15 minutes city conversations in the US are wildly different than in other places. But it's such an easy tagline, people understandably confuse what's at play. Same with Smart City technology.
WEF is on record many times saying they support top down control. Twitter was full of viral videos from people trapped in Chinese neighborhoods. That doesn't mean that stuff is going to happen tomorrow in the US, but it's foolish for Americans to ignore how top-down control is abused. Australia is flirting with disaster in this way right now.
So much of this goes back to local land use regulations. Legalize housing options, legalize mixed use neighborhoods, and outlaw traffic engineering. Do those things and you'll accidentally end up with a delightful 15-minute city.
"Accidentally" is the key, isn't it? Nobody "designed" classic cities, per se. They sort of arose, and when you look at them from today's vantage point and try and reverse engineer them it isn't quite the same thing.
I'm someone who should be all in on 15 Minute Cities - I'm a lifelong Manhattanite who has never owned a car, but I'm siding with the conspiracy theorists on this one. What turned me was the observation (not my own) that you should look at what local governments are doing to implement 15 Minute Cities. Are they building schools in locations where children can walk to school? Are they zoning so that people can walk to buy groceries? Are they building infrastructure so that people can safely rely on bikes for transportation? Are they developing frequent and reliable transit so that it's easy to live without a car? If so, great, I'm all for the concept. But that's not what these local governments are doing: they're setting up punitive measures to limit how much people can (afford to) drive. And they're doing it in a manner that creepily tracks your movement.
If they really cared about the stated goals of 15 Minute Cities, they would be doing all the things that make it easy to live that lifestyle. But they're not, so their claims just aren't sincere. Given that so many of the same promoters of 15 Minute Cities are the same people who brought us lockdowns that didn't flatten the curve and vaccine passports bullying people to take a jab that turned out to be neither safe nor effective, I'll stick with the conspiracy theorists. As they say, these days the difference between a wacky conspiracy and reality tends to be about six to nine months.
Build cities that people want to use as 15 Minute Cities, and it will work. Force people to count exactly how many car trips they make, and they will rebel.
Well, I don't agree with you on vaccines. But that's not the point. You write:
"Are they building schools in locations where children can walk to school? Are they zoning so that people can walk to buy groceries? Are they building infrastructure so that people can safely rely on bikes for transportation? Are they developing frequent and reliable transit so that it's easy to live without a car?"
Well look, that's what I and 90 percent or more of the urbanists/planners/activists I know and communicate with talk about all the time! Perhaps, just as my information sources didn't lead me to learn about the Oxford proposal, yours are selective in a way that you see every incident like that but not what the vast majority of urbanists are out there working for every day.
You also write: "I'm someone who should be all in on 15 Minute Cities - I'm a lifelong Manhattanite who has never owned a car."
Then I would say you *are* all in for 15-minute cities because that's what the (bad) term is pointing towards. I'm not saying you're saying this, but some folks will pick the extremist in a movement and say, "See, that's what they really want, that one let the cat out of the bag." As if the much larger moderate number are either being conned or in on the con.
You would not know from reading popular conservative sources that there is a lot diversity within urbanists and pro city movement. I know because I used to follow that stuff. But being part of it changed very much how I saw it.
Don't worry, I know that urbanists aren't all socialists - after all, I found you, and I had already listened to Chuck Mahron's podcast that you cite. And there's a lot that conservatives can love about the solid neighborliness that should come with a 15 Minute City.
However, my fear is that the work being done in the name of 15 Minute Cities isn't the type that you and I would like to see, what we simply used to call "walkable neighborhoods". The big money and the political will behind it is going towards the sinister tracking and monitoring infrastructure. And the most active proponents of the slogan are the last people many of us would trust to do anything now that we've seen what they did to us during lockdowns. There's a mean streak in the elites that relishes punishing those who won't conform to their worldview, and it's not so fanciful to think that the pandemic proved to be a convenient dry run for so much of their control-freak desires.
As others have noted, the surprisingly negative reaction by many to what should be a benign idea is yet another casualty to the collapse in trust in the self-appointed expert class.
One of my favorite lessons from the New Urbanist movement was that people would pay a premium to live in a walkable, urbanist neighborhood (I think there was a good study of the price of rowhouses in Old Town Alexandria vs. similar sized homes not far away in a more car-centric neighborhood). That's a good example of the market reflecting a natural desire for Fifteen Minute Cities. But when the market doesn't work as fast as the Cult of Doom Global Warming extremists want, they turn to solutions like banning gas stoves, banning ICE cars and, yes, forcing Fifteen Minute Cities on unwilling citizens.
