From
swldxer1958@gmail.com@21:1/5 to
All on Sat Jun 17 08:36:51 2023
QUOTE: Newark Town’s Fund 20-minute Cycle Town plan.ENDS
Tin foil hats on - far right nutter alert.
It is the year 2049, and residents of the UK city of Oxford are unable to leave their neighborhoods. If they do, a network of cameras — installed years earlier under the guise of easing traffic congestion — track their movements. If they stray too
far from their registered addresses, a £100 fine is automatically removed from their bank accounts. The only cars now allowed on the streets belong to representatives of the world government, who relentlessly patrol the city for anyone breaking the
rules.
That’s the scenario conjured by adherents of a conspiracy theory that has emerged in Britain, triggered by plans to place restrictions on through-traffic and fed by the popularity of a largely unrelated urban planning concept — the pedestrian-
friendly “15-minute city.”
The bizarre speculation burst into the real world on Feb. 18, when an estimated 2,000 demonstrators gathered in central Oxford. Five people were arrested during the demonstration, which drew groups of protesters and counter-protesters to the heart of the
university town.
At issue was the proposed introduction of six new traffic filters intended to limit car use through residential parts of the city at peak hours. Monitored by automatic license plate readers, these filters would fine drivers from outside the county of
Oxfordshire who entered central areas during high-traffic periods. Oxford residents will be allowed fine-free peak-hour access for 100 days per year, with residents of the wider county able to apply for a 25-day fine-free access permit.
Such efforts to limit vehicles have become increasingly common in UK cities, and many have faced opposition from drivers and residents. But the Oxford proposal took a weird turn when some protesters described the filters an effort to carve Oxford into
six sealed-off “15-minute cities.” That’s a reference to the hyper-local planning model coined by Franco-Colombian professor Carlos Moreno and adopted by mobility advocates, developers and city leaders around the world. Its principle holds that
daily needs like workplaces, schools and amenities should ideally be located within a short walk or bike ride from home.
Conflating walkability with a dystopian future of surveillance and oppression takes some work, but in recent weeks the term managed to get sucked into a maelstrom of British conspiracy theories. A British MP called 15-minute cities “an international
socialist conspiracy,” while conservative self-help guru Jordan Peterson tweeted Oxford’s vehicle restrictions were the work of “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” and referred his followers to the “Great Reset,” a 2020 World Economic Forum
initiative that’s become a magnet for right-wing fantasies about a Covid-fueled plot to destroy capitalism. A British TV presenter also took up that theme, insisting that the street revamp was part of a push for “one world government.” Afterward, a
leading UK Jewish organization and a group of MPs warned the network of indulging in dog-whistle anti-Semitism.
So out of proportion are the claims compared to what Oxford’s traffic-calming plan calls for that it takes some unpacking to explain how it happened.
Early misreporting of the issue helped throw oil on the fire. No local officials promised to divide Oxford into six “15-minute cities,” as some local media accounts implied. While the Oxford City Council does cite Moreno’s concept as a guiding
principle for its 2040 local plan, it’s not involved in rethinking the city’s streets. That’s the work of Oxfordshire County Council, a different body that oversees not just Oxford itself but its large surrounding county, an area of just over 1,000
square miles. What the county is proposing — without mentioning the 15-minute city concept — is a street intervention known as a low-traffic neighborhood, or LTN, which has already been implemented widely across Britain.
LTNs date back to the 1970s, with the aim of making urban neighborhoods more walkable and bikeable by restricting car access to residential streets. They are a familiar source of local-level controversy, especially recently, since they proliferated
immediately before and during the pandemic. Opponents have said that they slow down emergency services and displace traffic from affluent areas onto major arteries, where poorer residents are more likely to live. But recent research suggests that LTNs
cut traffic within their boundaries by almost half without increasing it on boundary roads, while in London the most deprived quartile of residents are more likely to live within an LTN than the least deprived quartile. LTNs continue to be contentious,
but support among London residents has been growing: 47% of respondents to a 2021 survey saying they were in favor of them and only 16% against.
Past opposition to LTNs, however, didn’t take the current bizarre conspiratorial tack, nor have the essentially local debates over their implementation been a target for activists from outside the affected area. In Oxford, protesters pounced on the
issue as a “lightning rod” for waging a broader culture war, says Milo Comerford, head of counter-extremism policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that studies extremist movements.
Their arguments show a peculiar mix of international and homegrown tinfoil hat-ism. “A lot of the conspiracy’s hallmarks are very American, being at its core about a kind of freedom of movement that’s defined by automobile-friendly cities,”
Comerford says. “The odd thing is that it doesn't really make sense in the context of Oxford. Its medieval center has always been pretty pedestrian and cycle-friendly. In fact, the conspiracy has slightly been imposed on Oxford.”
He cites the experience of the pandemic as a critical factor in the protest’s origins. As many people in the UK and beyond genuinely struggled with Covid-19 restrictions and fears of a dangerous-but-invisible force, their anxieties fueled a rich online
ecosystem of misinformation. “Covid has been a Pandora’s-box-opening moment,” says Comerford, one that has forged “unlikely coalitions between people who were previously hardened conspiracy theorists and those who were scared in the context of
the pandemic and got drawn in.”
A 2021 report from ISD tracked the rise of the “climate lockdown” conspiracy during the Covid crisis, which found broad buy-in among anti-vaccination and far-right groups. Amplified by conservative media outlets in the US and UK and threaded with
antagonism for climate action, this narrative holds that Covid-19 was “merely a precursor to future ‘green tyranny,’” the report states, “and that both governments and global elites would curtail civil liberties under the pretext of climate
change.”
