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Episode: The 15 Minute City

Author: Roman Mars
Duration: 00:37:22

Episode Shownotes

How did the “15 Minute City,” a simple urban planning idea, spark protests, conspiracy theories, and death threats? This week, we unravel how a concept for livable cities became a global flashpoint.The 15 Minute City Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get

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Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_04
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 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.

00:00:24 Speaker_03
Specifically, they were protesting new urban planning policies being carried out by their city. 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.

00:00:40 Speaker_03
Thousands of people showed up. And it was part of a bigger trend.

00:00:46 Speaker_04
Last year, there were demonstrations happening in countries around the world protesting against an urban planning concept called the 15-minute city.

00:00:55 Speaker_03
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. Because as a planning concept, the 15-minute city is completely inoffensive.

00:01:13 Speaker_12
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.

00:01:30 Speaker_12
So that's cycling, walking, buses, trains.

00:01:34 Speaker_03
Fergus O'Sullivan is a reporter for Bloomberg CityLab.

00:01:38 Speaker_12
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.

00:01:45 Speaker_03
Whenever I've tried to explain the 15-minute city to people, their reaction has usually been, oh, I mean, that sounds nice. How can you argue against having a supermarket or a daycare down the street from your house?

00:01:59 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:08 Speaker_04
All of which shows how even a benign urban planning concept can be demonized by bad faith actors. OK, so Chris. Yes, Roman. We've been circling this story for a long time, but we're finally getting to it now.

00:02:26 Speaker_03
Yeah, this story's 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.

00:02:37 Speaker_04
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.

00:02:49 Speaker_02
Professor Carlos Moreno, Sorbonne University, researcher and creator of the 15-minute city concept.

00:02:57 Speaker_03
So 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.

00:03:07 Speaker_04
Yeah, he's a delight. So much energy. I enjoy talking with him too.

00:03:11 Speaker_03
Totally. He's got this constant broad smile, this trim beard. He just like brings a lot of positive energy.

00:03:18 Speaker_02
I am Buddhist by my culture. This is very important for having the inner peace. And at the same time, I am a scientist.

00:03:29 Speaker_03
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.

00:03:40 Speaker_04
So let's talk about what's wrong with the way we have laid out cities.

00:03:44 Speaker_03
Okay, so Roman, we're gonna 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 gonna just recap a few and radically oversimplify some things. Is that okay?

00:03:57 Speaker_03
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.

00:04:10 Speaker_03
But in the 20th century, that changed with the advent of modernism and the rise of certain very influential architects.

00:04:18 Speaker_08
The 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.

00:04:32 Speaker_03
OK, so that is the voice of Le Corbusier.

00:04:35 Speaker_08
Corbu! Corbu!

00:04:38 Speaker_04
OK.

00:04:38 Speaker_03
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.

00:04:51 Speaker_04
And so his idea was to have cities where people lived in tall buildings, which were separated by green space, and people would live away from the noise and the grime of factory life.

00:05:02 Speaker_03
Exactly. 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.

00:05:13 Speaker_03
And all of that culminates with a paper called The Athens Charter, which he published in 1933.

00:05:19 Speaker_04
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.

00:05:29 Speaker_03
Yeah, and urban planners take up Corbu's ideas after World War II, and this makes a huge difference in how cities are planned. So suddenly we have zoning, we have residential areas where you can only build housing, and then

00:05:40 Speaker_03
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.

00:05:54 Speaker_02
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

00:06:08 Speaker_02
has produced the first Model T. The worldwide presence of massive cars is just after the Second World War. What was the impact just in seven decades of the presence of cars?

00:06:25 Speaker_04
So we've just spent an entire year talking about Robert Moses and how American cities became centered around freeways and driving.

00:06:31 Speaker_04
I mean, post-war cities around the world became more car-centric and urban planners were building more roads and highways all the time.

00:06:40 Speaker_03
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.

00:06:50 Speaker_04
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.