TL;DR: maybe try building some safe bike lanes before tracking everyone's cars.
"Now, further down, Hayley Richardson amended her initial tweet with this (accurate) clarification: 'Update from folks in the UK: no outright bans were ever proposed - you just have to pay a lot of money after taking your allotted number of trips. Sorry to participate in the conspiracy-making'."
I appreciate the piece and I think you're doing a fair job of looking at this issue. As someone who is more of the "loon" that is being described in the piece please allow me to point something out that grates people who are more of my perspective on this issue.
There are few things in policy discourse more elitist than saying something isn't banned because it punishable by a hefty fine. *That means, only legal if you can afford it.* Progressives understand this when it comes to cash bail.
The WEF exists and seeks to influence and enact policy throughout the world, this isn't some sort of secret. They publish books, papers, CNBC broadcasts live from Davos every year. As someone who agrees with urbanists about zoning/land use and affordability, I'm begging you guys, please stop calling any deviation from Approved Opinion™️ "conspiracy theories."
Well okay - I agree re fines, and you see this sort of thing with local governments/HOAs/"for-profit policing" too. But what confuses then is you say you *agree* on zoning reform and land use, but then...what? Where do you think this stuff is departing from that?
So much of what I hear from conservatives is not understandable to me as a real-world concern but more of fear and lack of trust: stuff like "If they're willing to do X, why should I trust them not to do Y?" I've had people suspicion of plant-based meat alternatives. Like, "First they say it's an option, then they'll force us to eat it." "So...it shouldn't be allowed?" "Well, no."
I don't really know what to say to people whose fears are more real than the real world right now. But my experience is that some of them really already agree with urbanism but just have a wildly different language and frame of reference for it. One reason I talk so much about small towns and the urbanity of small towns. Interesting stuff.
Theres a lot there. I first say you're exactly right about the fees and all of that, I have a feeling we have civil libertarian agreement there.
I agree with urbanists that the issue of affordability of housing is largely caused by zoning and the fact that creating more housing units in many places is flat out illegal. In general, I agree that single-family zoning is bad and makes it very difficult to create more innovative housing which we do sorely need. I think urbanists have a blind spot when it comes to demand, and that the interest rate policy during COVID threw gasoline on the fire by treating a housing boom as though it was a housing bust. It wasn't ever going to be possible to build enough, fast enough, for the 3% mortgage rates we had.
You're on to something with the lack of trust. Opposition to things like this are based upon the idea (right or wrong) that it won't stop with just fining people for driving, it is a stepping stone to disallowing cars altogether in urban areas. It doesn't help the trust in this situation that many of the people pushing this policy are *explicit in their desire to disallow cars altogether*. It becomes a "conspiracy theory" when people notice obvious motte/baileys being played out in public discourse. Guns, gas stoves(sorry, but its all out there in public also), incandescent light bulbs, gas powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers, you can argue the merits of any of these things until you're blue the face but the message is obvious: Nanny government knows what's best for you.
If you (the policy maker, not you personally) want to disallow cars, stop pretending that isn't actually what you want because you know its politically unpopular and actually make the argument. At the end of the day some people will agree with it and some people won't, and that is where the disagreement mostly is, I think. The Impossible Burger is a good example. There are people in the world that want to outlaw meat eating for whatever reason, good or bed. Allowing a burger substitute to market itself doesn't accomplish that (I am old enough to remember Veggie Burgers), but people who are opposed to them see a progression, the product gets introduced as an option, then some sort of tax incentive to use one over the other, then a tax-disincentive to not use the old option, then restrictions/outright bans on the other option and are trying to head it off before the frog gets too close to boiling.
I live in a small town, pop. 7,500 and it definitely qualifies as a 15-minute city. I live 3 blocks from my office. I can walk within 15 minutes to 3 grocery stores (and within 20 minutes I can get to 2 more). Within a 15 minute walk I can also get to a multi-screen locally owned movie theater, an independent bookstore, at least a dozen quality restaurants, 3 cafes, the library, city hall, post-office, etc. It's a great lifestyle and it is unfortunate more people don't live in a place where your daily needs can be accessed without a car. I can go a week or longer without getting in a car. I think the 15 minute city is a worthy goal, and I think it is important to point out that many of our places, especially our small towns, exist as 15 minute cities. In fact, many of our more popular places exist as 15 minute cities.
