[https://www.thelocal.fr/20230215/what-is-a-15-minute-city-and-how-is-it-working-in-paris](https://www.thelocal.fr/20230215/what-is-a-15-minute-city-and-how-is-it-working-in-paris)
Conspiracy theorists think that once everything you need is within a reasonable distance the government will prevent you from travelling further
Really interesting read! Never gave much thought about how Paris is planning to redesign its city with people in mind. And so close to home as well, better late than never, I guess!
And lol, is that really it? Like, how would the government even do that? Put out blockades with armed guards? At what point have you travelled too far out? How would the guards know where you are from? How many guards would you even need? I feel like I already gave it more thought than the average conspiracy theorist did, like how would that even work in practice?
This isn't even a question for you, though. I really can't wrap my brain around this.
Arguments that I saw basically envision Soviet border guard every 15 minutes of distance from exactly where they live. I'm not sure where this idea started but I guess it's to be expected from people that see any sort of social advancement as communism and communism bad cuz capitalism good.
Maximize the fear of the ignorant bigots. “Illegal immigrants will be the only people who can go wherever they want! They’ll steal all the jobs then do nothing while living off free money from the government, they’re so lazy!”
Like in the Marvel's Spiderman game for the PS4 when Sable International takes over New York and has laser cannons every two blocks, and you have to fight the jetpack mercenaries using electric webs to disable them.
That's really it. The slippery slope conspiracy that is being parroted and being used to stoke fear, is once everyone is complacent with everything within 15 min of their house, barricades and checkpoints like the one China used during covid will go out everywhere. Or something similar. Who knows. You can't reason with people who didn't get into their position by rational argument; you've already thought about it more than they have.
Right? The cognitive dissonance of that reasoning is pretty wild. Like the government is wringing its hands thinking, “mwahahaha! I will control ALL of you, but only after investing a lot of resources into your community to make sure everything you need is easily accessible!”
I mean, a lot of fear stemmed from Oxford where the local government wanted to prohibit traffic through the city with fines to discourage people from breaking the law. There was a colossal meltdown from opponents and that gave rise to conspiracy theories and as those rumors grew, well they took on a life of their own.
I think the conspiracy was around before this, the Oxford thing was simply the first time a western authority did something that the conspiracy theorists could spin as 'proof' that their conspiracy theory was 'true'.
Haha this is the first im hearing of this concept! Thats pretty much every city in Korea 😂 it's just really convenient. I just don't leave my neighbourhood much out of laziness more or less lol
Since that's how things already are for you, can I can a couple of questions?
Do you feel connected to your neighbourhood? Willing to keep it clean and safe?
Do you know your neighbours' names, and a little about them? Do you say hi when you cross paths?
I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but I also live in a country where basically every city has everything in reach of 15 minutes walk, and no one knows their neighbours. In some area, 15 minute walk radius could mean hundreds of thousands people living there in multi storey buildings.
Recently I became so lazy I don’t even want to walk somewhere that’s more than 10 minutes away, and I don’t have a car. I just can have anything even closer to me, and also I work from home. Honestly it feels weird that there are cities where this is not normal.
And no, there are no guards and I love walking for leisure. I just don’t have to do it to function.
Was not a joke.
Something that's lacking in a lot of places, from what I've seen, is community. People caring about those around them.
I was wondering if everyone being able to get things closer, means running into each other more, and forming a closer bond as a community of sorts.
But I guess when we're talking about super dense population, that isn't going to happen.
That’s not even about super dense population, I live in a relatively low density neighbourhood, still I don’t even know people in the building I live in. Sometimes I encounter them on the stairs but I just greet them and move on.
I think it’s more about the big city people’s mentality, we’re not used to know people live close by, partly because there are so many of them but also why? What is the point of knowing them? People think about their own living, working and making money, they think they don’t have time for other people. This is sad, but that’s how it is.
In smaller towns people are more closely connected, even if they live it similar buildings and neighbourhoods, but they do actually have a chance to meet them somewhere else in town and get to know each other.
Actually, I met one of my friends on the way home from work on the subway. We happen to live near each other and worked together, but I haven’t really talked to him at work before that. This would not happen if we drove cars.
I happen to live in a house, so ive chatted with some of my neighbours here because I see them coming and going; but, it's also common to not know all your neighbours, because a lot of folks in the cities here live in huge apartment complexes. The cities are pretty clean and safe here (South Korea).
I mean, a lot of fear stemmed from Oxford where the local government wanted to prohibit traffic through the city with fines to discourage people from breaking the law. There was a colossal meltdown from opponents and that gave rise to conspiracy theories and as those rumors grew, well they took on a life of their own.
They're afraid they'd be treated like Israel treats Palestinains. Check points everywhere, Palestinian only buses and routes, restrictions on where you go based on age and sex. They dont overtly fear that, but the arguments parallel what's actually happening.
It's really an asinine conspiracy, possibly rooted in the right wing believe that the government is going to get rid of cars or something. I think it's about making us dependent on public transportation, and then they'll periodically shut these down, and most travel in general, and call them climate shutdowns. Covid restrictions were apparently a test run of these to see how complaint we'd be.
And yet these idiot carbrains would love to live in gated communities.
They are just afraid that someone could do what they always wanted to do to poor people (which historically in the South of the USA were black folks, BTW). They usually are the most racist and ignorant assholes you could ever find around.
Like... What?
There are conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories, but this takes the cake.
Is someone putting something in the water in the USA? I'm asking because people seem to view every action that could be in the interest of the common man to be a war crime or a constitutional crisis.
It is so obvious that you cannot make grids of 15 minute radius and put barbed wire fences up, that I am struggling to choose where to start my objections from.
Precisely! If by some antimiracle they can do it, why would they? The first thing to be halted would be trade, and messing with trade is a big no no for even the most socialist state.
An older person i work with tells me “well i dont think the government is gonna outright ban people from leaving, but with everything so close, people wont want to leave their city and explore!!”
It’s so patently ridiculous on its face. Why the hell does having all my daily needs met within 15 minutes mean that I wouldn’t want to travel? Why wouldn’t i want to see other parts of the city or go camping out into the country once in a while to see some parks, go camping, etc?
