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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?
growstuff Front page of the Oxford Times this week: LTN's 'Traders angry as LTNs made permanent' Followed by an article saying how traders are complaining that LTNs are making access to a major shopping area difficult so that footfall is dropping and several shops have closed down or moved elsewhere. So much for 15 minute cities if reduced turnover means all the shops move out.
Dinahmo
M0nica
Dinahmo They are not called cottage hospitals anymore, they are called community hospitals and they can be found in almost every town in Britain.
The three towns near me all have community hospitals. As do several others a bit further afieldThat's good to know.
My local cottage/community hospital is actually expanding. It doesn't offer operations or scans using expensive equipment. However, it does offer a range of outpatient clinics and services, which means that residents have to travel less.
M0nica
DAR I have yet to discover that Oxford city council has issued any plans showing how they are going to ensure that all the services, essential for a 15 minute city are in place. The LTN are a crucial part of the 15 minute city plan, whatever the council may say. They have installed barriers and bollards that make it almost impossible to move across the city without going out to the ring road first. Its intentions is dlearly to discourage people living in those areas to own or use cars.
If people do not own or use cars, then they need to have allt he services they require close at hand. I have yet to see a document spelling out what services the council considers to be essential for 15 cities and how they intend to ensure that se will be in place.
As I said, with the medical authorities busy building big new medical centres and amalgamating practices and expanding existing practices rather than establishing new ones in communities are expanding rapidly as new housing goes up, They are working entirely counter to te 15 minute city.
So isn't it about time they had a rethink? And tried to follow the principles of 15 minute cities?
Allsorts
Just election talk, promises made to be broken
You shouldn’t judge by past experience over the last decades. It might be different this time.
Just election talk, promises made to be broken
M0nica
Dinahmo They are not called cottage hospitals anymore, they are called community hospitals and they can be found in almost every town in Britain.
The three towns near me all have community hospitals. As do several others a bit further afield
That's good to know.
A local plan is not the same as a detailed plan about what services the council want to see in the 15 minute city and how they are going to ensure they are present.
I go back to my point about the provision of GP services.
Not once they’ve passed the Inspectorate. However, a significant number are currently delayed, in response to the government proposing changes to planning legislation, which would have undermined or negated the LPA’s plans in some (or many) ways.
It’s another example of the real life consequences of the government’s short-termite and inconsistency.
The thing is, we know all about local plans, hollow laugh!
They get changed at the drop of a hat or vanish altogether.
I have yet to discover that Oxford city council has issued any plans showing how they are going to ensure that all the services, essential for a 15 minute city are in place
It’s the draft 2040 Local Plan. It’s passed council Cabinet, having been through three consultations and revisions (2021, 2022 and earlier this year). It will have a fourth consultation, planned for this November and December, and be revised into its final format in time for a formal Cabinet decision, itself in time for the Plan to be submitted to the central government appointed Planning Inspectorate in March 2024.
Most, if not all, of the documents relating to this are on the council’s website.
Dinahmo They are not called cottage hospitals anymore, they are called community hospitals and they can be found in almost every town in Britain.
The three towns near me all have community hospitals. As do several others a bit further afield
DAR I have yet to discover that Oxford city council has issued any plans showing how they are going to ensure that all the services, essential for a 15 minute city are in place. The LTN are a crucial part of the 15 minute city plan, whatever the council may say. They have installed barriers and bollards that make it almost impossible to move across the city without going out to the ring road first. Its intentions is dlearly to discourage people living in those areas to own or use cars.
If people do not own or use cars, then they need to have allt he services they require close at hand. I have yet to see a document spelling out what services the council considers to be essential for 15 cities and how they intend to ensure that se will be in place.
As I said, with the medical authorities busy building big new medical centres and amalgamating practices and expanding existing practices rather than establishing new ones in communities are expanding rapidly as new housing goes up, They are working entirely counter to te 15 minute city.
I'm not sure when I became responsible for all the UK councils MOnica . But as we both delight in Venn diagrams I will try and give an answer 
.
Oxford Council says it has set out to become a 15-minute city by the next decade under the 2040 local plan.
They also say people have conflated it with Oxfordshire County Council's Low Traffic Neighbourhood scheme, where traffic filters are set to be installed on six roads in early 2024.
The joint Oxford councils issued a statement saying that "misinformation online" has linked the two schemes to each other, adding that the 15-minute neighbourhood idea aims to "support and add services, not restrict them".
There obviously has been misinformation or we wouldn't have had some of the posts we have seen on here. I think hospitals are outside both schemes and would be more affected but what happens the NHS, but I don't know if that is the case.
It really is obvious Sunak et al are stirring in the hope of undermining people's confidence. Change happens and it seems to me the plans are designed to make things better. I do wonder if Sunak would have been against the change from horse to car; he does seem to be a bit of a Luddite when it comes to holding back other people's lives although noticeable not his own. He seems to want to destroy schemes rather than encourage them to be the best they can be.
I was interested to read that there are still some cottage hospitals. I thought that they'd all disappeared.
