The 15 Minute City

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. In February, 2023, protesters took to the streets of Oxford, England. Many were wearing yellow safety vests and holding flags and signs with complaints about the local government.

[AUDIO FROM PROTEST]

CHRIS BERUBE: Specifically, they were protesting new urban planning policies being carried out by their city.

ROMAN MARS: That’s producer Chris Berube.

CHRIS BERUBE: Now, under normal circumstances, a protest like this might get a little bit of local media attention and then disappear. But this one was different. Thousands of people showed up, and it was part of a bigger trend.

ROMAN MARS: Last year, there were demonstrations happening in countries around the world protesting against an urban planning concept called the “15-minute city.”

CHRIS BERUBE: These protestors were angry, saying the 15-minute city represented fascism or socialism or some kind of a human rights violation, which was all really over the top because, as a planning concept, the 15-minute city is completely inoffensive.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: In a nutshell, the 15-minute city concept is the idea that everything that a person needs within a city should be theoretically reachable within 15 minutes of their home by either walking or active travel or public transport, so that’s cycling, walking, buses, trains…

CHRIS BERUBE: Feargus O’Sullivan is a reporter for Bloomberg CityLab.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: It’s a very simple concept. It’s this idea that basically cities are going to be healthier if you integrate all their uses together.

CHRIS BERUBE: Whenever I’ve tried to explain the 15-minute city to people, their reaction has usually been, “Oh! I mean, that sounds nice.” How could you argue against having a supermarket or a daycare down the street from your house?

ROMAN MARS: But in 2023, the 15-minute city entered the world of far-right conspiracy theories, and it became the source of protests, hate speech, and even death threats–all of which shows how even a benign urban planning concept can be demonized by bad faith actors. Okay, so, Chris?

CHRIS BERUBE: Yes, Roman.

ROMAN MARS: We’ve been circling this story for a long time, but we’re finally getting to it now.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, this story’s been in the news for a couple of years, and people have actually been asking us to do this story. But now there’s been a little bit of distance, and it feels like it’s the right time for us to talk about the 15-minute city.

ROMAN MARS: And so we’re going to get into the internet circus around the 15-minute city. But first, let’s talk about where this planning concept originated.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, this concept of a 15-minute city–it was first laid out by this guy.

CARLOS MORENO: Professor Carlos Moreno, Sorbonne University researcher and creator of the 15-minute city concept.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Professor Moreno–he’s this famous urbanist. He’s from Colombia, but he’s lived in France for a long time. And Roman, you and I talked to him. And I found him to be just this really affable guy.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, he’s a delight–So much energy. I enjoyed talking with him, too.

CHRIS BERUBE: Totally! He’s got this constant broad smile–this trim beard. He just brings a lot of positive energy.

CARLOS MORENO: I am Buddhist by my culture. This is very important for having inner peace. And at the same time, I am a scientist.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, before he coined the term 15-minute city, for years, Professor Moreno had been thinking about urban planning. And he concluded, basically, the way that we are laying out cities–it just does not work.

ROMAN MARS: So, let’s talk about what’s wrong with the way we have laid out cities.

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay. So, Roman, we’re going to have to do a little bit of urban planning 101. If you’re a regular listener of 99% Invisible, you probably know these ideas, but we’re going to just recap a few and radically oversimplify some things. Is that okay?

ROMAN MARS: That sounds good.

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay. So, for centuries, towns and cities were laid out in this very central way. Like, you would have a town square with shops and amenities in the center. And then people would kind of encircle that. But in the 20th century, that changed with the advent of modernism and the rise of certain very influential architects.

LE CORBUSIER: The actual problem is to find, again, the condition of nature. And the answer is the major problem of today and tomorrow: the proper occupation of the land.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, that is the voice of Le Corbusier.

ROMAN MARS: Corbu!

CHRIS BERUBE: Corbu! Yes. So, he’s a fixture on our show obviously. You certainly know who he is if you’ve listened to enough 99PI. And one of his major concepts was this new way of laying out cities that he introduced in the ’20s, which he called “Radiant Cities.”

ROMAN MARS: And so his idea was to have cities where people lived in tall buildings, which were separated by green space–and people would live away from the noise and the grime of factory life.

CHRIS BERUBE: Exactly. And another one of his big ideas is that a city should be broken up into functional sectors. So, this is the concept that people should live in one zone and then work in another zone. And all of that culminates with a paper called the Athens Charter, which he published in 1933.

