Doodledog
nanna8
Do we ? I didn’t know.
I don't think 15 minute cities would work in Australia.
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Rishi Sunak and other Tories attack 15 minute cities
(176 Posts)A Sorbonne professor, Carlos Moreno, has formulated the idea of 15 Minute Cities. These will be somewhere where " where inhabitants have access to all the services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity - and shares ideas for making urban areas adapt to humans, not the other way around"
According to the NY Times Moreno is now Public Enemy No 1 because of the widespread belief that he wants to ban cars. He does not but he hopes that by people being able to walk or cycle for 15 minutes to get to what they need dependency on cars will be reduced.
This is taken from Forbes Magazine:
After coining the term “15-minute city” Moreno was invited to give talks internationally. But with this growing profile—and the swift acceptance of his simple-to-grasp defining concept—he became the target of hate. He is often on the receiving end of personal abuse on social media.
“They insult me, call me human trash, Neo-fascist or a rotten Latino,” he told me by email last year. He has critics from the left and the right, but in an all too typical Venn diagram of tinfoilhattedness they share climate denial, downplay of Covid harms, and anti-vaxxer beliefs.
“Their lies are enormous,” he exclaimed.
“You will be locked in your neighborhood; cameras will signal who can go out; if your mother lives in another neighborhood, you will have to ask for permission to see her and so on.”
He added, in disgust, they “sometimes post pictures of concentration camps.”
“The conspiracists see a big global agreement,” he said.
“As the UN-Habitat, the World Economic Forum, the C40 Global Cities Climate Network, and the Federation of United Local Governments, among others, have supported the [15-Minute-City] concept, it feeds their fantasies that I am involved in the ‘invisible leadership’ of the world.”
Moreno has been shocked to see his concept derided by the U.K. government, with the U.K. transport secretary trashing 15-Minute Cities in his speech today at the annual Conservative Party conference in Manchester.
“Right across our country, there is a Labour-backed movement to make cars harder to use, to make driving more expensive, and to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want,” Transport Secretary Mark Harper told the conference.
“I am calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities,” he added.
“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 can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV,” Harper said.
According to The Sun, Prime Minister Sunak “takes aim at so-called ‘“15 Minute Cities’” to make everyday essentials bike friendly - vowing to make sure drivers are not ‘aggressively restricted’.”
“Associating the 15-Minute City again with so-called liberty-restricting measures is tantamount to aligning with the most radical and anti-democratic elements of this movement.”
This is from Politico:
Broadly, the idea is to cut down on long commutes and car emissions, and improve people's quality of life by ensuring they have access to quality services where they live.
That's not the way it's being seen in Oxford.
News that the city council adopted a plan to embrace the 15-minute city model prompted fierce backlash, with local groups and public figures alleging that authorities planned to restrict residents to their immediate neighborhoods and strictly police their movements. A rally attend by thousands in Oxford last month claimed to be protesting plans to reconfigure the city as a "Stalinist-style, closed city" and the eventual enslavement of local citizens.
The outrage has been fanned by popular right-wing media figures and politicians, who seized on the issue as an outrageous example of government overreach.
"You will only have 15 minutes of freedom here in the U.K.," said the far-right media personality Katy Hopkins, who compared the scheme to pandemic-era lockdowns and claimed authorities will use facial recognition technology to police residents.
News commentator Mark Dolan denounced the plan as "dystopian," and similarly warned that the city planned to use "numberplate recognition cameras, installed everywhere" to create "a surveillance culture that would make Pyongyang envious."
The issue even made its way to the House of Commons, where Tory MP Nick Fletcher described 15-minute cities as an "international socialist concept" whose ultimate purpose was to "take away personal freedoms."
Although these alarmist claims of mass surveillance and loss of individual freedom are indeed far-fetched, the anxiety and unrest unleashed in Oxford fits into a broader picture of local pushback across Europe against green measures that are perceived as an attack on personal freedoms — particularly when they affect personal car use.
Given that most people are used to our high streets becoming deserts with only charity shops and cafes and not much else, surely the idea of the facilities that we need being much closer to our homes, surely the 15 minute city is a good idea?
What do you think?
Nice idea, I suppose. I can't figure it working well. Market towns are far spread, I drive minimum 20 minutes, couldn't walk with groceries.