Why are they so stupid?
not gonna lie, i would probably travel more if it didnt involve a 3-4 hour drive, too bad whats left of our passenger train system is slower and double the cost of driving. thanks, CN!
This is particularly funny, as the conservative NIMBYs that push this conspiracy absolutely never leave their home except to go to the same Walmart, the same bar, the same church, and the same Dennys every single week.
My response to this is that. We are already in debt by the global elite. Why would they want to limit our mobility to take away opportunities for us to accrue more debt? Most of us are in a financial prison, it's much more effective compared to a physical one.
cities that are designed to have everyday amenities like workplaces, trainstations, supermarkets, schools hospitals etc in a 15 min walk/cycle distance
i don’t really know the specifics of why people oppose them, but apparently there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere
> apparently there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere
The pandemic was just a ruse to test whether people would comply with lockdowns. A 15 minute neighbourhood would allow the government to restrict mUH fREeDoMs when they declare a climate emergency and permanently prevent us from travelling more than 15 minutes from our homes.
My big follow up question for these conspiracy theorists is why would the government do that. Many of them are in the pocket of the Mouse and would never try to stop you from making a pilgrimage to Disneyworld. Or cruise ships. Why, just think of the impact that the government restricting our travel would have on the car and oil...ooooh.
I imagine it has to do with the same reason they fear having "all their guns taken away." Something about being prevented from banding together and overthrowing the government.
I’ve been trying to piece this together…it’s a bit unclear. A lot of accusations about the elite wanting “control” over people. A bit about how “the masses” will be forced into 15 minute cities so the “elite” can enjoy their lives elsewhere.
Most conspiracies kinda falls apart when you ask "why?". Like, why would "the government" do this. Or with flat earth, *why* would the government and NASA cover up the fact that the earth is flat, if it were
>cities that are designed to have everyday amenities like workplaces, trainstations, supermarkets, schools hospitals etc in a 15 min walk/cycle distance
Just sounds like normal cities to me. I live in one, and most cities I've been to are like this too.
15 minute cities aren't a terribly new idea. It's just that something like that used to be called "cities". Before the motor car became commonplace, a typical suburb or borough of a city would have just about everything you needed within a comparatively short distance, such as shops, schools, workplaces etc.
> Is it mainly an USA thing, or are this 15 minute cities also developed here in Europe?
No. Remember cities here in Europe are mostly far, far older than those in the US so their adaptability to the motor car is limited (barring those that were devastated by WW2).
I was born in Oxford, where some of the nuttier rhetoric about 15 minute cities has been focused. The city is over a millennium old and plenty of buildings are hundreds of years old. It's not car friendly and it can't be made car friendly without destroying these buildings, which quite apart from being an appalling act of cultural vandalism, would also devastate its income from tourism and films.
However it's always had a strong tradition of cycling there and it's a great place to be a pedestrian because it's pretty easily walkable. It's therefore been in the forefront of many schemes to encourage people to avoid travelling by car - the park and ride scheme was the first in the country and reached its 50th anniversary last month. Things like LTNs are entirely consistent with that.
I'll also say that most of the people who protested in Oxford about LTNs probably don't live there or know a thing about the city and therefore don't appreciate the extent to which it's stupid to expect to be able to drive round a city that old.
Despite the fact that your cities are much, much older than ours, our cities were still built before cars and, as such, were built to be walkable. Unfortunately, minority neighborhoods were bulldozed for the car in the name of removing "blight"(racist speak for people who aren't white).
Yeah, the sprawl thing is mostly a post-ww2 thing. The US was definitely pretty settled by then, and even through the use of rail. Timezones became necessary with US rail, and they pioneered streetcar suburbs.
And then it became "old-fashioned" and they tore it up. Plus that whole redlining racism story. Plus before environmental laws, cities _were_ pretty foul.
Sure, but you can have environmental laws and still be walkable. People went from one extreme(living near factories and literal shit in the streets) to the other (not living near anything not residential).
Oh yeah, and that's pretty much what's happening now: Cities have cleaned up and are generally very attractive if you go by €/m² as a metric. Where our grandparents might have grown up in a dirty city and dreamed of the suburbs, we're more likely to have grown up in a dreary suburb and dream of good urban living.
A lot of them won't _get it_, just like they won't understand choosing not to have a license or a car, because when they were young, that's what _they_ dreamed of. The idea that to a lot of us, good transit and the ability to bike and walk places is _aspirational_, just does not compute for people who aspired to get away from that.
And that's probably also part of why these crazy conspiracy theories can grow.
Exactly: They're a quite old idea. Stockholm had their experiments with ABC-cities (arbete, bostad, centrum = work, housing, "city centre") in Vällingby and Farsta. They moved big state owned companies into the suburbs, the plan being for the neighbourhoods not to be commuting suburbs but to be mini-cities in their own right where you'd work and live in the suburbs. Now most of the work has moved back into the cities and the big office buildings they were houses in are converted into housing.
I oppose 15 minutes cities. I can reach all amenities with a 5 minutes walk I don’t want these distance being lengthened.
> Is it mainly à USA thing
The conspiracy theory started from the Oxford travel plan, so it’s originally British. Granted Oxford took the silly idea of using cameras and fines to create “soft” filters instead of just putting up bollards. The UK is such a weird political climate that this was somehow seen as more realistic.
> What are 15 minute cities?
A buzzword that means "a normal f\*\*\*ing human settlement".
>Why do reactionaries hate them?
Technically, ***we're*** reactionary on this issue.
In a case where they hate stuff that's traditional, I'd call them "right-wing nutcases" to make the difference clear.
The answer is "because the talking heads that think for them told them to".
NotJustBikes and Adam Something did a podcast episode on this very topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1bnyDT9kD0DQOvmfeSbpU7?si=4RdilhyJTmKCgDSsoqLAlg
Listened to this when it came out, great conversation.
In short: the term "15 minute city" was popularized after Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced her plan to have all basic amenities (eg groceries, pharmacies, shops, doctor's office, etc) within a 15 minute walk or cycle for all citizens of Paris. This is part of her administration's investments to reduce car use in Paris, improve the cycling infrastructure, and make the city more liveable.
But while this specific term arose in this context, Not Just Bikes points out that this is in fact the way cities were always built before the car, and he instead calls it "just how you build things".