ROMAN MARS: And so the Athens Charter basically lays out zoning as we understand it today. It said that people should live in one part of the city, work in another, and this was just the way things were done.

CHRIS BERUBE: And urban planners take up Corbu’s ideas after World War II. And this makes a huge difference in how cities are planned. So, suddenly, we have zoning. We have residential areas where you can only build housing and then areas where you can only build factories and then areas where you can only put up offices and businesses. And that’s something that really takes effect post-war, along with a second major trend, which is the rise of cars.

CARLOS MORENO: The automotive city is a very short period in the history of cities.

CHRIS BERUBE: This, again, is Professor Carlos Moreno.

CARLOS MORENO: Massive production of cars has started when Mr. Henry Ford has produced the first Model T. The worldwide presence of massive cars is just after the second war. What was the impact, just in seven decades, of the presence of cars?

ROMAN MARS: So, we’ve just spent an entire year talking about Robert Moses and how American cities became centered around freeways and driving. I mean, postwar cities around the world became more car-centric. And urban planners were building more roads and highways all the time.

CHRIS BERUBE: Exactly. So, with zoning, people are getting separated from things like work and school and movie theaters–leisure. And more and more people are taking cars to get to these places.

ROMAN MARS: And to be clear, this really is a phenomenon we’re seeing in North American cities after World War II. This is not necessarily the case everywhere.

CHRIS BERUBE: Right. Absolutely. So, Professor Moreno–he’s looking at these developments and he’s thinking, “Okay, this is not sustainable.” So, in 2016, he pitches this concept called the 15-minute city as a climate change solution. Basically, all the important stuff should be 15 minutes away on foot or by bicycle.

ROMAN MARS: And I feel like this is really straightforward. Like, this idea predates him certainly. Many older cities are just naturally like this already because they were laid out before cars and zoning.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: It’s a very simple concept and something that Carlos Moreno would admit, too, is that it is not a new concept. This is the direction in which planning has been moving pretty much from the late 20th century, starting back in the ’60s with people like Jane Jacobs.

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s Feargus O’Sullivan again from CityLab, invoking the patron saint of walkable cities, Jane Jacobs. And by the late 20th century, a lot of these ideas were becoming best practices in urban planning. So, Professor Moreno takes all these ideas, and he basically just gives them a new package, right? And that’s why, I think, the idea of the 15-minute city really resonated with people in this fresh way.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: What I think Carlos Moreno’s idea did that revolutionized this is it allowed people to sit at the center of that idea because, when you talk about a 15-minute city, you can sit there and say, “Okay, what’s within 15 minutes of my home? I do have a supermarket, I do have a pub, I don’t have a hospital, etc.” You can work through it, and immediately it becomes humanized. You think, “What do I need? What do I have, and what do I lack?”

ROMAN MARS: And to be clear, it’s pretty unrealistic to have everything within a 15-minute walking distance. And Professor Moreno totally acknowledges this. But at least ideally you’d have the most essential stuff close by.

CARLOS MORENO: This is not a question to build a Louvre Museum every 15 minutes. It is not a question to build a cancer hospital every 50 minutes.

ROMAN MARS: So, I mean, the concept sounds nice–it sounds simple–but how does it actually work?

CHRIS BERUBE: So, there’s no one size fits all version of this, but there are some key policy ideas that have become associated with the 15-minute city. And one of them is reducing strict, single-use zoning. So, we’re no longer going to have residential areas and business areas. Instead, you would make sure that people are living a lot closer to where they work.

CARLOS MORENO: We want to mix the uses for having in the same area offices for working, areas for living, green areas, parks, public spaces for people, cultural activities, medical services, leisure activities, in order to offer a diversity of services.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, less zoning is one policy. Another might be restricting car traffic in certain areas. So, you can pedestrianize roads or you can say cars are not allowed in during these hours–you can have congestion pricing. There’s lots of versions of that.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: Rather than saying cars will be banned, cities will be rethought so that cars no longer have such a dominant space. Instead of saying you have six-car lanes converging on a roundabout, you just have two. And then the rest could be opened up and it could be paved and you could have greenery and you could have sports facilities. So, I think it’s basically about taking the vibrancy of the town square–that vibrancy that we all recognize if we go to tourist places–and having it everywhere all the way across the urban fabric.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, there are a few more ideas Carlos Moreno has mentioned in connection with the 15-minute city, like more affordable housing and better public transit. But really the 15-minute radius thing and reducing the centrality of cars–that’s the crux of the philosophy.