There are many "re-education" ie convalescence homes in France for people who no longer need to be looked after in hospital. A friend who fell and broke his hip is now in one and has been for a number of weeks because of further complications. These homes have a doctor and facilities for physiotherapy as well as other services, such as psychotherapy. My friend's convalescent home is in a nearby town with a population of about 1150 people. It means that his wife and family can reach him quickly and visiting hours are long.
Reading some of the recent posts it seems to me that not everyone has read and inwardly digested my original post.
How many people live close to their friends and family - not many compared to those whose f & f live hours away, sometimes in a different country?
When I first lived in Suffolk, on the edge of a village I had to drive everywhere, just to buy a pint of milk or stamps. When I moved to Woodbridge I was within easy walking distance of the railway station, cinema and shops (and NHS dentist). I imagine that most people would like to live in a similar situation.
Here in France there is an excellent baker in the village plus a bar/restaurant and also a girl who makes leather goods. Not that she's essential but useful to have.
The traffic restrictions are pushing out all the other things for precedence. It seems the councils can only concentrate on one aspect at a time.
MOnica You have described exactly why 15 minute cities are needed. A big general hospital almost certainly wouldn't be within the 15 minute radius, but if other people didn't have a need to use their cars, it would be easier to access the hospital.
This isn't just about traffic restrictions! It's about planning - initially, for new developments and, long term, when planning permission is given for any new building and infrastructure. The traffic restrictions and 15 minute cities seem to have coalesced. They're not the same.
DAR. I live near Oxford. I am cursed by having to try and access Oxford hospitals recently.
Oxford has an air pollution problem and, as I read it the main purpose of their traffic reduction schemes are to reduce air pollution, with which I am entirely in agreement.
But if you are going to implement a 15 minute city, you need to do more than just slow traffic, you need to come up with a published scheme of how this will be part of an integrated plan to make sure that all the neighbourhood facilities are there for people to be able access within an easy walk.
Despit what you write about Venn diagrams, and I fully understand them. many services are being planned and predicated on catchement areas far larger than any Venn diagram can encompass.
One of our local towns has a population rapidly heading for 50,000 and 3 doctors practices. Plans to bring medical services to the rapidly growing population does not envisage a new surgery easily accessed from these new estates, it envisages doubling the size of the least accessible practice by doubling it in size. The other 2 practices are almost side-to-side in the town centre, accessible by bus and car, and with public car parks as well as practice car parks but as most of the surrounding area is commercial and industrial premises, the proportion of patients within a 15 minute walk is limited.
Another local town there is just one medical practice and that has recently relocated from the town centre to a huge purpose built medical centre on the outskirts of the town. The majority of the town's inhabitants are no longer within a 15 minute walk.
As I said I am all for 15 minute towns. It is just that everyone seems to immediately have jumped on 'the lets make using cars more difficult bandwagon and no one has thought through the realities first and properly faced up to the other changes in infrastructure that are necessary to make it work and it looks like descending, as it has in Oxford, to being little more than a traffic calming plan that leads to people making longer journeys, because moving around the area means first driving out to the ring road and then back in, rather than using the shorter cross routes that used to be possible.
No problem!
growstuff
GrannyGravy13
Growstuff I have two friends who live here who have had their operations in your Cottage Hospital in the last six months.
It is functioning as an overflow facility for the entire County at the moment.Impossible! The hospital I mean doesn't do operations.
There is a cottage hospital in the North of our County which does operations, I have obviously mixed them up, my apologies.
fancythat
And what about the people living in Oxford currently. Who are objecting currently.
Do their feelings and lives not matter?
They're protesting about traffic restrictions, which aren't the same thing at all.
fancythat
*where inhabitants have access to all the services they need to live, learn and thrive within their immediate vicinity*
From the OP.
No mention of friends and family.
* and shares ideas for making urban areas adapt to humans, not the other way around"*
Concrete alone cannot adapt to humans.
*surely the idea of the facilities that we need being much closer to our homes, surely the 15 minute city is a good idea?
*
You yourself dont mention friends and family either in the op. Only facilities needed.
Most of the comments on here are devoid of people.
I suspect you might be happy with AI and robots providing the "services" and "facilities" as well.
Perhaps that is your idea of utopia.
It certainly is not mine.
But Nobody would stop you visiting friends and family anywhere else in the country or the world. You seem to have got hold of the wrong idea.
GrannyGravy13
Growstuff I have two friends who live here who have had their operations in your Cottage Hospital in the last six months.
It is functioning as an overflow facility for the entire County at the moment.
Impossible! The hospital I mean doesn't do operations.
We will eventually have differently powered cars and, hopefully trains, busses and trams we want to use
I have been waiting since birth for better public transport for all.
I no longer hold my breath.
I still think this is tin hat country when you accuse people who are trying to improve lives of those in places you don't live in as being part of some devious plot.
I can see you really do believe that it is all just trying to improve lives for some.
I will leave you to it.
I can see that applies to the end of what you have written as well.
DaisyAnneReturns
GrannyGravy13
Growstuff I have two friends who live here who have had their operations in your Cottage Hospital in the last six months.
It is functioning as an overflow facility for the entire County at the moment.No idea what that us about Granny. I have tried giving you facts but you want to believe something other. I have better thing to do than have that level of conversation.
My reply was to Growstuff
We live in the same County
Please do not address me rudely.
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