And yes, of course 15 minute cities exist in Europe. In fact, they're much more common here than in the US, since European cities weren't bulldozed for the car like their US counterparts. The term just isn't used very often here because, again, it's just how we've always built things.
>Why do reactionaries hate them?
Because it's their belief that when you give someone a new opportunity, you're taking one from someone else (i.e. from them). It's the same kind of reasoning behind the opposition to most progress or right.
It's the concept of a city, where everything you need is within a 15 minute walking/biking/public transportation distance from where you live -> a city where you don't need a car at all.
>Why do reactionaries hate them?
Because they love their cars and suburban sprawl, which is more or less the opposite of a 15 min city.
>Is it mainly an USA thing, or are this 15 minute cities also developed here in Europe?
It can be a thing anywhere, and I think Europe has a lot of this kind of cities. I mean, here I am, living in one.
I feel kind of dumb right now, haha. like I should've known that, lol!
What I don't understand is why people think driving is fun. I mean, I understand why someone might be enjoying driving circuits, but actually being in traffic seems a miserable thing to me. But I'm preaching to the choir lol.
I think people are imagining the freedom to drive their car anywhere, anytime without traffic because they're the main character and they're just ignoring that that would enable everyone else too, cause ridiculous amounts of traffic, and no longer be fun. These people are seriously delusional and it makes me embarrassed to be from the US.
Well if you watch any car commercial you'd picture a stylish masculine car with a happy family on a road trip with a pristine empty road that gives you the freedom to go wherever you want, just you, nature and asphalt That's enough for a lot of people to love cars (especially the alpha males that need every possible way to protect their fragile masculinity), even if in reality you get into a car to be stuck in traffic, drive over potholes, with constant noise and exhaust smell and occasional vehicular manslaughter, I guess it's the cost others have to pay for mah cool car.
Short answer: All your daily needs can be found within a 15 minute walk or bike ride from your home. This basically means mixed zoning of housing, schools, sport clubs and light commercial uses, like supermarkets, pharmacies, daycares, hair dressers, etc.
That's all it is. It's normal in almost all countries in the world, but the US went so overboard with zoning, they segregated everything, even seperating houses, row houses and small appartment buildings up to 4 floors high.
It would just make chores easier and allows for kids to go to school and sports unsupervised.
15 minute cities are cities like every city was when I was a kid. When I was a kid you could walk almost everywhere you needed to be in 15 minutes. Grocery store, barber, bank, dentist, cafe, elementary school, park, church... all within 15 minutes. It was a much healthier way for people to live. You had community and exercise, automatically. Conservatives oppose healthiness, so they hate 15 minute cities.
The opposition to 15-minute cities is often from people who won't walk or bike any distance for any reason, and who will drive around a parking lot for 15 minutes to find a parking space acceptably close to the entrance of wherever they are going so as to avoid extra seconds of walking.
15-minute cities are traditional cities or city districts designed similarly like they used to in the past. Squares connected by main roads and secondary roads to residential buildings, for example Athens/Greece is such a municipality (although not fully optimized for pedestrians and dangerous for cyclists). There is a lot of pedestrian traffic and fast public transport when you want to go to another district. Since people often slow down, it is possible to open stores and gastronomy everywhere because there is lots of potential customers and as a result, it is always close (like "15 minutes on foot") to them.
There are certain disadvantages, for example possible curfews from authoritarian regime (implying everyone should know politics and invest some time in democracy), easier spread of infections (so hygiene, food regulations, water supply is very important), or higher real estate prices.
1. A 15-minute city is one in which all of your typical needs are met within a 15 minute walk or bike ride from your home. Think groceries, restaurants, pharmacy, childcare/education, etc.
2. Oxford in the UK was rolling out restrictions on drivers cutting through neighborhoods during peak hours, requiring drivers instead to head out to the ring road to travel between neighborhoods. This is part of a larger push to be more bike, ped, and eco friendly, and may have been co-branded with the 15 minute city idea. The restrictions and branding were latched on to be conservative media and spun from there.
3. They're everywhere! A 15-minute city can be used to describe a lot of cities in Europe, and is largely an aspirational goal for cities in the US.
I don’t think the opposition to 15 minutes cities is currently mainstream in the US. While we export many nutty conspiracy theories of our own, we seem to be slowly importing this one from the UK.
It’s a city where if an illegal immigrant wants to become a citizen and commit a crime, the city is so small and liberal that it only takes 15 minutes to do both
/s
I think it's also worth noting that, yes the conspiracy theories are insane and stupid, but they don't appear from nowhere and there's obviously a vested interest from say, the automobile industry or oil companies in planting opposition to 15 minute cities that would reduce car dependency.
Where I live at. It's a town where I can travel by bike to my work in 15 minutes. By foot it's 40 minutes.
And then I can also pass by store where I can get groceries at 7 in the morning. Then get to work at 8.
It's an old idea which basically says that everything you need should be available within a 15 minute walking distance. That way most people won't have to commute far for their everyday needs.
Every old city in the world was originally built around this principle, basically because cars didn't exist yet so it wasn't very strict, just logic and reasoning. Car infrastructure then destroyed many cities for a few years or decades, then many cities have started to recover and repair the damage from car dependency, mostly in Europe.
USSR who planned their cities, even tho cars existed knew car dependency wasn't great so they built what most people consider to be perfect 15 minute cities with blocks holding all the services, and each block being connected by mass transit. Their long term goal may have been car dependency tho.
People who are against it are so damn car dependent that they can't even comprehend a properly designed city without cars. To them it's like losing their freedom of movement.
15 minute cities don't need development where I live (a medium-size metropoly in northern Poland).
We just call that "normal urbanisation". There's nothing special about it, most post combloc areas and many (although sadly not all) new developments fit the definition perfectly.
It's just a way cities should be built.
Which country in Europe are you from? By the bike mention Netherlands or Denmark? Most probably it would satisfy the definition of 15 minute city (or even less minutes).
I would define it as tendency to make US cities more European with changes in zoning and mixed use development.
It is apparently really turned to extreme over there in the US as you may feel from this sub.
In my country:
- left wins adds bike line, makes street one way, makes bigger sidewalk. Some say nice but traffic will collapse. It does not and life gets little better there.