”It is reminiscent, to me, of what’s become known as “social credit.” What that basically refers to, in my understanding, is the implementation of public policy by means other than the equally applied, dispassionate law.” I don’t really agree, it’s perfectly equally applied law. It’s always the case that the law states different outcomes based on different situations. In the equal application of law there are different outcomes for different situations. If you are a resident in country, you are civilly registered there. Other people are not. If you kill someone intentionally, it’s murder. Otherwise it is not. If you have a disability permit, you may park in such a spot. Otherwise you are fined. Social credit is when your actions generate credits that affect your standing. It’s normal to differentiate between different residential areas.
I think there is a distinction between treating murderers differently from non-murderers and having an opaque system that determines who can drive where when and how much it will cost them. The idea of having an "allotted" number of trips per person is something different from American rule of law. Maybe it isn't quite social credit, but I think it is closer in spirit to that.
It’s not really opaque, and it would be perfectly compatible with rule of law. And also, what would that difference consist of? And how would people affect their position without moving? Many legal rules apply differently based on where one lives. Property taxation, the rate on public transportation to get to various locations, where you can go to get healthcare etc. There are probably much more odd regulations around than the Oxford one that would still not be invalid due to being in conflict with rule of law principles.
"Or maybe it feels like giving the loons too much credit. I just don’t think it is."
I do tend to think of it this way. The people who push for conspiracies about 15 minute cities are gonna find the boogeyman for it and hundreds of other things everywhere they look. We shouldn't stumble around trying to avoid topics because they'll use bad faith arguments to come to the conclusion they seek no matter what
Oh, I'm not saying to avoid the topic at all. At most I'm saying we should be careful about framing. But I'm really saying that there's a substantive difference between a modern planner's top-down approach to building cities, and the old small-scale, distributed approach. And I favor, if it is possible, more of a return to the old way. But as I've written elsewhere, I'm not sure that's really possible today, and then I'll take what we can get.
15 minutes city conversations in the US are wildly different than in other places. But it's such an easy tagline, people understandably confuse what's at play. Same with Smart City technology.
WEF is on record many times saying they support top down control. Twitter was full of viral videos from people trapped in Chinese neighborhoods. That doesn't mean that stuff is going to happen tomorrow in the US, but it's foolish for Americans to ignore how top-down control is abused. Australia is flirting with disaster in this way right now.
So much of this goes back to local land use regulations. Legalize housing options, legalize mixed use neighborhoods, and outlaw traffic engineering. Do those things and you'll accidentally end up with a delightful 15-minute city.
"Accidentally" is the key, isn't it? Nobody "designed" classic cities, per se. They sort of arose, and when you look at them from today's vantage point and try and reverse engineer them it isn't quite the same thing.
I'm someone who should be all in on 15 Minute Cities - I'm a lifelong Manhattanite who has never owned a car, but I'm siding with the conspiracy theorists on this one. What turned me was the observation (not my own) that you should look at what local governments are doing to implement 15 Minute Cities. Are they building schools in locations where children can walk to school? Are they zoning so that people can walk to buy groceries? Are they building infrastructure so that people can safely rely on bikes for transportation? Are they developing frequent and reliable transit so that it's easy to live without a car? If so, great, I'm all for the concept. But that's not what these local governments are doing: they're setting up punitive measures to limit how much people can (afford to) drive. And they're doing it in a manner that creepily tracks your movement.
If they really cared about the stated goals of 15 Minute Cities, they would be doing all the things that make it easy to live that lifestyle. But they're not, so their claims just aren't sincere. Given that so many of the same promoters of 15 Minute Cities are the same people who brought us lockdowns that didn't flatten the curve and vaccine passports bullying people to take a jab that turned out to be neither safe nor effective, I'll stick with the conspiracy theorists. As they say, these days the difference between a wacky conspiracy and reality tends to be about six to nine months.
Build cities that people want to use as 15 Minute Cities, and it will work. Force people to count exactly how many car trips they make, and they will rebel.
