The 15-minute city conspiracy theory is not the strangest such idea to emerge in recent years – the fantastical QAnon canon takes some topping – but it might be the most unlikely. How on Earth did a benign, aspirational urban planning philosophy about local amenities and more accessible streets become a secret World Economic Forum plan to turn our neighbourhoods into open-air prisons?
The 15-minute city concept was coined by the French-Colombian urban designer Carlos Moreno, who wrote in 2015 that cities “should be designed so that within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride, people should be able to access work, housing, food, health, education, culture, and leisure”. Since then, the idealised 15 minutes has sometimes been extended to a more practical 20 and public transport is usually included in the vision.
As the UK government’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities explained earlier this year, “15-minute cities aim to provide people with more choice about how and where they travel, not to restrict movement.” Which makes it all the more odd that the Tories recently made the conspiracy theory part of their platform.
“What is sinister,” Transport Secretary Mark Harper warned delegates at the Conservative Party’s conference, “and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it with CCTV.”
Similar ideas were aired at a meeting about urban design that got out of control in Hamilton in June. According to the Waikato Times, after watching a group in the crowd attempting to conduct a “citizen’s arrest” on several of his council colleagues, the then Hamilton city councillor Ryan Hamilton took up the microphone to express solidarity with those who saw a sinister agenda behind, for example, in-lane bus stops, which make buses more efficient, but briefly hold up private vehicles.
Hamilton will no longer be a councillor, because he has been elected as the National MP for Hamilton East, after recanting his beliefs about fluoridation during the campaign. He joins a parliamentary party whose transport spokesman, Simeon Brown, has built a political personality around press releases with headlines such as “Labour is coming after your car and street”. In that statement, he railed against the prospect of people being “housebound or penalised by Labour’s anti-car agenda” and at the possibility that some streets “could even be used as playgrounds at certain times during the day”.
The dystopian threat of children playing in the street occupies minds – and fuels a certain kind of politics – because of the way many of us think about our cars. Cars are private spaces in the public realm; an attack on the car is akin to a home invasion. Cars also represent freedom, even if that means the freedom to be stuck in traffic en route to some big-box retail complex.
Days before the election, an electronic sign went up warning of “major works” on one of our local roads. It’s part of Auckland’s Waitematā Safe Routes, a planned bus- and bike-friendly upgrade backed by local boards, schools and residents’ groups. It has been stalled for years by a tiny group of opponents, animated in part by ideas about “Agenda 2030″, a precursor to the 15-minute city conspiracy theory, and a handful of political allies.
Much of the cost of the upgrade will be in rebuilding the foundations of our local road, which have been progressively collapsing. But it’s the bike lanes, bus stops and raised pedestrian crossings that have been the focus of the rage. It feels reassuring that there will be shovels in the ground before Simeon Brown is officially minister of anything.