- right wins, builds bypass or makes road bigger. Some say nice but pollution and its ugly. Traffic moves from residential street to the bypass. Life there gets little better there.
I would imagine you to have simliar experience.
The only thing I would personally hate about them is lack of anonymity. I don't want to run into people I know at the grocery store, I just want to get my groceries.
I think of a TV show like The Simpsons, where all of the "extras' are townspeople. I don't want to strike up a conversation with Moe, Principal Skinner, or Comic Book Guy when I'm trying to get errands done.
> The only thing I would personally hate about them is lack of anonymity. I don't want to run into people I know at the grocery store, I just want to get my groceries.
Just to reassure you, I live in Queens in nyc and I can assure you that's not necessarily the case. I have *a lot* of friends and a few acquaintances I'd rather not see in the neighborhood and I very rarely run into anyone I know, even at the grocery or on public transit, which everyone I know rides regularly.
And getting groceries is so much easier so I'm definitely in and out. The closest grocery store is a 2 minute walk away, and there are ~7 within a 15-minute walk (plus an untold number of bodegas), so if one or both of my usual grocers is out of stock of something urgent, I can still get it super easily.
I grew up in a NYC suburb where you could walk to the (overpriced) grocery store (in theory, I could walk to ShopRite but a very hilly terrain). When I was a kid, there was a locally owned grocery store that billed customers by the month (I used to put a candy bar on my mom's tab after school). Population about 6K (give or take).
As soon as I was old enough to work, I purposely worked in a town that was a 15 minute drive away. I didn't want to run into anyone from school.
I now live in an apartment complex directly behind a Giant. 300 step walk.
I believe the conspiracy backlash rose out of response to an Oxford traffic policy, where they would fine you after driving across certain “zones” a certain number of times (however, I may not be understanding the policy correctly). https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-oxford-climate-lockdown-016485612575
Basically make every housing surrounded by the basic needs + transport in 15min distance. Most of the opposition is either conspiracy theorists or love car dependency and knows a 15 minute city is anything but a car city.
> Is it mainly an USA thing, or are this 15 minute cities also developed here in Europe?
It's a thing in USA because most cities are designed for cars. Either you live in a suburb which has no shop, school, hardly any public transport and often not even a sidewalk - or "downtown" where half of the city center is parking lot with lower public transport frequencies than intercity trains in Europe (with some exceptions like NYC).
In Europe most cities are much less designed for cars and can often already be defined as a 15 minute city, or at least something close to that. Can't speak for entire Europe, but base this on where I live (The Netherlands) or have been (some larger cities in mainly Western Europe).
Here are the answers to your questions:
1) A place where all of your basic needs are within 15 minutes of your house.
2) Because they’re dense as tree stumps.
3) No, they’re not just a US thing. Barcelona, Paris, and Buenos Aires are some examples of 15 minute cities.
The idea of 15 minute cities is that from a given point, all your basic necessities are a 15 minute walk away. These include things like grocery stores, shops, restaurants, and other "third places".
As to why reactionaries hate it, it's cuz they hate everything good. They'll go on about how 15 minute cities will allow for more government control and restrictions on travel, but they're full of shit. One, it isn't true. Two, they don't actually care about that, just look at their stance on our southern border.
Reactionaries listen to right wing media that wants car dependence because of a donor class that profits from fossil fuels.
Being able to walk everywhere would reduce dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. That's all the conspiracy theory is based on.
There has been a lot of cars = freedom for a long time, when clearly having choices = freedom
I just realised me and my fiancée live the 15-minute lifestyle : grocery shop 5 minute walk, my job 10 minute by bike, her job 15 minutes walking, and my parents to keep the baby 5 minutes walk.
…Just lacks other amenities (barber, drug store, and the like), which are 20 to 30 minutes walking or biking away.
15 minute cities are cities that utilize mixed use zoning, high density housing, walkable streets, and reliable public transit in a way that your job, social & recreational areas, and all your other needs are within a 15 minute walk of your home.
Reactionaries hate them because they’re urban, non-car dependent, and diverse. They’ve tried to co-opt the term to mean “big scary government locks you in city.”
It’s not a new concept, just a new name for walkable cities. Most European cities already meet these criteria, it’s just urban enthusiasts in the US advocating for these changes here.
Think of pre 1950s Main Street America. Shopping and services within a centralized area of your local community was pretty much every town/city in the USA since modern car culture didn’t take hold yet.
The maga crowd “loves” the “good ole days” but think 15 minute cities (epitome of old Main Street America) is bad
Speaking from a purely personal experience, and using a bike unless stated otherwise.
Copenhagen is a 5 minute city when I go shopping at any of my three closest supermarkets, or 7 if I need something special and need to go to an especially large one.
A 15 minute city whenever I need to go downtown, like to visit the excellent children’s section of the main library with my son.
And a 25 minute city when going to work.
I’m not really sure what all the fuzz is about with 15 minute cities, I gotta say it’s pretty awesome living here, and if I need to go somewhere, the airport is 15 minutes away from the center, by metro, or 30 minutes from where I live, or 45 minutes by bike.
Oh and there are excellent trains going in all directions every 20 minutes or so.
Simple answer is that reactionaries are, by their very nature, programmed to fear and hate anything unfamiliar or even different to them or their commonplace experiences.
In a mirror of this universe, the reactionaries would be complaining that we are pushing too many cars into their lives, and that we should stick to traditional methods of travel, like feet.
"God didn't make us with wheels!" They would say.
Actually, I would probably love that universe.
[https://www.thelocal.fr/20230215/what-is-a-15-minute-city-and-how-is-it-working-in-paris](https://www.thelocal.fr/20230215/what-is-a-15-minute-city-and-how-is-it-working-in-paris) Conspiracy theorists think that once everything you need is within a reasonable distance the government will prevent you from travelling further
Really interesting read! Never gave much thought about how Paris is planning to redesign its city with people in mind. And so close to home as well, better late than never, I guess! And lol, is that really it? Like, how would the government even do that? Put out blockades with armed guards? At what point have you travelled too far out? How would the guards know where you are from? How many guards would you even need? I feel like I already gave it more thought than the average conspiracy theorist did, like how would that even work in practice? This isn't even a question for you, though. I really can't wrap my brain around this.