ROMAN MARS: And as O’Sullivan pointed out, there are cities that actually already do this. There are cities that are already kind of close to being the 15-minute city, especially in Europe. And this is just trying to replicate what a lot of older European cities are like.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah. But then the 15-minute city also gives them kind of some language to what it is that they’re doing. So, a couple of cities actually jump on the bandwagon right away. They say, “We want to be 15-minute cities.” One of them is Shanghai, and one of them very famously is Carlos Moreno’s hometown. It’s Paris. So, in 2014, Anne Hidalgo was elected mayor. And a few years after that, she made the 15-minute city pretty central to their city planning. And she actually named Carlos Moreno as an advisor. So, Paris started implementing a bunch of these policy ideas, partly under the guise of having a more livable city, and also around the concept of fighting climate change.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: They reduced car lanes and they increased the number of cycle lanes into the city center. They pedestrianized certain areas, they made other areas much, much less car accessible, and they have tried to increase the green areas by as much as possible partly because–like so many paces–Paris is suffering from extreme heat in the summer, and they’re desperate to try and cool that down.

CHRIS BERUBE: And I got to say, there is a visible difference in the city. You see a lot more people on bikes. You see areas where cars cannot go in Paris now–a lot of green spaces where people can walk. So, Paris took up the 15-minute city as this kind of organizing principle. But something happened in 2020 that really just thrust it into the spotlight of global urban planning.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: I think the reason it came into the media and into public discussion with such powerful force was due to the pandemic. It’s very much that–lockdowns–suddenly everyone is concentrated in their local areas.

ROMAN MARS: And because kind of everything had changed, we were rethinking everything about cities.

CHRIS BERUBE: Totally.

ROMAN MARS: Why do we live next to each other? What is work for? And one of the things that was super clear as people were walking more and trying to find ways to interact was that it was really nice to be close to amenities.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah! And lots of mayors and urban planners–they start taking this up, too. They’re hearing this from people. So, in the wake of COVID, we’re seeing lots of cities passing resolutions and saying, “We want to be 15-minute cities. We want to be more like 15-minute cities.” So, Buenos Aires, Busan in South Korea… It’s not just big cities though. It’s not just global capitals. There’s also some fairly unexpected places that want to become 15-minute cities.

ROMAN MARS: Like what?

CHRIS BERUBE: So, one American city that developed a plan to become a 15-minute city was Cleveland, Ohio.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. I mean, I’ve spent some time in Cleveland, Ohio. It’s not especially dense. It’s not that walkable a city, as I remember.

CHRIS BERUBE: No, totally. But Cleveland’s planning commission–they set up a pilot program to change the city zoning with the goal of becoming a 15-minute city. And another municipality– I was surprised by this. It’s a Canadian city I never would’ve expected to take this up.

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] It always comes back to Canada with you.

CHRIS BERUBE: I am guilty as charged as Resident Canadian Guy on 99% Invisible.

CARLOS MORENO: The 15-minute city has become a very worldwide popular movement–in North America, for example, in Canada, in Edmonton, close to Toronto…

CHRIS BERUBE: Respectfully to Professor Moreno, Edmonton is not close to Toronto at all. That is wrong.

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] Yeah. It’s, like, days and days drive away, right?

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, I looked it up. It’s, like, a 36-hour drive if you do it straight. But I have to be honest, I was surprised to hear Edmonton was planning to become a 15-minute city because it just kind of sounded like a tall order to me. It’s one of those places where, in theory, you can get around without a car. Lots of people do, but it’s not super walkable in places.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: It’s a lot more challenging. It’s not impossible, but the default is obviously the car, at this point.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, this is somebody who, I would say, knows a thing or two about getting around in Edmonton.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: Hello, my name is Erin Rutherford. I’m a city counselor in Edmonton, Alberta. And I represent a ward in the northwest of the city.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, when Erin joined the city council, Edmonton had just approved a new city plan that was based around the 15-minute city because they saw their population growing really fast, actually. They were adding a ton of new cars on the road, and it just didn’t seem like a good idea to keep going in that direction. So, under the new city plan, the city would be more walkable. It would be broken up into districts–they’re saying “districts”–across the city of Edmonton.