DaisyAnneReturns
Is any council suggesting a "magic wand"?
Leeds included 20-minute neighbourhoods in their current and ongoing plans.
This quotes people who live in such an area, not people with fears imagined by a far-right government.
Leeds included 20-minute neighbourhoods in their current and ongoing plans
AKA suburbs as we used to call them.
With local shops.
All the same, I don't understand how every small area can have a vet, a library, a nursery, a cinema, restaurants, cafes, shopping and various medical/paramedical offerings. It just isn't commercially viable. The cynic in me can't help thinking that what will happen will be Utopian areas with all the facilities - possibly built with money from government incentives, and others without any
It's idealistic, a vision of what life was like years ago through rose-tinted spectacles. The reality was often quite different.
Shopping habits have changed, working practices changed and people have changed. Their expectations are more than they were many years ago although those who strove for something different (not necessarily proving to be better) have always moved, either to cities or emigrating, moving to where the work and opportunities are. Older people often relocate to idyllic country areas without thinking through what amenities will be nearby for them as they age.
We had 15 minute "cities" but by and large, they have disappeared because people's habits have changed. Planners can plan but trying to persuade people to go back to what life was like decades ago is the hurdle - what do people want?
How viable is it all financially for small businesses or for businesses to operate in many smaller locations?
Norah
Nice idea, I suppose. I can't figure it working well. Market towns are far spread, I drive minimum 20 minutes, couldn't walk with groceries.
It's worked in other countries for well over a decade. It's working in dome of our cities. The only people making others worry are the Tories and those who enjoy their culture wars.
Callistemon21
^All the same, I don't understand how every small area can have a vet, a library, a nursery, a cinema, restaurants, cafes, shopping and various medical/paramedical offerings. It just isn't commercially viable. The cynic in me can't help thinking that what will happen will be Utopian areas with all the facilities - possibly built with money from government incentives, and others without any^
It's idealistic, a vision of what life was like years ago through rose-tinted spectacles. The reality was often quite different.
Shopping habits have changed, working practices changed and people have changed. Their expectations are more than they were many years ago although those who strove for something different (not necessarily proving to be better) have always moved, either to cities or emigrating, moving to where the work and opportunities are. Older people often relocate to idyllic country areas without thinking through what amenities will be nearby for them as they age.
We had 15 minute "cities" but by and large, they have disappeared because people's habits have changed. Planners can plan but trying to persuade people to go back to what life was like decades ago is the hurdle - what do people want?
How viable is it all financially for small businesses or for businesses to operate in many smaller locations?
Best post on the thread.
DaisyAnneReturns
Norah
Nice idea, I suppose. I can't figure it working well. Market towns are far spread, I drive minimum 20 minutes, couldn't walk with groceries.
It's worked in other countries for well over a decade. It's working in dome of our cities. The only people making others worry are the Tories and those who enjoy their culture wars.
The only people making others worry are the Tories and those who enjoy their culture wars
Rubbish!
😁
Labour Councillor told us our children couldn't go to the local school, it hadn't been built for them, they had to be bussed elsewhere.
There seems to be a lot of blowing the idea out of all proportion on here. I am sure we can all guess why. I imagine Sunak will be happy to have his neglect the example of what the exaggerators hold up as success.
In the city of Leeds the residents wanted infrastructure to be more accessible and the council went for gearing the putting of shops and services in communities and within walking distance of people’s homes. Why is that a bad thing? Whether retail businesses are either stopped or encourage has always been very much in the hands of Councillors. If it wasn't many more towns would already be bereft of their M & S, etc.
But Rishi and his supporters apparently say "no". They know better than the people and their local councils apparently - and the want to bring their "culture" of telling others (including American States it appears) what everyone may or may not do.
From my last visit to England it looked like town centres were
being deserted anyway as more shopping takes place on line.
I live in a small town in France and use the small shops but
my main shopping is a 10 minute drive away at a large centre.
It works for me. I have also used the local bus service which
takes me to the shopping centre for 1€20, cheaper than my
car. 20 years ago there was barely a bus service here but they
changed the policy and the price, it works
DAR how does that explain the local shops closing down? When we moved here, we used to have a bread shop, a fish and chip shop, and a pet grooming place, a pub, a post office and an off licence at the bottom of the hill. Despite the masses of houses at the bottom of the hill, there is now an off licence. Our Labour council has site plans for over 500 more houses-and one shop.
