15 Minutes to Midnight?

How did human settlements as built until 70 years ago become a conspiracy?

Every revolution seeks to destroy, or distort to its own ends, the memory of what came before. On this count, America’s suburban revolution has been among history’s most successful.

This conclusion is inescapable to me when I see that the “15-minute city”—a trendy name in urban planning for walkable, amenity-rich urban neighborhoods—has apparently ended up at the center of a new (or, perhaps, updated) conspiracy theory.

From a piece in Wired:

With help from right-wing figures in the US and UK, including the author Jordan Peterson, the 15-minute city concept has become entwined within a much bigger universe of conspiracies based around the idea of a “Great Reset” that will see people locked in their homes by climate-obsessed autocracies.

A lot of this stuff really took off during the pandemic, but it goes back to the 1990s, with “Agenda 21,” “Smart Growth is socialism,” etc. What seems to happen is that progressives or left-wing organizations champion this stuff, which serves as a signal to conservatives that it must be suspect. This pulls it out of the realm of reality and public policy, and into a much more abstract realm. This is how you get the absurdity of people who love classic small towns and Main Streets, and yet who, if you described those things to them vaguely, would condemn them as left-wing social engineering.

Urbanist writer Andy Boenau has a fun piece on the conspiracy theories surrounding 15-minute cities, which seem to have arisen, in their current form, from the fact that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum (of “you will eat the bugs” and “you will own nothing and be happy” fame) endorsed the idea. I think there are limits to this kind of thought experiment, and I think suburbia does offer things that people really want. But Boenau remarks:

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.

The point being that if your heuristic is not to evaluate an actual idea, but to basically consciously believe the opposite of people you don’t like—“if WEF endorses it, it must be bad”—then you will do just that: condemn, and freight with malevolent intent, anything that WEF happens to endorse. Whether it’s eating bugs, or building towns and cities the way they were built everywhere in the world until the last 50-70 years.

Because a “15-minute city” is just…a city. Or a village, or small town. A larger town or small city might be composed of several 15-minute cities. A big city might be composed of dozens. In these cases, we would call them neighborhoods. That is literally what this is: a trendy name for one of the oldest things in human history. The “15-minute city” is an old but disused tradition in land use, sold with and packaged in modern trappings.

Now, if there are people who slip other things into this, which have nothing to do with urban design or planning per se, I don’t agree with them. And frankly, while fighting climate change is one of the most popular framings for why we need denser communities, I personally think it is among the least compelling. For one thing, it makes it very easy for climate change skeptics to dismiss it; or even for those who accept climate change to think that in the absence of climate change, there is no real, immediate, on-the-ground reason for building better urban places.

Maryland urbanist Dan Reed, years ago, even noted that he found conservative rhetoric for urbanism to be more persuasive than the typical liberal rhetoric. He observed that climate change is a big, distant concern, while the more frequent appeals from conservative urbanists tying good urban design to better family and community life seemed more grounded and relevant. I agree, and while I do believe in climate change, I would not give up a single urbanist opinion of mine if I did not.

---

This all kind of reminds me of a question that was occasionally tossed around in the early days of the pandemic. What if back in February 2020, President Trump had commissioned and distributed millions of red-dyed N95 masks with “Make America Great Again” emblazoned across the front? Would the entire political framing of the pandemic have changed? I don’t know. It’s a curious question.

I can only conclude that many of these critics and conspiracy theorists really, genuinely don’t understand that urbanists are not radicals. I think they cannot grasp the idea that Klaus Schwab could endorse something that is not malevolent.

Yet on the other hand, as Boenau also suggests, maybe Klaus Schwab is simply a bad messenger. I’ve heard this sentiment before—people saying to me something like, “I trust you when it comes to urbanism, but I don’t trust the people who will actually be implementing these things.” Here’s another housing advocate making a similar point:

Angus Knowles @angus_mk

Push back against 15 minute cities isn’t about proximity to coffee shops or schools, it’s about trust.

This is why I frequently remind you that I reside, generally, on the political right. Not because I have anything against those who arrive at urbanist conclusions via different politics. I don’t—in fact, I think that’s one of the strengths of this issue area, and it’s a reason I’m hopeful for it.

But I remind you of my political orientation because I think it’s important not just to have progressives saying that there are conservative avenues to urbanism, but to have conservatives explaining it. The form of our built environment affects everybody, every day. It is far too important to allow it to become the province of one political orientation, or to become just another battlefield in the culture war.

For an example, from the more libertarian/property rights side, take a look at this. I think this is brilliant. It’s a tweet from a libertarian/free market think tank in Montana:

Is this actually enough? Can you take America’s predominant land-use pattern today, call it “California-style,” and get conservatives on board with the exact same urbanist principles as the 15-minute city? Which those same conservatives label open-air concentration camps when Klaus Schwab endorses them?

Part of what’s going on here is politically couched messaging getting picked up by folks other than the target audience. Some conservatives will hear that we need zoning reform because of climate change and racial equity, and that is enough to make them say, “Oh, so that’s what this is all about.” But that is merely one framing of an underlying idea, not the idea itself. The very same idea can be couched in much more conservative-friendly terms: making marriage, children, and family more affordable, for example. Or, as Strong Towns put it once, increasing the amount of “delight per acre” that our built environment permits and fosters.

I myself have been following and advocating for better urbanism, zoning reform, new housing, etc. for the last six years. I am not sure I ever heard of Klaus Schwab (though I have heard of “Davos”) until a few months ago, when I finally decided to look up why right-wingers occasionally replied in mock German (“Ah, so you vill eat ze bugs and live in ze pod, yah?”) when I talked about urbanism.

But the messenger is not the message. America had more “15-minute cities” a century ago than it does today. Making your beliefs the negation of those of your political opponents will only get you so far. I don’t care if you want to live in a city or an urban environment. I don’t think you should, or have to. I simply want it to be permitted for those who do.

And that’s the sorry victory of America’s land-use revolution. Abolishing, banning, and foreclosing so much of our heritage, and calling it freedom.

---

Related Reading:

What’s a City To You?

An Embryonic City

Urbanism is American History

---

Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 500 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!