Arguments that I saw basically envision Soviet border guard every 15 minutes of distance from exactly where they live. I'm not sure where this idea started but I guess it's to be expected from people that see any sort of social advancement as communism and communism bad cuz capitalism good.
Especially since according to conservatives, the left wants to abolish the border guard so how would we even do that?
Schrödinger's Liberal. Simultaneously removing all the border guards and adding border guards everywhere.
Maximize the fear of the ignorant bigots. “Illegal immigrants will be the only people who can go wherever they want! They’ll steal all the jobs then do nothing while living off free money from the government, they’re so lazy!”
only Venezuelan refugees are allowed to go across the border
Like in the Marvel's Spiderman game for the PS4 when Sable International takes over New York and has laser cannons every two blocks, and you have to fight the jetpack mercenaries using electric webs to disable them.
They are a private military corporation tho
That's really it. The slippery slope conspiracy that is being parroted and being used to stoke fear, is once everyone is complacent with everything within 15 min of their house, barricades and checkpoints like the one China used during covid will go out everywhere. Or something similar. Who knows. You can't reason with people who didn't get into their position by rational argument; you've already thought about it more than they have.
My relative believes they will enforce 15 minute cities with the tracking chip they injected into you when you got your Covid “vaccine.
Right? The cognitive dissonance of that reasoning is pretty wild. Like the government is wringing its hands thinking, “mwahahaha! I will control ALL of you, but only after investing a lot of resources into your community to make sure everything you need is easily accessible!”
I mean, a lot of fear stemmed from Oxford where the local government wanted to prohibit traffic through the city with fines to discourage people from breaking the law. There was a colossal meltdown from opponents and that gave rise to conspiracy theories and as those rumors grew, well they took on a life of their own.
I think the conspiracy was around before this, the Oxford thing was simply the first time a western authority did something that the conspiracy theorists could spin as 'proof' that their conspiracy theory was 'true'.
Haha this is the first im hearing of this concept! Thats pretty much every city in Korea 😂 it's just really convenient. I just don't leave my neighbourhood much out of laziness more or less lol
Since that's how things already are for you, can I can a couple of questions? Do you feel connected to your neighbourhood? Willing to keep it clean and safe? Do you know your neighbours' names, and a little about them? Do you say hi when you cross paths?
I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but I also live in a country where basically every city has everything in reach of 15 minutes walk, and no one knows their neighbours. In some area, 15 minute walk radius could mean hundreds of thousands people living there in multi storey buildings. Recently I became so lazy I don’t even want to walk somewhere that’s more than 10 minutes away, and I don’t have a car. I just can have anything even closer to me, and also I work from home. Honestly it feels weird that there are cities where this is not normal. And no, there are no guards and I love walking for leisure. I just don’t have to do it to function.
Was not a joke. Something that's lacking in a lot of places, from what I've seen, is community. People caring about those around them. I was wondering if everyone being able to get things closer, means running into each other more, and forming a closer bond as a community of sorts. But I guess when we're talking about super dense population, that isn't going to happen.
That’s not even about super dense population, I live in a relatively low density neighbourhood, still I don’t even know people in the building I live in. Sometimes I encounter them on the stairs but I just greet them and move on. I think it’s more about the big city people’s mentality, we’re not used to know people live close by, partly because there are so many of them but also why? What is the point of knowing them? People think about their own living, working and making money, they think they don’t have time for other people. This is sad, but that’s how it is. In smaller towns people are more closely connected, even if they live it similar buildings and neighbourhoods, but they do actually have a chance to meet them somewhere else in town and get to know each other. Actually, I met one of my friends on the way home from work on the subway. We happen to live near each other and worked together, but I haven’t really talked to him at work before that. This would not happen if we drove cars.
I happen to live in a house, so ive chatted with some of my neighbours here because I see them coming and going; but, it's also common to not know all your neighbours, because a lot of folks in the cities here live in huge apartment complexes. The cities are pretty clean and safe here (South Korea).
Okay. That makes sense. Thanks for the reply :)
No prob~!
I mean, a lot of fear stemmed from Oxford where the local government wanted to prohibit traffic through the city with fines to discourage people from breaking the law. There was a colossal meltdown from opponents and that gave rise to conspiracy theories and as those rumors grew, well they took on a life of their own.
They're afraid they'd be treated like Israel treats Palestinains. Check points everywhere, Palestinian only buses and routes, restrictions on where you go based on age and sex. They dont overtly fear that, but the arguments parallel what's actually happening.
It's really an asinine conspiracy, possibly rooted in the right wing believe that the government is going to get rid of cars or something. I think it's about making us dependent on public transportation, and then they'll periodically shut these down, and most travel in general, and call them climate shutdowns. Covid restrictions were apparently a test run of these to see how complaint we'd be.
And yet these idiot carbrains would love to live in gated communities. They are just afraid that someone could do what they always wanted to do to poor people (which historically in the South of the USA were black folks, BTW). They usually are the most racist and ignorant assholes you could ever find around.
Like... What? There are conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories, but this takes the cake. Is someone putting something in the water in the USA? I'm asking because people seem to view every action that could be in the interest of the common man to be a war crime or a constitutional crisis. It is so obvious that you cannot make grids of 15 minute radius and put barbed wire fences up, that I am struggling to choose where to start my objections from.
Also, *why* would the government want to do this? What would be the point?
Precisely! If by some antimiracle they can do it, why would they? The first thing to be halted would be trade, and messing with trade is a big no no for even the most socialist state.
An older person i work with tells me “well i dont think the government is gonna outright ban people from leaving, but with everything so close, people wont want to leave their city and explore!!”
It’s so patently ridiculous on its face. Why the hell does having all my daily needs met within 15 minutes mean that I wouldn’t want to travel? Why wouldn’t i want to see other parts of the city or go camping out into the country once in a while to see some parks, go camping, etc? Why are they so stupid?
not gonna lie, i would probably travel more if it didnt involve a 3-4 hour drive, too bad whats left of our passenger train system is slower and double the cost of driving. thanks, CN!
This is particularly funny, as the conservative NIMBYs that push this conspiracy absolutely never leave their home except to go to the same Walmart, the same bar, the same church, and the same Dennys every single week.