That doesn’t sound like a 15 minute city, or even a hamlet.
I'm sorry Mollygo, how does what explain local shops closing down?
Mollygo many fish and chip shops went out of business due to oil costs. Post offices have been closed everywhere with small post office counters operating from newsagents. Pubs also have been closing down everywhere.
However in my corner of Utopia all these services and more remain. I am not being flippant but one of the nearest villages is mentioned in The Doomsday Book and we have a continuous connection with three villages in a straight line leading to a major town with a major shopping mall and brand new cinema. Do you not have umpteen nail bars? Not that this is progress….
We've still got our fish and chip shops and very good they are too.
Other shops have disappeared, blaming internet shopping.
Supermarkets being able to sell alcoholic drinks forced the closure of off-licences many years ago.
Choice? People do like choice which many small shops, unless niche which is reflected in the price, are unable to offer.
DAR I do not think anyone is saying that 15 minute cities are a bad thing, just that we are not sure how effective they would be.
We get too many ideas that start as sounding wonderful way of improving life and end up being disasters. Have a look at the films produced in the 1950s and 60s of the joys of living in new high rise flats in estates. Streets in the sky, where everyone would socialise on the balconies. Ideals soon to collapse as people bemoaned the lost of old neighbours and the communities they used to live in, the communal outside areas, that looked so beguiling in architects drawings, turned out to be bleak concrete spaces where the wind howled and there was nowhere for children to gather.
I am always deeply suspicious of ideas that begin rolling like wagons carrying everyone away with the latest idea.
I am all in favour in getting facilities spread around, but as we are always told that, for example a big medical centre can offer more facilities than lots of small GP practices, as dental practices are also getting larger enabling them to have state of the art facilities and every other service considers it can offer a better service if it consolidates and centralises, i am deeply cynical about the whole idea.
I still think there is a lot of over reaction Monica and it has been stirred by recognisable sources.
We vote for our local authorities, we can even stand for them so this is democratic and above board.
This is about cities. However, those who insist on directly attacking other GNetters with a carelessly flung "rubbish" have been talking about anything but cities.
This may be where we now are. The problems aren't the same as "in our day" so solutions will be different. Being hunan we won't get it all right but people who allow others to make them angry when they know so little about what they are being angry about - it just seems so pointless and crass.
Thank you for your politeness and your reasoned reply - even if I don't wholly agree.
those who insist on directly attacking other GNetters
😁
That is so ironic it is risible.
Why is that Callistemon?
DaisyAnneReturns
I'm sorry Mollygo, how does what explain local shops closing down?
If there is such a positive impact of having 15 minute facilities, why have they closed? Why will the new estate have one shop?
Well you are chucking around phrases such as far right on this thread Daisy.
As I say the phrase far right is used with such abandon these days it is meaningless, I just laugh when I see it used in this way.
Me too.
What is 'right wing' or 'left wing' about any of this? I often wonder what people understand by the terms, as they are so often used to insult people who just have a different point of view from the person using them.
I've no idea about your new estate. Why would I? Where is the estate? Which city are you in? Which council. You seem to think I'm a mind reader! Do you know if your council is working towards this in your city?
Your local shops may have closed for many reasons that are nothing to do with this. In fact if your area has been dying for some time it will almost certainly be nothing to do this.
Just to help you find out if your council is going down this route, different councils have slightly different names for it. Edinburgh, for instance, calls them 20-minute neighbourhoods.
I don't think you can compare that to a personal insult directed at an individual member Galaxy. Perhaps you would like to check with GNHQ?
I think there are few who would suggest that the recent PMs haven't taken their party to the far-right. Or do you believe people's views should be sensored - by you?
Yes I am well known on here for my support of censorship. 
You will be, if you keep saying that I may not call those who are a long way to the right of me, and even further to the right of those on here on the left, "far-right".
Could you point out where I said you couldnt call people far right.
I said that I found its usage meaningless. And that it is so over used it makes me laugh.
Similar to the use of nazi and the tiresome use of the phrase culture war.
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