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?
. The language of the article was a textbook example of persuasive writing. 