ROMAN MARS: And I’m guessing the residents of each district are going to be 15 minutes away from various amenities.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So, the idea was that each district would have a park and a school and all the things you need within a close proximity.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: Seeing the trend of more people having to go further and further for work for the services that they need because our city’s footprint was growing and growing out rather than up, how do we ensure that we’re also building a climate resilient city in a city that allows people to not have to drive an hour one way in traffic?

CHRIS BERUBE: So, by 2022, Paris, Edmontonand–according to Moreno–dozens of places around the world have taken up this urban planning concept. But as we know, from here on out, things get very rough.

ROMAN MARS: So, when we come back, how the far right made the 15-minute city and Carlos Moreno into the boogeyman…

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ROMAN MARS: So, we’re back with Chris Berube. And now we have to talk about the messy conspiracy part.

CHRIS BERUBE: Unfortunately, yes. So, in 2020, the 15-minute city is becoming popular with urban planners and all these places. But around this time, there was also a major spike in awful political rhetoric. So, Roman, I mean, you remember what it was like in the summer of 2020.

ROMAN MARS: It was a brutal time. It was terrible.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, absolutely. And some of the rhetoric–especially far-right rhetoric–it was spilling over into the conversation about urban planning.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: There were a lot of conspiracy theories around lockdowns. There was a lot of people that found lockdowns enormously stressful and then were tending to see the underlying politics of that as inherently sinister. And I think actually that was the springboard; anti-lockdown activism bled into anti-15-minutes cities activism.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, that’s Feargus O’Sullivan again. He’s a reporter at CityLab who says that these online posters were taking this concept and their imaginations were just running wild. So, they were starting to make these giant leaps in logic.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: I suppose the idea of– People have heard 15 minutes and then think that cities are going to be portioned into 15-minute zones that are going to be controlled and that you will therefore need some to pay a fee, pay a toll, or have some kind of permit to get in and out of these zones.

ROMAN MARS: And of course, there’s no part of the 15-minute city that says anything about this whatsoever.

CHRIS BERUBE: No.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, there’s congestion pricing; maybe it’s kind of mixing with that as an idea. But there’s nothing about the 15-minute city inherently that involves anything remotely like this. So, then how does this conspiracy form and then spread?

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, it’s not clear who started it exactly. But it bubbled up from kind of the usual far-right corners of the internet–some very unpleasant websites that I had to visit to research the story–with people saying, “This 15-minute city thing–it sounds a lot like lockdowns.” And as this is happening, people are making all these leaps in logic–that you’re going to need a permit to leave your neighborhood and things like that.

ROMAN MARS: You can attribute some of this to ignorance, but a lot of this is just bad faith because there’s nothing in the policy that says this at all.

CHRIS BERUBE: Totally. But there are these conspiracy theorists who are kind of twisting it, and they’re actually taking it to an even more extreme level than licenses to leave your neighborhood.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: It is kind of potentially a form of tyrannical, authoritarian control. Even some people assess some sort of harbinger of a world government.

ROMAN MARS: It always comes down to that–with people getting paranoid about a world government.

CHRIS BERUBE: Totally. So, this conspiracy theory–it’s picking up momentum. Eventually, it all gets kind of lumped in with this idea called the Great Reset. So, Roman, do you know about the Great Reset theory?

ROMAN MARS: Right. I know about this.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah. So, in 2020, the World Economic Forum, during the pandemic, proposed this project they called the “Great Reset.” They’re having these conversations everybody’s having, like, “Oh, should we question some assumptions? What if we did things differently? What if we had a more sustainable world–things like this?” But they package it as the Great Reset, and they make these videos promoting it, one of which is narrated by King Charles.

KING CHARLES: We have an incredible opportunity to create entirely new sustainable industries, investing in nature as the true engine of our economy…

ROMAN MARS: I mean, they immediately run into this branding problem because the Great Reset is a really ominous sounding title.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, especially when it’s coming from the World Economic Forum and the British royal family. Yeah, that sounds not great. And if you’re inclined to think there is a plot to start a one-world government, this might contribute to that. And some of these right-wing people on the internet are suggesting global elites are using COVID as a way to initiate the Great Reset. This is where their thinking is going. And then those ideas start to go mainstream. It jumps from these far-right social media echo chambers to the general population. And that’s because of a pretty notorious right-wing internet guy named Jordan Peterson. So, Roman, how much do you know about Jordan Peterson?