Accordingly, some Oxford protesters see the town’s car-calming initiative as an extension of a sinister authoritarian agenda. In videos and memes dispersed via social media, their vision of the 15-minute city often references the extreme social
confinement enforced in Wuhan and other Chinese cities amid China’s now-discarded Covid Zero policy.
The pandemic provided ready-made “architectures” of protest, Comerford says, “built to respond to any issue of the day. It’s important to know that these episodes are essentially issue-agnostic.”
It’s also important to know that the UK’s wave of 15-minute-city protest employs a very fundamental misunderstanding of the concept.
“We just applied a term to something that has been there all along.”
Many Oxford protesters fixate on the notion that authorities intend to break cities up into small, fenced-off zones within which citizens will be confined by physical barriers, facial recognition tech, or other means. These grimly totalitarian scenarios
do indeed sound alarming, but they have nothing to do with the reality of 15-minute-city-style urban thinking.
The term doesn’t describe a discrete area with barriers — it’s a planning approach that tries to ensure that schools, health-care facilities, parks and other amenities are spread equitably across neighborhoods, limiting the need for lengthy
commutes and expanding job access. The time span in the name refers simply to what a person can easily reach from their home. Every resident’s 15 minute radius is going to be different; a city of a million homes will have a million overlapping 15-
minute cities.
If this idea sounds familiar — or very familiar — that’s because it is. The general concept reflects the dominant direction of urban planning for at least the last 20 years, in which cities have tried to move away from the rigid single-use zoning
popular in the earlier 20th century toward a mixed-use template that integrates homes, businesses, cultural venues and workplaces within the same areas. Carlos Moreno didn’t dramatically innovate on this approach; he merely packaged it a very effective
way, by placing the ordinary resident at the heart of the urban plan.
That doesn’t mean that the 15-minute cities framework doesn’t raise legitimate concerns. Critics of hyper-local planning policies have highlighted how they might displace less-affluent residents, as seen in Barcelona’s “superblock” system,
where through-traffic is restricted to a small part of the city grid to cut pollution and increase car-free public space. Others dismiss the approach as hopelessly utopian for North American cities planned around automobile use, which are not just low
density but have social and racial segregation operating at a far more entrenched level than zoning alone can address.
Such concerns, however, are typically voiced by progressive foes of corporate overreach, not the far-right conspiracists who converged on Oxford and saw eco-tyranny on the march because their drive to the grocery store may be slightly extended.
Meanwhile, the leaders of that city, whose central street plan took shape around eight centuries before the automobile’s invention, have been left scrambling to understand the strange forces they unwittingly tapped. “We just applied a term to
something that has been there all along,” says Councillor Alex Hollingsworth of the Oxford City Council. That’s the body that first invoked the 15-minute city template for its long-term planning, but didn’t draw the street changes that triggered
the current protests.
About the controversy, Hollingsworth sounds understandably bemused. “What is more British,” he asks, “than a corner shop and a pub you can walk to?”
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From
swldxer1958@gmail.com@21:1/5 to
All on Sat Jun 17 13:03:46 2023
Conspiracy theories aren’t a new thing, and for as long as they’ve been around they’ve ranged from the benign to the absurd. From the six moon landings being faked to the Earth being flat, or our ruling class being lizards, we’ve all probably
come across them in one form or another.
Yet, in a surprise twist, the hottest conspiracy theory of 2023 comes from an unlikely corner: town planning. This relates to the idea of “the 15-minute city” and has even gone so far as to be mentioned in UK parliament by an MP who called the idea
an international socialist concept” that will “cost us our personal freedom”.
As town planning academics who have published research on 15-minute cities, we know this is nonsense. But what actually is the 15-minute city? And what’s the fuss about?
The 15-minute city itself is a simple idea. If you live in one, it means that everything you need to go about your daily life – school, doctors, shops and so on – is located no more than a 15-minute walk from your house.
Designed for people not cars
The concept, which originated from the French-Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno, is the current zeitgeist in planning, and calls for city design that is centred on people and their needs rather than being designed for cars. It gained international
attention when the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, announced her intention to make Paris a 15-minute city following her re-election in 2020, with the plan to enhance neighbourhoods across Paris while ensuring connections between them. The idea flourished
in the wake of COVID, when lockdowns and working from home had more of us ditching the car and recognising the need for well-served local neighbourhoods.
Yet this connection to how our towns and cities are changing in the wake of COVID is also probably the reason that 15-minute cities are now a hot-topic in the conspiracy world. Among other things, the charge sheet against 15-minute cities is that they
are a “socialist”, or even “Stalinist”, attempt to control the population by actively preventing citizens from straying more than 15 minutes from their homes.
However, the reality is that the 15-minute city does not seek to exclude people or to prevent them from leaving. Instead, the idea is about providing high-quality neighbourhoods so that you don’t have to travel further to get the service. Crucially,
this doesn’t mean you’re trapped where you live.
Yes, if travelling by car, the 15-minute city might make the journey to leave the neighbourhood longer as the urban realm and roads shifts from car dominance to a more equal distribution of space for active travel. But this might also mean that other
ways of getting about town (walking, wheelchair, cycling, bus or train) might make sense for most journeys, with the car used only when necessary.
It’s fairly easy to see how Moreno’s idea has been perverted here. Within this, it’s also equally easy to trace a line between this and the prevalence of conspiracy theories surrounding COVID and the role of government. In this world, encouraging
us to use cars less is seen as a limitation of our freedom rather than an opportunity to live in more vibrant and less polluted neighbourhoods.
The thing is, like so many other conspiracy theories, it gets into trouble when it comes into contact with reality. In many British cities, the reality is that having most services within a 15-minute walk of your house is already closer than you might
think – what matters more is the quality and equity of those services.
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