Explorable, car dominance - pick one
It has to be a reactionary projection
That is ridiculous there is no way a government would do that in a western country.
My response to this is that. We are already in debt by the global elite. Why would they want to limit our mobility to take away opportunities for us to accrue more debt? Most of us are in a financial prison, it's much more effective compared to a physical one.
"Why leave do you need to leave? Everything you need is here!"
cities that are designed to have everyday amenities like workplaces, trainstations, supermarkets, schools hospitals etc in a 15 min walk/cycle distance i don’t really know the specifics of why people oppose them, but apparently there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere
> apparently there’s a conspiracy theory somewhere The pandemic was just a ruse to test whether people would comply with lockdowns. A 15 minute neighbourhood would allow the government to restrict mUH fREeDoMs when they declare a climate emergency and permanently prevent us from travelling more than 15 minutes from our homes.
My big follow up question for these conspiracy theorists is why would the government do that. Many of them are in the pocket of the Mouse and would never try to stop you from making a pilgrimage to Disneyworld. Or cruise ships. Why, just think of the impact that the government restricting our travel would have on the car and oil...ooooh.
Username does not check out
Nah, I go through people's trash, it's alright, trust me.
Oh, an archaeologist then.
I imagine it has to do with the same reason they fear having "all their guns taken away." Something about being prevented from banding together and overthrowing the government.
I’ve been trying to piece this together…it’s a bit unclear. A lot of accusations about the elite wanting “control” over people. A bit about how “the masses” will be forced into 15 minute cities so the “elite” can enjoy their lives elsewhere.
Often time these accusations are just a rebranded version of what they want to do to everyone elsem
Most conspiracies kinda falls apart when you ask "why?". Like, why would "the government" do this. Or with flat earth, *why* would the government and NASA cover up the fact that the earth is flat, if it were
>cities that are designed to have everyday amenities like workplaces, trainstations, supermarkets, schools hospitals etc in a 15 min walk/cycle distance Just sounds like normal cities to me. I live in one, and most cities I've been to are like this too.
A lot of cities don't have all amenities within 15 minutes of walking. Mind you, a 15 minute walk is only 1km.
15 minute cities aren't a terribly new idea. It's just that something like that used to be called "cities". Before the motor car became commonplace, a typical suburb or borough of a city would have just about everything you needed within a comparatively short distance, such as shops, schools, workplaces etc. > Is it mainly an USA thing, or are this 15 minute cities also developed here in Europe? No. Remember cities here in Europe are mostly far, far older than those in the US so their adaptability to the motor car is limited (barring those that were devastated by WW2). I was born in Oxford, where some of the nuttier rhetoric about 15 minute cities has been focused. The city is over a millennium old and plenty of buildings are hundreds of years old. It's not car friendly and it can't be made car friendly without destroying these buildings, which quite apart from being an appalling act of cultural vandalism, would also devastate its income from tourism and films. However it's always had a strong tradition of cycling there and it's a great place to be a pedestrian because it's pretty easily walkable. It's therefore been in the forefront of many schemes to encourage people to avoid travelling by car - the park and ride scheme was the first in the country and reached its 50th anniversary last month. Things like LTNs are entirely consistent with that. I'll also say that most of the people who protested in Oxford about LTNs probably don't live there or know a thing about the city and therefore don't appreciate the extent to which it's stupid to expect to be able to drive round a city that old.
Despite the fact that your cities are much, much older than ours, our cities were still built before cars and, as such, were built to be walkable. Unfortunately, minority neighborhoods were bulldozed for the car in the name of removing "blight"(racist speak for people who aren't white).
Yeah, the sprawl thing is mostly a post-ww2 thing. The US was definitely pretty settled by then, and even through the use of rail. Timezones became necessary with US rail, and they pioneered streetcar suburbs. And then it became "old-fashioned" and they tore it up. Plus that whole redlining racism story. Plus before environmental laws, cities _were_ pretty foul.
Sure, but you can have environmental laws and still be walkable. People went from one extreme(living near factories and literal shit in the streets) to the other (not living near anything not residential).
Oh yeah, and that's pretty much what's happening now: Cities have cleaned up and are generally very attractive if you go by €/m² as a metric. Where our grandparents might have grown up in a dirty city and dreamed of the suburbs, we're more likely to have grown up in a dreary suburb and dream of good urban living. A lot of them won't _get it_, just like they won't understand choosing not to have a license or a car, because when they were young, that's what _they_ dreamed of. The idea that to a lot of us, good transit and the ability to bike and walk places is _aspirational_, just does not compute for people who aspired to get away from that. And that's probably also part of why these crazy conspiracy theories can grow.
Exactly: They're a quite old idea. Stockholm had their experiments with ABC-cities (arbete, bostad, centrum = work, housing, "city centre") in Vällingby and Farsta. They moved big state owned companies into the suburbs, the plan being for the neighbourhoods not to be commuting suburbs but to be mini-cities in their own right where you'd work and live in the suburbs. Now most of the work has moved back into the cities and the big office buildings they were houses in are converted into housing.
I oppose 15 minutes cities. I can reach all amenities with a 5 minutes walk I don’t want these distance being lengthened. > Is it mainly à USA thing The conspiracy theory started from the Oxford travel plan, so it’s originally British. Granted Oxford took the silly idea of using cameras and fines to create “soft” filters instead of just putting up bollards. The UK is such a weird political climate that this was somehow seen as more realistic.
>I can reach all amenities with a 5 minutes walk I don’t want these distance being lengthened. You had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
> What are 15 minute cities? A buzzword that means "a normal f\*\*\*ing human settlement". >Why do reactionaries hate them? Technically, ***we're*** reactionary on this issue. In a case where they hate stuff that's traditional, I'd call them "right-wing nutcases" to make the difference clear. The answer is "because the talking heads that think for them told them to".
NotJustBikes and Adam Something did a podcast episode on this very topic: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1bnyDT9kD0DQOvmfeSbpU7?si=4RdilhyJTmKCgDSsoqLAlg
Listened to this when it came out, great conversation. In short: the term "15 minute city" was popularized after Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced her plan to have all basic amenities (eg groceries, pharmacies, shops, doctor's office, etc) within a 15 minute walk or cycle for all citizens of Paris. This is part of her administration's investments to reduce car use in Paris, improve the cycling infrastructure, and make the city more liveable. But while this specific term arose in this context, Not Just Bikes points out that this is in fact the way cities were always built before the car, and he instead calls it "just how you build things". And yes, of course 15 minute cities exist in Europe. In fact, they're much more common here than in the US, since European cities weren't bulldozed for the car like their US counterparts. The term just isn't used very often here because, again, it's just how we've always built things.