ROMAN MARS: You know, I don’t honestly know a whole lot. I try to avoid him as much as possible because everything I’ve sort of encountered has been pretty loathsome.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, no, this is a good plan for your mental health. So, Jordan Peterson was a professor of psychology at my alma mater, actually, the University of Toronto, where I went to university.

ROMAN MARS: The fighting leaves!

CHRIS BERUBE: The Varsity Blues, but thank you. So, he doesn’t teach there anymore, actually. So, over the last decade, Peterson has become pretty notorious. He has these ideas about masculinity and refusing to use transgender people’s pronouns. Very famously, he advocated for the all-meat diet. So, believe it or not, I’m not a huge fan of the thoughts and works of Jordan Peterson.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it doesn’t sound like you have a lot in common besides your alma mater.

CHRIS BERUBE: No, no. But New Year’s Eve 2022, Jordan Peterson tweets some charts about the 15-minute city and the Great Reset. So, he’s amplifying this, right? And he adds a quote saying… [HIGH-PITCHED] “The great–” No, I’m not going to do his voice. I’m sorry.

ROMAN MARS: I wouldn’t know it if you did.

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s a very Muppety sounding– Just trust me that it’s very Muppety sounding–more so than mine somehow. Okay. The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot, tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re allowed to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of this idea…” So, this keeps going. It keeps spreading all over the place. And within a couple months, by February, 2023, there is the protest taking place in downtown Oxford, in England. Thousands of people show up. They are carrying signs that say things like, “No to 15-Minute Cities,” and then “Save Our Freedom of Movement, Worship, and Family Life.”

ROMAN MARS: So, they’re really lumping a lot of grievances in one message there.

CHRIS BERUBE: It becomes this weird magnet for a lot of things. And to be clear about this, Oxford was proposing some pretty strict traffic measures. They were really going to limit when cars could come into the downtown. You could still go to the downtown, but you just had to walk or take public transit. And this wasn’t even part of their 15-minute city plan, weirdly. But the protesters lumped in this traffic plan and the 15-minute city and all of these other anxieties. And at this point–the Oxford protest–this is actually the first time Carlos Moreno is becoming aware of the internet reaction because they’re actually using his name. They’re actually protesting him in Oxford.

CARLOS MORENO: I was in Paris. I received the photo of the demonstration for saying, “Moreno is Paul Pot,” “Moreno is Hitler,” et cetera, et cetera. It was very, very difficult.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, this is just so baffling and so tragic. Even though a lot of the protesters are completely mischaracterizing his ideas, it still has an effect on him.

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, I mean, at first he’s confused, right? This whole idea sounds ridiculous. He’s an urban policy professor, and now there’s these protesters out there saying he’s at the center of world events.

CARLOS MORENO: This is a psychological bad moment for a scientist because I am a scientist. I’m not a politician, I’m not a candidate–just a scientist.

CHRIS BERUBE: And from there, this idea starts showing up all over the place on the right wing internet.

ARCHIVAL MONTAGE: Protests are popping up around the world against something called 15-minute cities. Now, we’ve covered the 15 minute cities here on the show, and we’ve warned you about this… / “They’ll essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave.” “That’s true? How are they going to put us in there?” “That’s the idea they’re starting to roll out in Europe… / It seems to me that they’re using the climate change narrative to have travel restricted…

ROMAN MARS: I mean, one of the ironic things about this to me, in this whole mishegoss, is that the 15-minute city doesn’t strike me as a left wing idea at all. If anything, it really hearkens back to an old way of thinking about city planning about kind of small towns. It’s kind of weirdly conservative.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, I think you’re right. And I think a lot of city planning people agree with you about that.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: There’s nothing inherently leftist about it. I suppose that maybe a focus on affordable housing might be seen as that, but really it’s ultimately a traditionalist way of thinking. And people with perhaps a more small-c conservative approach to the world are embracing it more, which makes it slightly paradoxical that people that like Jordan Peterson–who are all about going back to some idea of what was a hundred years ago–are so against it.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, after the protest in Oxford–all this stuff on the internet–things actually escalate even more. So, city counselors in Oxford start getting death threats and Professor Moreno starts to get death threats.