00:06:58 Speaker_03
Right. Absolutely. So Professor Marino, 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.

00:07:10 Speaker_03
Basically, all the important stuff should be 15 minutes away on foot or by bicycle.

00:07:16 Speaker_04
Yeah, and I feel like this is really straightforward. This idea predates him, certainly. Many older cities are just naturally like this already because they were laid out before cars and zoning.

00:07:29 Speaker_12
It's a very simple concept. And something that Carlos Moreno would admit to is that it is not a new concept.

00:07:35 Speaker_12
This 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.

00:07:44 Speaker_03
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.

00:07:56 Speaker_03
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.

00:08:07 Speaker_12
What I think Carlos Moreno's idea did that revolutionized this is it allowed people to sit at the center of that idea. Because when you talk about a 15-minute city, you can sit there and say, OK, what's within 15 minutes of my home?

00:08:22 Speaker_12
I do have a supermarket. I do have a pub. I don't have a hospital, et cetera. 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?

00:08:35 Speaker_04
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.

00:08:46 Speaker_02
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.

00:08:57 Speaker_04
So, I mean, the concept sounds nice, it sounds simple, but how does it actually work?

00:09:02 Speaker_03
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?

00:09:14 Speaker_03
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.

00:09:22 Speaker_02
We wanted 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

00:09:48 Speaker_03
services. So 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.

00:10:02 Speaker_03
There's lots of versions of that.

00:10:04 Speaker_12
Rather than saying cars would be banned, cities would be rethought so that cars no longer have such a dominant space.

00:10:13 Speaker_12
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.

00:10:26 Speaker_12
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.

00:10:38 Speaker_03
So 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.

00:10:54 Speaker_04
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.

00:11:04 Speaker_04
And this is just trying to replicate what a lot of older European cities are like.

00:11:08 Speaker_03
Yeah, but then the 15-minute city also gives them kind of some language to what it is that they're doing, right? So 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.

00:11:21 Speaker_03
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.

00:11:36 Speaker_03
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.

00:11:49 Speaker_12
They reduced car lanes, and they increased the number of cycle lanes into the city center. They pedestrianized certain areas. They made other areas much, much less car accessible.

00:12:02 Speaker_12
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.

00:12:16 Speaker_03
And I gotta 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.

00:12:27 Speaker_03
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.

00:12:38 Speaker_12
I 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.

00:12:53 Speaker_04
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?

00:13:01 Speaker_04
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.

00:13:10 Speaker_03
Yeah. And lots of mayors and urban planners, like they start taking this up, too. They're hearing this from people. So in the wake of COVID, we're seeing lots of cities passing resolutions and saying, you know, we want to be 15 minute cities.

00:13:23 Speaker_03
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?

00:13:38 Speaker_03
So one American city that developed a plan to become a 15-minute city was Cleveland, Ohio.

00:13:45 Speaker_04
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.

00:13:52 Speaker_03
No, totally. But Cleveland's planning commission, they set up a pilot program to change the city zoning with the goal of, you know, becoming a 15 minute city and another municipality. I was surprised by this. It's a Canadian city.

00:14:04 Speaker_03
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.

00:14:16 Speaker_02
The 15-minute tweeting has become a very worldwide popular movement. In North America, for example, in Canada, in Edmonton, close to Toronto.

00:14:29 Speaker_03
Respectfully to Professor Moreno, Edmonton is not close to Toronto at all. That is wrong.

00:14:37 Speaker_04
It's like days and days drive away, right?

00:14:40 Speaker_03
Yeah, I looked it up. It's like a 36-hour drive if you do it straight. 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.

00:14:52 Speaker_03
Like 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.

00:15:01 Speaker_10
It's a lot more challenging. It's not impossible, but the default is obviously the car at this point.

00:15:09 Speaker_03
So this is somebody who I would say knows a thing or two about getting around in Edmonton.

