Walkable cities become grist for conspiracy mill

By Brent Bellamy, Associate + Creative Director 
Originally published in the Winnipeg Free Press

Being a city planner might sound like a mundane job, plodding through zoning regulations that read like riddles written by Gollum from Lord of the Rings. But it can be a polarizing profession that evokes high emotions from citizens opposing change in their neighbourhood or reacting to the very mention of the words “bike lane.”

Rarely, however, is local city planning pushed into the spotlight as a global conspiracy theory — but that’s what’s happening with a new concept called “15-minute cities,” believed by some to be a sinister scheme of population control.

The 15-minute city plan was introduced in 2015 by Colombian-born architect Carlos Moreno. His idea was that people living in cities, regardless of age, economic status, background or ability, should be able to access their daily needs (employment, groceries, health, education, and recreation) within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of their home.

The simple idea reimagines how we build modern cities, challenging the zoning regulations that segment them into different uses — houses over here, apartments over there, shops in a giant parking lot off the highway. Instead, it envisions dense, diverse, integrated mixed-use neighbourhoods where people can comfortably walk to a corner store, a café or a shop, and kids can safely ride their bikes to school or walk to the rink for a game of shinny.

It’s how we built cities for centuries. Tree-lined residential streets with continuous sidewalks laid out in a grid, connected directly to commercial high streets lined with shops and public transit (streetcars). Corner stores, which modern zoning makes illegal in most areas, were peppered throughout older neighbourhoods, providing employment, social connection, and convenience. Houses, townhomes, duplexes, and small apartment buildings could all be found side-by-side on the same street, attracting a diversity of residents at all stages of life and economic backgrounds.

Fifteen-minute cities is a new way to think about this old idea, establishing quantifiable goals that inform an entire recipe of planning ingredients needed to create the type of neighbourhoods that we once built without regulation. In the strategy, cites are divided into walkable planning zones, generally about two kilometres in radius. Specific policy and zoning reforms are then tailored to the needs of each area to achieve the 15-minute goal. These policies can include promoting increased density, housing diversity, mixed-used developments, transit, walking and biking.

The 15-minute-cities concept was made famous when it was embraced by Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. During the pandemic, she saw the importance of walkable neighbourhoods with nearby amenities and pledged that temporary pandemic initiatives such as new pedestrian streets, bike lanes, and parks, would be made permanent.

In 2020, she swept to an election victory, campaigning on a central promise to implement 15-minute neighbourhoods, something that has already transformed how Parisians live and move around their city. Seeing this success, cities around the world began creating their own 15-minute initiatives. But when the World Economic Forum promoted the concept in 2022, suspicions of conspiracy theorists were triggered.

The ancient city of Oxford, England has since become ground zero for the conspiracy. The city is currently working on Oxford Local Plan 2040, a long-term policy document that will inform planning decisions as the city evolves and grows. The 15-minute neighbourhood idea has been presented as a central objective in the plan, largely supported during public consultation.

Independent of this master plan, Oxford has also been working on strategies to combat traffic congestion, particularly in the historic central areas. Last year, a pilot project called “low traffic neighbourhoods” was implemented, with temporary wooden planters installed on three residential streets to allow access for local residents but preventing drivers from using the neighbourhoods as through-traffic shortcuts.

A second pilot project called “traffic filters” was also announced for six highly congested roads leading into the city centre. The filters, which are simply traffic cameras, are to be set up on these streets. Residents will be given free passes to drive through them during rush hour 100 days per year. Access to all areas of city will be maintained, but if a driver doesn’t have a pass on a certain day, they will need to take a secondary route to the centre. The hope is that by pushing drivers to alternate routes at peak times, congestion will be reduced. Special exemptions will be offered to people with disabilities, and taxis, public transit, pedestrians and cyclists will always be allowed to pass freely.

Conspiracy theorists have conflated the three policies, believing that once the 15-minute districts are established, these traffic filters, often represented as physical barriers, will be used to forever barricade people in their own zones, in a Hunger Games-like scheme of population monitoring and control.

It is, of course, unlikely that local councilors and planners in cities and towns across the world are somehow secretly conspiring to restrict personal freedoms in an orchestrated global plot, but “freedom” protests have been triggered in many cities, including, most recently, in Edmonton.

The irony of this conspiracy theory is that the 15-minute cities concept is specifically about freedom. The freedom to age in your neighbourhood. The freedom to access a high quality of life regardless of your economic or social background. The freedom to walk down the street to buy a litre of milk in the evening. The freedom to have your children safely ride their bikes to school. The freedom to comfortably not own a car. That’s it. That’s all it is.