CARLOS MORENO: This was a very complicated period for me, for my wife, and for my family because I received a lot of threats–death threats. I was on their police protections. This was a very, very complicated situation.

ROMAN MARS: I cannot stress how weird it is that this delightful, thoughtful man, talking about making cities better for people, is getting death threats.

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s unbelievable. And it’s obviously like, at this point, the entire situation is just clearly out of control.

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: So, it just kind of snowballs in this kind of hysterical climate–a hysterical climate that, of course, is exacerbated by having figures like Mark Harper, a government representative, actually feeding it.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. So, please tell me who Mark Harper is.

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, Mark Harper was actually the minister of transportation for the United Kingdom in 2023. So, he’s one of those people who was appointed during the last days of the British Conservative government. There was lots of chaos. There were a lot of people moving in and out of cabinet.

ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLING] Heads of lettuce. Yeah.

CHRIS BERUBE: There was the head of lettuce, obviously, that out-survived a prime minister. So, October, 2023, Mark Harper is the transportation minister–not for long, as it turns out. And he starts talking about the 15-minute city, and he starts talking a lot like these protestors.

MARK HARPER: What is different, 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 ration who uses the roads and when and they police it all with CCTV…

ROMAN MARS: This is so ridiculous. These are not serious thinkers. These are not serious men.

CHRIS BERUBE: No, no, they’re not. And it’s all coming to a head as cities are trying to implement policies to become more like a 15-minute city. And they’re facing these protests and this pushback. Even somewhere like Edmonton is facing this stuff. Earlier this year, in 2024, Edmonton City Council were going to finalize the city plan, which includes this concept of districts and a 15 minute radius to all of the amenities that you need, like we talked about earlier. And in the spring, they were having public hearings about it. And there were people who brought some reasonable concerns to the table about density–about some specifics of the plan. But there were also lots of people who are repeating these talking points that they clearly got from the internet.

EDMONTON PUBLIC HEARING MONTAGE: My understanding is that this means I will need to stay within my district to meet all my needs so that the city can meet its climate plan objectives… / I don’t think Edmontonians can afford to be part of a renovation experiment of this size so quickly… / No one in the government wants to lose their job and people don’t want to speak up, and that’s why the citizens in the streets are starting to rise. And we need you to hear us, and you’re not hearing us…

CHRIS BERUBE: So, these protesters are coming. This is completely new for an Edmonton city planning meeting. Erin Rutherford admits that there might’ve been something of a branding problem in terms of their proposal that maybe set some people off.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: It’s unfortunate that they’re named districts because a lot of people think that that is very Hunger Games-esque in the visualization that it creates for them. But it’s just a planning term that’s been used since planning has been a profession.

ROMAN MARS: I hadn’t thought about that, but that’s–

CHRIS BERUBE: That is actually– I could sort of see how it conjures that image.

ROMAN MARS: Well, but still, it’s just… It’s the word “district.” You live in a school district, too.

CHRIS BERUBE: You do.

ROMAN MARS: It’s so funny to me that Hunger Games has a bigger footprint than all of social studies education.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, apparently. So Councilor Rutherford says that this kind of ange–it’s pretty new but it’s actually not surprising to her because it’s a tone that she’s hearing pretty much in every part of her job.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: The reality is it’s not just 15-minute communities. It’s police funding. It’s so many topics that we’re talking about right now that are creating those visceral responses from folks.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, municipalities like Edmonton that are pursuing the 15-minute city–they’re faced with this choice, right? “Do we backtrack, or do we forge ahead with this policy that is getting this kind of visceral, angry reaction?”

ROMAN MARS: I mean, if I was facing that kind of pushback, I can imagine backing off. It seems like a completely rational and reasonable thing to do.

CHRIS BERUBE: Totally. And actually what one city did is they just went ahead with the plans, but they just dropped the name “15-minute cities.”

ROMAN MARS: So, it’s like, “This is the 16-minute city.”

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, I think it’s a little bit more subtle than that–just a tiny bit more subtle. But this is actually what happened in Oxford, England. So, that’s the place where they had the massive protest with thousands of people in the streets. They just dropped the name “15-minute cities.”