00:15:13 Speaker_10
Hello, my name is Erin Rutherford. I'm a city councillor in Edmonton, Alberta, and I represent a ward in the northwest of the city.

00:15:23 Speaker_03
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.

00:15:32 Speaker_03
Actually, they 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.

00:15:44 Speaker_03
They're saying districts across the city of Edmonton.

00:15:47 Speaker_04
And I'm guessing the residents of each district are going to be 15 minutes away from various amenities.

00:15:52 Speaker_03
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.

00:16:01 Speaker_10
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.

00:16:13 Speaker_10
How 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?

00:16:24 Speaker_03
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.

00:16:40 Speaker_04
So when we come back, how the far right made the 15 minute city and Carlos Moreno into the boogeyman. So we're back with Chris Berube, and now we have to talk about the messy conspiracy part.

00:17:03 Speaker_03
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.

00:17:14 Speaker_03
So, Roman, I mean, you remember what it was like in the summer of 2020. It was a brutal time. It was terrible. Yeah, absolutely.

00:17:20 Speaker_03
And some of the rhetoric, especially like far-right rhetoric, it was spilling over into the conversation about urban planning.

00:17:28 Speaker_12
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. And I think actually that was the springboard.

00:17:46 Speaker_12
anti-lockdown activism bled into anti-15-minute cities activism.

00:17:52 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:04 Speaker_12
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.

00:18:26 Speaker_04
And of course, there's no part of the 15 minute city that says anything about this whatsoever. I mean, there's congestion pricing.

00:18:32 Speaker_04
Maybe it's kind of mixing with that as an idea, but like there's nothing about 15 minutes inherently that involves anything remotely like this. So then how does this conspiracy form and then spread?

00:18:43 Speaker_03
Well, it's not clear who started it exactly, but it bubbled up from kind of the usual far right

00:18:49 Speaker_03
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.

00:18:57 Speaker_03
And 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.

00:19:05 Speaker_04
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.

00:19:13 Speaker_03
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.

00:19:22 Speaker_12
It is a kind of, potentially, a form of tyrannical authoritarian control. Even some people assess some sort of harbinger of a world government.

00:19:33 Speaker_04
Yeah, it always comes down to that, with people getting paranoid about a world government.

00:19:38 Speaker_03
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.

00:19:49 Speaker_03
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?

00:20:01 Speaker_03
What if we did things differently? You know, what if we had a more sustainable world? Things 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.

00:20:13 Speaker_01
We have an incredible opportunity to create entirely new sustainable industries, investing in nature as the true engine of our economy.

00:20:25 Speaker_04
I mean, they immediately run into this branding problem because the Great Reset is a really ominous sounding title.

00:20:32 Speaker_03
Yeah, especially when it's coming from the World Economic Forum and the British royal family. Like, yeah, that 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.

00:20:46 Speaker_03
And 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.

00:20:59 Speaker_03
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?

00:21:12 Speaker_04
You know, I don't honestly know a whole lot. I try to avoid them as much as possible, because everything I've sort of encountered has been pretty loathsome.

00:21:20 Speaker_03
Yeah, 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 Fightin' Leafs. The Varsity Blues, but thank you.

00:21:34 Speaker_03
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.

00:21:47 Speaker_03
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. No, no.

00:21:59 Speaker_03
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.

00:22:15 Speaker_03
It's a very Muppet-y sounding. Just trust me, it's very Muppet-y sounding, more so than mine somehow. Okay. The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely.

00:22:23 Speaker_03
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.

00:22:34 Speaker_03
And within a couple months, by February 2023, there is the protest taking place in downtown Oxford in England. Thousands of people show up.

00:22:44 Speaker_03
They are carrying signs that say things like, no to 15 minute cities, and then save our freedom of movement, worship, and family life.

00:22:53 Speaker_04
So they're really lumping in a lot of grievances in one message there.

00:22:58 Speaker_03
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.