Well, I don't agree with you on vaccines. But that's not the point. You write:
"Are they building schools in locations where children can walk to school? Are they zoning so that people can walk to buy groceries? Are they building infrastructure so that people can safely rely on bikes for transportation? Are they developing frequent and reliable transit so that it's easy to live without a car?"
Well look, that's what I and 90 percent or more of the urbanists/planners/activists I know and communicate with talk about all the time! Perhaps, just as my information sources didn't lead me to learn about the Oxford proposal, yours are selective in a way that you see every incident like that but not what the vast majority of urbanists are out there working for every day.
You also write: "I'm someone who should be all in on 15 Minute Cities - I'm a lifelong Manhattanite who has never owned a car."
Then I would say you *are* all in for 15-minute cities because that's what the (bad) term is pointing towards. I'm not saying you're saying this, but some folks will pick the extremist in a movement and say, "See, that's what they really want, that one let the cat out of the bag." As if the much larger moderate number are either being conned or in on the con.
You would not know from reading popular conservative sources that there is a lot diversity within urbanists and pro city movement. I know because I used to follow that stuff. But being part of it changed very much how I saw it.
Don't worry, I know that urbanists aren't all socialists - after all, I found you, and I had already listened to Chuck Mahron's podcast that you cite. And there's a lot that conservatives can love about the solid neighborliness that should come with a 15 Minute City.
However, my fear is that the work being done in the name of 15 Minute Cities isn't the type that you and I would like to see, what we simply used to call "walkable neighborhoods". The big money and the political will behind it is going towards the sinister tracking and monitoring infrastructure. And the most active proponents of the slogan are the last people many of us would trust to do anything now that we've seen what they did to us during lockdowns. There's a mean streak in the elites that relishes punishing those who won't conform to their worldview, and it's not so fanciful to think that the pandemic proved to be a convenient dry run for so much of their control-freak desires.
As others have noted, the surprisingly negative reaction by many to what should be a benign idea is yet another casualty to the collapse in trust in the self-appointed expert class.
One of my favorite lessons from the New Urbanist movement was that people would pay a premium to live in a walkable, urbanist neighborhood (I think there was a good study of the price of rowhouses in Old Town Alexandria vs. similar sized homes not far away in a more car-centric neighborhood). That's a good example of the market reflecting a natural desire for Fifteen Minute Cities. But when the market doesn't work as fast as the Cult of Doom Global Warming extremists want, they turn to solutions like banning gas stoves, banning ICE cars and, yes, forcing Fifteen Minute Cities on unwilling citizens.
TL;DR: maybe try building some safe bike lanes before tracking everyone's cars.
"Now, further down, Hayley Richardson amended her initial tweet with this (accurate) clarification: 'Update from folks in the UK: no outright bans were ever proposed - you just have to pay a lot of money after taking your allotted number of trips. Sorry to participate in the conspiracy-making'."
I appreciate the piece and I think you're doing a fair job of looking at this issue. As someone who is more of the "loon" that is being described in the piece please allow me to point something out that grates people who are more of my perspective on this issue.
There are few things in policy discourse more elitist than saying something isn't banned because it punishable by a hefty fine. *That means, only legal if you can afford it.* Progressives understand this when it comes to cash bail.
The WEF exists and seeks to influence and enact policy throughout the world, this isn't some sort of secret. They publish books, papers, CNBC broadcasts live from Davos every year. As someone who agrees with urbanists about zoning/land use and affordability, I'm begging you guys, please stop calling any deviation from Approved Opinion™️ "conspiracy theories."
Well okay - I agree re fines, and you see this sort of thing with local governments/HOAs/"for-profit policing" too. But what confuses then is you say you *agree* on zoning reform and land use, but then...what? Where do you think this stuff is departing from that?
So much of what I hear from conservatives is not understandable to me as a real-world concern but more of fear and lack of trust: stuff like "If they're willing to do X, why should I trust them not to do Y?" I've had people suspicion of plant-based meat alternatives. Like, "First they say it's an option, then they'll force us to eat it." "So...it shouldn't be allowed?" "Well, no."
I don't really know what to say to people whose fears are more real than the real world right now. But my experience is that some of them really already agree with urbanism but just have a wildly different language and frame of reference for it. One reason I talk so much about small towns and the urbanity of small towns. Interesting stuff.
Theres a lot there. I first say you're exactly right about the fees and all of that, I have a feeling we have civil libertarian agreement there.
