounding. more so than mine somehow. Okay, the idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot, tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you're allowed to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of this idea. So this keeps going. It keeps spreading all over the place.

22:34And within a couple months, by February 2023, there is the protest taking place in downtown Oxford in England. Thousands of people show up. They are carrying signs that say things like, no to 15-minute cities, And then save our freedom of movement, worship, and family life. So they're really lumping in a lot of grievances in one message there. Yeah, it becomes this weird magnet for a lot of things. And to be clear about this, like Oxford was proposing some pretty strict traffic measures. Like they were really going to limit when cars could come into the downtown. You could still go to the downtown, but you just had to like walk or take public transit.

23:13And this wasn't even part of their 15-minute city plan, weirdly. But the protesters, they lumped in this traffic plan and the 15-minute city and all of these other anxieties. And at this point, the Oxford protest, this is actually the first time Carlos Moreno is becoming aware of the Internet reaction because they're actually using his name. Like they are actually protesting him in Oxford. I was in Paris. I received the photo of the demonstration for saying Moreno is Pol Pot, Moreno is Hitler, et cetera, et cetera. it was very, very difficult. I mean, this is just so baffling and so tragic. Like, even though a lot of the protesters are completely mischaracterizing his ideas, it still has an effect on it.

23:58Well, I mean, at first he's confused, right? Like, this whole idea sounds ridiculous. Like, he's an urban policy professor. And now there's these protesters out there saying he's, like, at the center of world events. This is the psychological bad moment for a scientist because I am a scientist. I'm not a politician. I'm not a candidate. Just a scientist. And from there, this idea starts showing up all over the place on the right-wing internet. Protests are popping up around the world against something called 15-minute cities. Now, we've covered the 15-minute cities here on the show, and we warned you about them.

24:38It will essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave. That's true. Yeah, that's the idea they're starting to roll out in Europe. It seems to me that they're using the climate change narrative to will have travel restricted. I mean, one of the ironic things about this to me in this like whole mishkos is that the 15 minute city doesn't strike me as a left wing idea at all. Like, if anything, it really harkens back to an old way of thinking about city planning, about, you know, kind of small towns. Like, it's kind of weirdly conservative. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think a lot of city planning people agree with you about that.

25:20There's nothing inherently leftist about it. I suppose maybe a focus on affordable housing might be seen as that. But really, it's ultimately a traditionalist way of thinking. and people with perhaps a more small C conservative approach to the world are embracing it more, which makes it slightly paradoxical that people like Jordan Peterson, who are all about going back to some idea, their idea of what was 100 years ago or so against it. So after the protests in Oxford, all this stuff on the internet, things actually escalate even more, right? So city councilors in Oxford start getting death threats, and Professor Moreno starts to get death threats.