00:23:09 Speaker_03
You could still go to the downtown, but you just had to like walk or take public transit.

00:23:13 Speaker_03
And 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.

00:23:23 Speaker_03
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.

00:23:35 Speaker_02
I was in Paris, I received the photo of the demonstration for saying Moreno is Pol Pot, Moreno is Hitler, etc, etc.

00:23:46 Speaker_04
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 him.

00:23:59 Speaker_03
Well, 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.

00:24:11 Speaker_02
This is a psychological bad moment for a scientist, because I am a scientist. I'm not politician. I'm not candidate. Just a scientist.

00:24:23 Speaker_03
And from there, this idea starts showing up all over the place on the right wing internet.

00:24:29 Speaker_11
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 It will essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave. That's true.

00:24:42 Speaker_11
How are you going to put us in there? That's the idea they're starting to roll out in Europe.

00:24:47 Speaker_07
It seems to me that they're using the climate change narrative to have travel restricted.

00:24:56 Speaker_04
I mean, one of the ironic things about this to me, in this like whole Mishkas, is that the 15-minute city doesn't strike me as a left-wing idea at all.

00:25:06 Speaker_04
Like if anything, it really harkens back to an old way of thinking about city planning, that about, you know, kind of small towns, like it's kind of weirdly conservative.

00:25:16 Speaker_03
Yeah, I think you're right. And I think a lot of city planning people agree with you about that.

00:25:21 Speaker_12
There'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

00:25:37 Speaker_12
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 a hundred years ago, are so against it.

00:25:52 Speaker_03
So after the protests in Oxford, all this stuff on the internet, things actually escalate even more, right? So city councillors in Oxford start getting death threats, and Professor Moreno starts to get death threats.

00:26:06 Speaker_02
This was a very complicated period for me, for my wife, for my family, because I received a lot of threats, death threats. I was under police protection. This was a very, very complicated situation.

00:26:24 Speaker_04
I cannot stress how weird it is that this delightful, delightful, thoughtful man talking about making cities better for people is getting death threats.

00:26:35 Speaker_03
It's, it's unbelievable. And like, it's obvious, like at this point, the entire situation is just clearly out of control.

00:26:42 Speaker_12
So it just kind of snowballs in this kind of hysterical climate, a hysterical climate that of course is exacerbated by having figures like Mark Harper, a government representative, actually feeding it.

00:26:55 Speaker_04
Okay, so please tell me who Mark Harper is.

00:26:59 Speaker_03
Well, Mark Harper was actually the minister of transportation for the United Kingdom in 2023. So he's one of those people who was appointed during the last days of the British conservative government. You know, there was lots of chaos.

00:27:11 Speaker_03
There were a lot of people moving in and out of cabinet. There was the head of lettuce, obviously, that out-survived a prime minister. So, October 2023, Mark Harper is the transportation minister, not for long, as it turns out.

00:27:26 Speaker_03
And he starts talking about the 15-minute city, and he starts talking a lot like these protesters.

00:27:32 Speaker_09
What is different, what is sinister and what we shouldn't tolerate is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops and that they ration who uses the roads and when and they police it all with CCTV.

00:27:49 Speaker_04
I mean, this is so ridiculous. These are not serious thinkers. These are not serious men.

00:27:53 Speaker_03
No, no, they're not. And it's all coming to a head as cities are trying to implement policies to become more like a 15-minute city, right? And they're facing these protests and this pushback. Even somewhere like Edmonton is facing this stuff.

00:28:11 Speaker_03
Earlier this year in 2024, Edmonton City Council were going to finalize the city plan, which includes this concept of districts, you know, and 15 minute radius to all of the amenities that you need, like we talked about earlier.

00:28:24 Speaker_03
And in the spring, they are having public hearings about it. And there were people who brought some reasonable concerns to the table, right, about density, about some specifics of the plan.

00:28:33 Speaker_03
But there were also lots of people who are repeating these talking points that they clearly got from the internet.