FEARGUS O’SULLIVAN: You can get rid of the 15-minute city concept and keep the policies because all it is is literally thinking about what’s in your area within a 15 minute radius of your home. Get rid of that concept. You can still work towards low-traffic neighborhoods, greater pedestrianization, tree planting, and all of these things that individually aren’t automatically going to face the same kind of resistance.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, we’ve seen this before when something comes up, like the Green New Deal, and it becomes kind of unpopular and lots of negative associations get attached to it. The people who are really diehards that are for the fundamental concepts therein just stop calling it the Green New Deal. It’s the same thing, and it’s just part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

CHRIS BERUBE: Right, this kind of thing happens all the time.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s smart to me. I don’t know. It just seems like smart politics.

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, I guess so. But there’s other cities who went ahead with these plans, and they kept the name “15-minute cities.” And that’s actually what Edmonton ended up doing in the end.

ROMAN MARS: So, why is that? I mean, it seems like it could be a lot easier to just give it a rebrand.

CHRIS BERUBE: Erin Rutherford explained this to me. So, she said, in her view, it would actually sow distrust if they stopped referencing the 15-minute city and just went ahead with the same plans anyway.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: I think we’re almost doing a disservice by stopping calling it “15-minute cities” because the more we do call it “15-minute cities” and the more nothing substantially changes in people’s lives, the more that becomes, “Oh, my fears didn’t come to reality.” However, if we stop using that language, that actually creates a validation in terms of you might be calling it something different, but now you’re just trying to do the same thing under a different name. And it can actually fuel this trust further.

ROMAN MARS: I can see why she wanted to stick to her guns on this, but what ended up happening in Edmonton then?

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, in June, the city put their plan to a vote. And they kept the language intact, despite all of this protest–despite this pushback. But they did add an amendment to placate some people. So, the amendment says, “The district plan shall not restrict freedom of movement, association, and commerce in accordance with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

ROMAN MARS: And to be clear, this doesn’t change anything at all; this is just an additional thing to make people feel better. There’s a little bit of an act of political theater–just playing along with the game that they’ve set up.

CHRIS BERUBE: Right, because freedom of movement is actually guaranteed under Canadian law. So, it wasn’t necessary at all. And actually, at the beginning, this bothered Erin Rutherford because she was voting on this, right? She was a city councilor, and she was worried about giving credence to disinformation around the 15-minute city.

ERIN RUTHERFORD: My logical brain and my policy best practices brain wanted to say no, but my human side and my heart and realizing that the harm was greater in not giving people that certainty than the harm of making a redundant sentence in a document swayed me.

CHRIS BERUBE: So, the city council adopted the city plan. They added this amendment, and now they’re on this path to bringing in some of these actual policy changes to becoming a 15-minute city. And there’s other cities that are forging ahead with it too, despite everything that happened.

ROMAN MARS: And then, of course, there’s Carlos Moreno–the delightful Carlos Moreno–the father of the 15-minute city.

CHRIS BERUBE: Right. So, for a while, he kept getting these death threats. But eventually those started to calm down and people actually started standing up for him in public. There was this article in The New York Times that was defending him, and he started seeing petitions online.

CARLOS MORENO: The scientists launched an online manifesto for supporting me. In a few days, more than, I think, 5,000 or 6,000 have signed it.

CHRIS BERUBE: Professor Moreno noticed people on the internet were actually starting to move on. And eventually the vitriol and the threats–those stopped. And he even published a book called The 15-Minute City, where he kind of doubles down on these concepts and this whole idea. And I really love that because I’m glad he’s getting this idea out there and he’s promoting it again. But I have to say this whole thing with the 15-minute city just has me really exhausted because, in the next couple of years, I feel like any hope for positive change is going to be at the local level, right? It’s going to be concentrated at the municipal level. And if something like the 15-minute city has to go through this gauntlet–marches and disinformation and death threats–if this is the price of putting forward something like the 15-minute city, how many people realistically are going to stand up and try to make a positive change? How many people are going to be like Carlos Moreno?

ROMAN MARS: Thank you so much, Chris.

CHRIS BERUBE: Thanks, Roman.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. With editing help from Emmett FitzGerald. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Fact checking by Graham Hacia. Carlos Moreno’s book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, is available now. Special thanks this week to Rebecca Rosman, Sheena Rossiter, and Hannah Uguru.

Our Executive Producer is Kathy Tu, our Senior Editor is Delaney Hall, our Digital Director is Kurt Kohlstedt. Our intern is Taylor Shedrick. The rest of the team includes Jayson DeLeon, Gabriella Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Neena Pathak, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful, uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our own Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.