Who’s behind the push for the 15-minute city?
Most
articles portray the 15-minute city as
a movement, an idea of the people that
emerged out of the pandemic, but their data are largely self-referential.
Chamberlain’s WEF article presented a Google search trend analysis as evidence for its claim that the idea was “more than a fad,” asserting:
“The 15-minute city went from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a rallying cry. … The pandemic created an urgency around equitable urbanism that sidelined arguments about bike lanes and other ‘amenities’ that have roiled communities for years.”
Mainstream media outlets like
Forbes referred to the WEF article as proof of this new movement.
An article published last week by the World Resources Institute called it “a global movement” — citing evidence that mayors around the world are instituting plans for a 15-minute city.
The idea is heavily promoted by planning organizations like the
Congress for the New Urbanism.
Efforts to pilot the 15-minute city in practice are largely driven by
C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, made up of 96 mayors of cities from around the world,
funded by major corporations and philanthropic foundations and focused on urban activism for climate change.
The group was founded in 2005, by the mayor of London, and in 2006, it
merged with the Clinton Climate Initiative.
C40 Cities also works closely with developer
Arup Group, a
WEF-affiliated organization, to create development plans to redevelop “sustainable” or
“net zero” buildings to address the problem of climate change.
In July 2020, the group published a
framework for cities to “build back better.” The organization promotes the 15-minute city model as a new roadmap for a post-pandemic world.
C40 Cities in September 2022 announced it is partnering with a developer,
Nordic Real Estate Partners — a Danish development firm with
18 billion euros in assets — and
UN-Habitat to deliver proof-of-concept for “15-minute city” policies by implementing neighborhood pilot projects in at least five cities.
Cities such as Paris, Madrid, Milan, Ottawa, Seattle,
Milan and
Vancouver are among those that have
declared plans to transform their cities into a 15-minute city model.
Melbourne has adopted a long-term strategic plan for
20-minute neighborhoods.
Recently Cleveland, Ohio’s new
mayor announced, with the support of the city development department, a bike advocacy group and real estate developers, that the city is “working toward being the first city in North America to implement a 15-minute city planning framework where people — not developers, but people — are at the center of urban revitalization.”
More
city councils throughout the U.K. also announced they will
investigate or implement 15-minute city plans.
A walkable city with amenities close to home, what could be the problem?
On a
recent episode of “
The Corbett Report,” James Corbett said:
“You have to hand it to the technocratic planners of the would-be
technate. They are masters at taking ideas that, detached from all of the context that they put them in, could be a good idea.
“In fact, if I was going to create an intentional community, I would probably want to create it around the idea that everything is accessible and close and you don’t need to rely on some big infrastructure in order to get your groceries that are coming from halfway around the world.
“Yeah, having a 15-minute city, it sounds good.”
The problem, he said, is that the concept isn’t based on democratic principles of people deciding together or agreeing on an idea.
“No, we are talking about city councils starting to take control and starting to herd people into carefully controlled spaces,” Corbett said.
Some planners, even within the new urbanist school of thought, link the concept to the history of
top-down urban planning approaches that exclude the marginalized.
At the
CityLab 2021 conference, hosted by
Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute, Jay Pitter, a Toronto-based urban designer, commented:
“I’m a champion of the hyper-local, as certainly we need more resilient, climate change-resistant cities. …
“However, I am averse to this concept. It doesn’t take into account the histories of urban inequity, intentionally imposed by technocratic and colonial planning approaches, such as segregated neighborhoods, deep amenity inequity and discriminatory policing of our public spaces.”
Pitter said many marginalized communities are opposed to ideas like this because they lead to further displacement.
Even Richard Florida — who coined the
“creative city” planning concept that drove gentrification globally over the last decade — warned that the 15-minute city plans in major cities across the world would be more likely to exacerbate existing inequalities than resolve them.
Moreno has acknowledged that the distances most working-class people are required to travel for work pose a major challenge to the 15-minute city.
And then there are the people themselves.
Politico reported that Paris Mayor
Anne Hidalgo has been internationally lauded, winning prizes for her leadership in fighting climate change and landing herself on Time’s list of 100 most influential people in 2020.
But she faced backlash from Parisians who charge her with destroying the city’s heritage and disrupting their lives by supporting the 15-minute city concept.
Analysts critical of the program in Oxford raised concerns about the concept more generally. They cautioned that the inspiration for the concept in the
lockdowns, which were responsible for widespread
social and economic devastation and
new forms of social control, ought to be concerning.
They point out that while the concept of, “climate lockdown” sounds “ridiculous,” articles in publications like the BBC’s “
How ’15-minute cities’ will change the way we socialise,” celebrating life under lockdown and linking it to climate benefits, raise flags.
Others have said, “The 15-minute cities being sold look a lot like an
excuse for more control.”
Corbett argued that the 15-minute city concept is part of a master plan:
“The people get herded into these 15-minute cities so that when you are allowed by the loving masters of the techne, you’ll be allowed to travel from one little 15-minute city to another, if your
social credit score is high enough.
“This is not about saving the earth as I have said 8 million times … This is exactly how they create the infrastructure for the
climate lockdowns of the future …
“This is about that long-term vision of the future in which we will be herded into these small cities.”
“Climate lockdown” is another term
often dismissed as “conspiracy theory” in the mainstream media.
But
several organizations, including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), have circulated the idea that “climate lockdown” might be necessary for several years.
They promoted
an article written by University College of London professor and WEF contributor
Marian Mazzucato, Ph.D. suggesting that “climate lockdowns” might become necessary to address the looming “climate emergency.”
The WBCSD is a partner of and supported by the WEF-affiliated
Arup Group.
Arup and C40 have been partners for over a decade in their project to redesign cities. The 15-minute city is part of that project.
Proponents of the “15-minute city” say it will reduce emissions and improve residents’ quality of life, but critics say the concept, supported by the World Economic Forum, is discriminatory and will lead to “climate lockdowns.”
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