I agree with urbanists that the issue of affordability of housing is largely caused by zoning and the fact that creating more housing units in many places is flat out illegal. In general, I agree that single-family zoning is bad and makes it very difficult to create more innovative housing which we do sorely need. I think urbanists have a blind spot when it comes to demand, and that the interest rate policy during COVID threw gasoline on the fire by treating a housing boom as though it was a housing bust. It wasn't ever going to be possible to build enough, fast enough, for the 3% mortgage rates we had.
You're on to something with the lack of trust. Opposition to things like this are based upon the idea (right or wrong) that it won't stop with just fining people for driving, it is a stepping stone to disallowing cars altogether in urban areas. It doesn't help the trust in this situation that many of the people pushing this policy are *explicit in their desire to disallow cars altogether*. It becomes a "conspiracy theory" when people notice obvious motte/baileys being played out in public discourse. Guns, gas stoves(sorry, but its all out there in public also), incandescent light bulbs, gas powered leaf blowers and lawn mowers, you can argue the merits of any of these things until you're blue the face but the message is obvious: Nanny government knows what's best for you.
If you (the policy maker, not you personally) want to disallow cars, stop pretending that isn't actually what you want because you know its politically unpopular and actually make the argument. At the end of the day some people will agree with it and some people won't, and that is where the disagreement mostly is, I think. The Impossible Burger is a good example. There are people in the world that want to outlaw meat eating for whatever reason, good or bed. Allowing a burger substitute to market itself doesn't accomplish that (I am old enough to remember Veggie Burgers), but people who are opposed to them see a progression, the product gets introduced as an option, then some sort of tax incentive to use one over the other, then a tax-disincentive to not use the old option, then restrictions/outright bans on the other option and are trying to head it off before the frog gets too close to boiling.
I live in a small town, pop. 7,500 and it definitely qualifies as a 15-minute city. I live 3 blocks from my office. I can walk within 15 minutes to 3 grocery stores (and within 20 minutes I can get to 2 more). Within a 15 minute walk I can also get to a multi-screen locally owned movie theater, an independent bookstore, at least a dozen quality restaurants, 3 cafes, the library, city hall, post-office, etc. It's a great lifestyle and it is unfortunate more people don't live in a place where your daily needs can be accessed without a car. I can go a week or longer without getting in a car. I think the 15 minute city is a worthy goal, and I think it is important to point out that many of our places, especially our small towns, exist as 15 minute cities. In fact, many of our more popular places exist as 15 minute cities.
”It is reminiscent, to me, of what’s become known as “social credit.” What that basically refers to, in my understanding, is the implementation of public policy by means other than the equally applied, dispassionate law.” I don’t really agree, it’s perfectly equally applied law. It’s always the case that the law states different outcomes based on different situations. In the equal application of law there are different outcomes for different situations. If you are a resident in country, you are civilly registered there. Other people are not. If you kill someone intentionally, it’s murder. Otherwise it is not. If you have a disability permit, you may park in such a spot. Otherwise you are fined. Social credit is when your actions generate credits that affect your standing. It’s normal to differentiate between different residential areas.
I think there is a distinction between treating murderers differently from non-murderers and having an opaque system that determines who can drive where when and how much it will cost them. The idea of having an "allotted" number of trips per person is something different from American rule of law. Maybe it isn't quite social credit, but I think it is closer in spirit to that.
It’s not really opaque, and it would be perfectly compatible with rule of law. And also, what would that difference consist of? And how would people affect their position without moving? Many legal rules apply differently based on where one lives. Property taxation, the rate on public transportation to get to various locations, where you can go to get healthcare etc. There are probably much more odd regulations around than the Oxford one that would still not be invalid due to being in conflict with rule of law principles.
"Or maybe it feels like giving the loons too much credit. I just don’t think it is."
I do tend to think of it this way. The people who push for conspiracies about 15 minute cities are gonna find the boogeyman for it and hundreds of other things everywhere they look. We shouldn't stumble around trying to avoid topics because they'll use bad faith arguments to come to the conclusion they seek no matter what
Oh, I'm not saying to avoid the topic at all. At most I'm saying we should be careful about framing. But I'm really saying that there's a substantive difference between a modern planner's top-down approach to building cities, and the old small-scale, distributed approach. And I favor, if it is possible, more of a return to the old way. But as I've written elsewhere, I'm not sure that's really possible today, and then I'll take what we can get.