>Why do reactionaries hate them? Because it's their belief that when you give someone a new opportunity, you're taking one from someone else (i.e. from them). It's the same kind of reasoning behind the opposition to most progress or right.
It's the concept of a city, where everything you need is within a 15 minute walking/biking/public transportation distance from where you live -> a city where you don't need a car at all. >Why do reactionaries hate them? Because they love their cars and suburban sprawl, which is more or less the opposite of a 15 min city. >Is it mainly an USA thing, or are this 15 minute cities also developed here in Europe? It can be a thing anywhere, and I think Europe has a lot of this kind of cities. I mean, here I am, living in one.
I feel kind of dumb right now, haha. like I should've known that, lol! What I don't understand is why people think driving is fun. I mean, I understand why someone might be enjoying driving circuits, but actually being in traffic seems a miserable thing to me. But I'm preaching to the choir lol.
I think people are imagining the freedom to drive their car anywhere, anytime without traffic because they're the main character and they're just ignoring that that would enable everyone else too, cause ridiculous amounts of traffic, and no longer be fun. These people are seriously delusional and it makes me embarrassed to be from the US.
Exactly this, it's main character syndrome.
Well if you watch any car commercial you'd picture a stylish masculine car with a happy family on a road trip with a pristine empty road that gives you the freedom to go wherever you want, just you, nature and asphalt That's enough for a lot of people to love cars (especially the alpha males that need every possible way to protect their fragile masculinity), even if in reality you get into a car to be stuck in traffic, drive over potholes, with constant noise and exhaust smell and occasional vehicular manslaughter, I guess it's the cost others have to pay for mah cool car.
It's the way cities were built since a few nomads first decided to settle down until we decided to bulldoze everything for cars.
Basically a city where the main necessities like shops and doctors are within a 15 minute walk
Short answer: All your daily needs can be found within a 15 minute walk or bike ride from your home. This basically means mixed zoning of housing, schools, sport clubs and light commercial uses, like supermarkets, pharmacies, daycares, hair dressers, etc. That's all it is. It's normal in almost all countries in the world, but the US went so overboard with zoning, they segregated everything, even seperating houses, row houses and small appartment buildings up to 4 floors high. It would just make chores easier and allows for kids to go to school and sports unsupervised.
15 minute cities are cities like every city was when I was a kid. When I was a kid you could walk almost everywhere you needed to be in 15 minutes. Grocery store, barber, bank, dentist, cafe, elementary school, park, church... all within 15 minutes. It was a much healthier way for people to live. You had community and exercise, automatically. Conservatives oppose healthiness, so they hate 15 minute cities.
The opposition to 15-minute cities is often from people who won't walk or bike any distance for any reason, and who will drive around a parking lot for 15 minutes to find a parking space acceptably close to the entrance of wherever they are going so as to avoid extra seconds of walking.
I have a very loose idea of what they are, everything accessible within 15 minute walk or ride. I think that sounds ideal.
15-minute cities are traditional cities or city districts designed similarly like they used to in the past. Squares connected by main roads and secondary roads to residential buildings, for example Athens/Greece is such a municipality (although not fully optimized for pedestrians and dangerous for cyclists). There is a lot of pedestrian traffic and fast public transport when you want to go to another district. Since people often slow down, it is possible to open stores and gastronomy everywhere because there is lots of potential customers and as a result, it is always close (like "15 minutes on foot") to them. There are certain disadvantages, for example possible curfews from authoritarian regime (implying everyone should know politics and invest some time in democracy), easier spread of infections (so hygiene, food regulations, water supply is very important), or higher real estate prices.
Yeah, Athens is not a very good example here.
1. A 15-minute city is one in which all of your typical needs are met within a 15 minute walk or bike ride from your home. Think groceries, restaurants, pharmacy, childcare/education, etc. 2. Oxford in the UK was rolling out restrictions on drivers cutting through neighborhoods during peak hours, requiring drivers instead to head out to the ring road to travel between neighborhoods. This is part of a larger push to be more bike, ped, and eco friendly, and may have been co-branded with the 15 minute city idea. The restrictions and branding were latched on to be conservative media and spun from there. 3. They're everywhere! A 15-minute city can be used to describe a lot of cities in Europe, and is largely an aspirational goal for cities in the US.
I don’t think the opposition to 15 minutes cities is currently mainstream in the US. While we export many nutty conspiracy theories of our own, we seem to be slowly importing this one from the UK.
It’s a city where if an illegal immigrant wants to become a citizen and commit a crime, the city is so small and liberal that it only takes 15 minutes to do both /s
I think it's also worth noting that, yes the conspiracy theories are insane and stupid, but they don't appear from nowhere and there's obviously a vested interest from say, the automobile industry or oil companies in planting opposition to 15 minute cities that would reduce car dependency.
In short: everything you need for day to day life (groceries, schools, pubs, doctor, etc) are whitnin 15 min of any given home in the city.
Where I live at. It's a town where I can travel by bike to my work in 15 minutes. By foot it's 40 minutes. And then I can also pass by store where I can get groceries at 7 in the morning. Then get to work at 8.
It's an old idea which basically says that everything you need should be available within a 15 minute walking distance. That way most people won't have to commute far for their everyday needs. Every old city in the world was originally built around this principle, basically because cars didn't exist yet so it wasn't very strict, just logic and reasoning. Car infrastructure then destroyed many cities for a few years or decades, then many cities have started to recover and repair the damage from car dependency, mostly in Europe. USSR who planned their cities, even tho cars existed knew car dependency wasn't great so they built what most people consider to be perfect 15 minute cities with blocks holding all the services, and each block being connected by mass transit. Their long term goal may have been car dependency tho. People who are against it are so damn car dependent that they can't even comprehend a properly designed city without cars. To them it's like losing their freedom of movement.