00:28:39 Speaker_00
My understanding is that this means I will need to stay within my district to meet all my needs so that the city can meet its climate plan objectives.

00:28:48 Speaker_05
I don't think Edmontonians can afford to be part of a renovation experiment of this size so quickly.

00:28:55 Speaker_06
No one in the government wants to lose their job and people don't want to speak up and that's why the citizens in the streets are starting to rise and we need you to hear us and you're not hearing us.

00:29:09 Speaker_03
So these protesters are coming. This is completely new for like an Edmonton city planning meeting. Aaron Rutherford admits that there might have been something of a branding problem in terms of their proposal that maybe set some people off.

00:29:23 Speaker_10
It's unfortunate that they're named districts because a lot of people think that that is very Hunger Games-esque in the visualization that it creates for them, but it's just a planning term that's been used since planning has been a profession.

00:29:42 Speaker_04
I hadn't thought about that, but that's- That is actually, you know, I can sort of see how it conjures that image, yeah. Well, I mean, but still, it's just like, it's the word district. It's like you live in a school district too, you know? You do.

00:29:54 Speaker_04
It's so funny to me that Hunger Games has a bigger footprint than all of social studies.

00:30:01 Speaker_03
Yeah, apparently. So Councilor Rutherford says that this kind of anger, it's pretty new, but it's actually not surprising to her because it's a tone that she is hearing pretty much in every part of her job.

00:30:14 Speaker_10
The reality is it's not just 15-minute communities. It's police funding. It's, you know, so many topics that we're talking about right now that are creating those visceral responses from folks.

00:30:25 Speaker_03
So municipalities like Edmonton that are pursuing the 15-minute city, they're faced with this choice, right? Like, do we backtrack or do we forge ahead with this policy that is getting this kind of visceral, angry reaction?

00:30:39 Speaker_04
I mean, if I was facing that kind of pushback, I can imagine backing off. It seems like a completely rational and reasonable thing to do.

00:30:45 Speaker_03
Totally. And actually, what one city did is they just went ahead with the plans, but they just dropped the name 15 minute cities. It's like the 16 minute city. Yeah, I think it's a little bit more subtle than that, just a tiny bit more subtle.

00:31:00 Speaker_03
But this is actually what happened in Oxford, England. So that's the place where they had the massive protest with thousands of people in the streets. They just dropped the name 15-Minute Cities.

00:31:09 Speaker_12
You can get rid of the 15-Minute City concept and keep the policies, because all it is is literally thinking about what's in your area within a 15-minute radius of your home. Get rid of that concept. You can still work towards

00:31:21 Speaker_12
low-traffic neighborhoods, greater pedestrianization, tree planting, all of these things that individually aren't automatically going to face the same kind of resistance.

00:31:32 Speaker_04
I mean, we've seen this before, like when something comes up like the Green New Deal and it becomes kind of unpopular and lots of negative associations sort of get attached to it.

00:31:40 Speaker_04
The people who are really diehards that are for the fundamental concepts they're in, just stop calling it the Green New Deal. It's the same thing and it's just part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

00:31:52 Speaker_03
Right. This kind of thing happens all the time.

00:31:53 Speaker_04
It's smart to me. I don't know. It just seems like smart politics.

00:31:56 Speaker_03
Well, I guess so. But there's other cities who went ahead with these plans and they kept the name 15 Minute Cities. And that's actually what Edmonton ended up doing in the end.

00:32:04 Speaker_04
So why is that? I mean, it seems like it could be a lot easier to just give it a rebrand.

00:32:09 Speaker_03
Erin Rutherford explained this to me. So she said, in her view, it would actually sow distrust if they stopped referencing the 15 Minute City and just went ahead with the same plans anyway.

00:32:20 Speaker_10
I think we're almost doing a disservice, stopping calling it 15-minute cities, because the more we do call it 15-minute cities, and the more nothing substantially changes in people's lives, the more that that becomes, oh, my fears didn't come to reality.