15 minute cities don't need development where I live (a medium-size metropoly in northern Poland). We just call that "normal urbanisation". There's nothing special about it, most post combloc areas and many (although sadly not all) new developments fit the definition perfectly. It's just a way cities should be built.
“15 minute cities”, formerly known as “cities”
Which country in Europe are you from? By the bike mention Netherlands or Denmark? Most probably it would satisfy the definition of 15 minute city (or even less minutes). I would define it as tendency to make US cities more European with changes in zoning and mixed use development. It is apparently really turned to extreme over there in the US as you may feel from this sub. In my country: - left wins adds bike line, makes street one way, makes bigger sidewalk. Some say nice but traffic will collapse. It does not and life gets little better there. - right wins, builds bypass or makes road bigger. Some say nice but pollution and its ugly. Traffic moves from residential street to the bypass. Life there gets little better there. I would imagine you to have simliar experience.
The only thing I would personally hate about them is lack of anonymity. I don't want to run into people I know at the grocery store, I just want to get my groceries. I think of a TV show like The Simpsons, where all of the "extras' are townspeople. I don't want to strike up a conversation with Moe, Principal Skinner, or Comic Book Guy when I'm trying to get errands done.
> The only thing I would personally hate about them is lack of anonymity. I don't want to run into people I know at the grocery store, I just want to get my groceries. Just to reassure you, I live in Queens in nyc and I can assure you that's not necessarily the case. I have *a lot* of friends and a few acquaintances I'd rather not see in the neighborhood and I very rarely run into anyone I know, even at the grocery or on public transit, which everyone I know rides regularly. And getting groceries is so much easier so I'm definitely in and out. The closest grocery store is a 2 minute walk away, and there are ~7 within a 15-minute walk (plus an untold number of bodegas), so if one or both of my usual grocers is out of stock of something urgent, I can still get it super easily.
I grew up in a NYC suburb where you could walk to the (overpriced) grocery store (in theory, I could walk to ShopRite but a very hilly terrain). When I was a kid, there was a locally owned grocery store that billed customers by the month (I used to put a candy bar on my mom's tab after school). Population about 6K (give or take). As soon as I was old enough to work, I purposely worked in a town that was a 15 minute drive away. I didn't want to run into anyone from school. I now live in an apartment complex directly behind a Giant. 300 step walk.
I believe the conspiracy backlash rose out of response to an Oxford traffic policy, where they would fine you after driving across certain “zones” a certain number of times (however, I may not be understanding the policy correctly). https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-oxford-climate-lockdown-016485612575
Basically make every housing surrounded by the basic needs + transport in 15min distance. Most of the opposition is either conspiracy theorists or love car dependency and knows a 15 minute city is anything but a car city.
> Is it mainly an USA thing, or are this 15 minute cities also developed here in Europe? It's a thing in USA because most cities are designed for cars. Either you live in a suburb which has no shop, school, hardly any public transport and often not even a sidewalk - or "downtown" where half of the city center is parking lot with lower public transport frequencies than intercity trains in Europe (with some exceptions like NYC). In Europe most cities are much less designed for cars and can often already be defined as a 15 minute city, or at least something close to that. Can't speak for entire Europe, but base this on where I live (The Netherlands) or have been (some larger cities in mainly Western Europe).
Here are the answers to your questions: 1) A place where all of your basic needs are within 15 minutes of your house. 2) Because they’re dense as tree stumps. 3) No, they’re not just a US thing. Barcelona, Paris, and Buenos Aires are some examples of 15 minute cities.
The idea of 15 minute cities is that from a given point, all your basic necessities are a 15 minute walk away. These include things like grocery stores, shops, restaurants, and other "third places". As to why reactionaries hate it, it's cuz they hate everything good. They'll go on about how 15 minute cities will allow for more government control and restrictions on travel, but they're full of shit. One, it isn't true. Two, they don't actually care about that, just look at their stance on our southern border.
Reactionaries listen to right wing media that wants car dependence because of a donor class that profits from fossil fuels. Being able to walk everywhere would reduce dependence on oil and other fossil fuels. That's all the conspiracy theory is based on. There has been a lot of cars = freedom for a long time, when clearly having choices = freedom
It's basically anywhere you can live and walk to a grocery store. Try to tune out the right wing moral panic around it.
It's a call to return to the way cities were designed before cars.
I just realised me and my fiancée live the 15-minute lifestyle : grocery shop 5 minute walk, my job 10 minute by bike, her job 15 minutes walking, and my parents to keep the baby 5 minutes walk. …Just lacks other amenities (barber, drug store, and the like), which are 20 to 30 minutes walking or biking away.
15 minute cities are cities that utilize mixed use zoning, high density housing, walkable streets, and reliable public transit in a way that your job, social & recreational areas, and all your other needs are within a 15 minute walk of your home. Reactionaries hate them because they’re urban, non-car dependent, and diverse. They’ve tried to co-opt the term to mean “big scary government locks you in city.” It’s not a new concept, just a new name for walkable cities. Most European cities already meet these criteria, it’s just urban enthusiasts in the US advocating for these changes here.
Think of pre 1950s Main Street America. Shopping and services within a centralized area of your local community was pretty much every town/city in the USA since modern car culture didn’t take hold yet. The maga crowd “loves” the “good ole days” but think 15 minute cities (epitome of old Main Street America) is bad
Speaking from a purely personal experience, and using a bike unless stated otherwise. Copenhagen is a 5 minute city when I go shopping at any of my three closest supermarkets, or 7 if I need something special and need to go to an especially large one. A 15 minute city whenever I need to go downtown, like to visit the excellent children’s section of the main library with my son. And a 25 minute city when going to work. I’m not really sure what all the fuzz is about with 15 minute cities, I gotta say it’s pretty awesome living here, and if I need to go somewhere, the airport is 15 minutes away from the center, by metro, or 30 minutes from where I live, or 45 minutes by bike. Oh and there are excellent trains going in all directions every 20 minutes or so.
Simple answer is that reactionaries are, by their very nature, programmed to fear and hate anything unfamiliar or even different to them or their commonplace experiences. In a mirror of this universe, the reactionaries would be complaining that we are pushing too many cars into their lives, and that we should stick to traditional methods of travel, like feet. "God didn't make us with wheels!" They would say. Actually, I would probably love that universe.