00:32:38 Speaker_10
However, if we stop using that language, that actually creates a validation in terms of you might be calling it something different, but now you're just trying to do the same thing under a different name, and it can actually fuel distrust further.

00:32:52 Speaker_04
I can see why she wanted to stick to her guns on this. But what ended up happening in Edmonton then?

00:32:57 Speaker_03
Well, in June, the city put their plan to a vote and they kept the language intact, you know, despite all of this protest, despite this pushback. But they did add an amendment to placate some people.

00:33:07 Speaker_03
So the amendment says, the district plan shall not restrict freedom of movement, association and commerce in accordance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

00:33:18 Speaker_04
And to be clear, this doesn't change anything at all. This is just an additional thing to make people feel better. Like this is a little bit of an act of political theater, just playing along with the game that they've set up.

00:33:31 Speaker_03
Right, because freedom of movement is actually guaranteed under Canadian law, right? So it wasn't necessary at all. And actually, at the beginning, this bothered Erin Rutherford, because she was voting on this, right?

00:33:41 Speaker_03
She was a city councillor, and she was worried about giving credence to disinformation around the 15-minute city.

00:33:48 Speaker_10
My logical brain and my policy best practices brain wanted to say no, but my human side and my heart and realizing that the harm was greater in not giving people that certainty than the harm of making a redundant sentence in a document swayed me.

00:34:12 Speaker_03
So the city council adopted the city plan, they added this amendment, and now they're on this path to bringing in some of these actual policy changes to becoming a 15-minute city.

00:34:22 Speaker_03
And there's other cities that are forging ahead with it, too, despite everything that happened.

00:34:26 Speaker_04
And then, of course, there's Carlos Moreno, the delightful Carlos Moreno, the father of the 15-minute city.

00:34:32 Speaker_03
Right. So for a while, he kept getting these death threats. But eventually, you know, those started to calm down and people actually started standing up for him in public.

00:34:40 Speaker_03
You know, there was this article in The New York Times that was defending him and he started seeing petitions online.

00:34:49 Speaker_02
launched an online manifesto for supporting me. In a few days, more than, I think, 5,000 or 6,000 have signed it.

00:35:03 Speaker_03
Professor Moreno noticed people on the internet were actually starting to move on. And eventually, the vitriol and the threats, those stopped.

00:35:12 Speaker_03
And he even published a book called The 15-Minute City, where he kind of doubles down on these concepts, on this whole idea. And I really love that because I'm glad he's getting this idea out there and he's promoting it again.

00:35:24 Speaker_03
But I have to say this whole thing with The 15-Minute City, it just has me really exhausted. Because in the next couple of years, I feel like any hope for positive change is going to be at the local level, right?

00:35:37 Speaker_03
Like it's going to be concentrated at the municipal level.

00:35:40 Speaker_03
And if something like the 15-Minute City has to go through this gauntlet, you know, marches and disinformation and death threats, if this is the price of putting forward something like the 15-Minute City, how many people realistically are going to stand up and try to make a positive change?

00:35:58 Speaker_03
Like, how many people are going to be like Carlos Moreno? Thank you so much, Chris. Thanks, Roman.

00:36:11 Speaker_04
99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, with editing help from Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed by Martín González. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact-checking by Graham Haysha.

00:36:21 Speaker_04
Carlos Moreno's book, The 15-Minute City, A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, is available now. Special thanks this week to Rebecca Rossman, Sheena Rossiter, and Hana Aguru. Our executive producer is Cathy Tu.

00:36:34 Speaker_04
Our senior editor is Delaney Hall. Our digital director is Cora Colston. Our intern is Taylor Shedrick.

00:36:39 Speaker_04
The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeon, Gabriella Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Patak, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% visible logo was created by Stephan Lawrence.

00:36:54 Speaker_04
We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server.

00:37:08 Speaker_04
There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.