How Can Anyone Object to ‘15 Minute Cities’?
How Can Anyone Object to ‘15 Minute Cities’?
We live in an age when the most unobjectionable and necessary ideas for progress can give rise to paranoia and fear. If the most innocuous, unoriginal possible idea can fuel paranoia, how can we hope to have a sensible discussion about the future of our places?
I love transit and I live less than 15-minutes from a bus stop, but last night it took 2 hours and 15 minutes to get home by the bus that would have been around 30 minutes of a drive. Just having a bus stop isn't enough to make people consider switching. It needs to be at least reasonably competitive in time or price.
Also car advocates always are sure to bring up their disgust with sharing their commute with nasty people or the homeless. That's a tried and true method to drum up fear against a working, affordable transportation system.
if your public transportation has enough people living below the poverty line on it that it becomes distasteful to be on, then that's separate issue and a disgusting reflection of the standard of living in the area. a person shouldn't get a bus and feel like a social worker. however, this isn't antithetical to good public transportation! it just recognises another social injustices that also need addressing.
15 minute cities can and should be seen separately to public transportation though, in that everything a person NEEDS is limited to a 15 minute walk/cycle. a person hopes that public transportation is almost redundant for any daily travel you make (for most people), and that it is still to a high standard for when we do need it.
Why does a lot of people who are below the poverty line using public transportation make it distasteful in the first place? They're people like everyone else. ~Strawberry
We should have fast and slow buses. One bus that stops at every stop along a route, another which goes a distance in a city only stopping at a few. That would greatly speed up transportation in my area.
As for poverty, everyone should be able to go on the bus. IMO they should be free and taxpayer funded. I have no idea what to do about “undesirables” except that we need to fix homelessness and poverty.
I mean, in the US there's an entire movement of people whose sole driving ideology is objecting to everything that a different group of people is for in order to "own" them
Nick Fletcher, a Conservative member who represents part of Yorkshire, in northern England, called for a debate about “the international socialist concept” of 15-minute cities, which, he said, “would take away your personal freedoms.”
Yeah right, like the freedom to have people, places and stuff u need out of reach.
Nice read OP, thanks.
I can only imagine how awesome it would be to live in an area like they describe towards the beginning where it's easily walkable and you can get to almost everything you need easily, safely, and without a vehicle. I'm so jealous of people who live anything close to being like that!
P.S. I always love seeing your posts here. You share such great articles! You've been killin' it for quite a while now. I appreciate you!
The right wing is afraid of a totalitarian dystopia? Uhhhh what? Republicans have become more and more authoritarian, but the line being drawn is...letting people walk to places instead of drive?
Baffling.
The right wing is afraid of a totalitarian dystopia?
Lol, no they're not. They salivate at the thought of having a totalitarian dystopia where they're on top. This is just more projection shit on their part. If anything, 15 minute cities deradicalize people by putting them in proximity to more diversity, make people friendlier by making them get to know their neighbors better, and financially better off because they're not forced to buy and maintain a vehicle to live a healthy life.
But fascists can't put the boot on your neck as easily if you have more wiggle room with money or solidarity with the working class, so of course they're afraid of it.
This is the first time I've heard of this concept. lemme check
EDIT: I'm confused, this sounds like a normal city? Like, there's a school, residential areas, convenience stores, a mall, a hospital, a forest, and green grocers just surrounding my workplace right now.
EDIT2: Browsing the thread made me realize that this is about US cities. Now it makes sense. But it's still confusing why this is a debate, life is much more fulfilling, more eventful with this kind of city.
My understanding is that reactionary lunatics of the Q type have gotten hold of the idea and are convinced that it is part of a plan to limit people within particular zones, enforced by digital surveillance, as part of some grand Orwellian plot. I believe that is how the weird right-wing reaction to this started, anyways.
This definitely to be a US problem as anywhere i've been in Europe every city has reachable necessities within 15 minutes. I assume it's the same in Asia. I also don't understand why would anyone except automotive company CEOs be against having everything necessary in close reach.
Everyone who is confused by why conservatives are opposed to 15-minute cities, there's one simple thing to understand:
Conservatives think that city=scary ethnic people, and suburb=nice white people.
Anything that appears to disrupt the urban/suburban divide, they see as another attempt to de-segregate, which they hate.
i didn't know there was objections to this, i read about this concept about 4/5 years ago and i've been obsessed with the idea ever since. i even moved to a sort-of 30 minute city. i was doing some searches online after reading this and without adding anything inflammatory to my search terms i saw a predominantly negative response to this in the UK. im baffled. british MP Mark Dolan called this a "socialist" and "dystopian" idea and said it would create "a surveillance culture that would make Pyongyang envious".
15 minute cities don't make an enemy out of anyone. being afraid of this is baffling to me.
You're 100% right to be baffled. Where I live we've seen extreme push back against the concept. The anti-vaxxers from the pandemic have latched onto the message in my area, and are saying that it will create ghetto's where it makes governments more able to enforce lock downs and restrict our freedoms. I don't see how they connected those dots together. It's actually crazy.
The first time I ever heard of 15-minute cities was through conspircy theories (I like learning about them) and you're right that it is actually crazy. It's the exact same anti-vaxx crowd, who also believe 5G is harmful and similar "theories", lead by right-wing pundits and grifters whipping up outrage over nothing.
Doesn’t seem like the author really offers any possible reasons for the rights reaction to responsible urban planning, so perhaps I will offer some.
Conservatism isn’t solely a political philosophy that a person decides to adopt. There are personally traits that feed into a person’s susceptibility to right wing thought. People who have low openness tend to be conservative. To paraphrase Buckley, their brains wired up to tell them to stand athwart history and yell STOP.
These people all grew up in a car centric world, where dad commuted in to the city from the suburbs and mom drove them to the school everyday. That, to them is the comfortable, natural order of things. Their psychology begs them to preserve that order at all costs.
Even though that model of planning is really new, only going back about 70 or 80 yrs, to them it is the natural way. Any alternative looks like change and progress, which they are psychologically predisposed to be suspicious of. All change to them, can be reduced to something that is being taken away from them. Something that disrespects their forefathers.
Not all change is good and some conservative thought is useful when a society is planning its future. But, it’s really dangerous when we have made mistakes.
In our modern political landscape, there are charlatans like Peterson and Jones who know how to pick at their audience’s psychology and pull dollars out of it. They cynically use the fears of their audience and package up any “new” ideas as existential threats.
The key when discussing progress with conservatives is to opening them up to the idea that we are going back. In this case specifically, 15min cities sounds scary but “returning to the urban planning ideas that motivated our great grandparents” might sound great. Same change different reaction.
Conservative cruelty cannot be accepted or forgiven but the psychology that drives it must be understood and accounted for when developing communication strategies.
as I've grown older, one of the things I've realized is that the primary driving force behind a lot of people's beliefs is, as pratchett put it, 'the overwhelming desire that tomorrow should be pretty much like yesterday was'. It takes a lot, like a lot Lot LOT, to get people to be willing to risk the unknown. people have this weird ability to look back at all of history, see how much things have grown and changed, and think to themselves "thank god that I live here and now, where things operate in the only possible correct way that was ordained by god. the past is nothing but barbarians dying of infections and the future is a dystopia that no one could possibly want or understand, but the way I grew up with is comfortable and makes sense. it's the natural order." this isn't a terribly unique thought, but the ability to think it without realizing that every generation that came before you also believed that very same thing with as much conviction as you did is....let's say it's uniquely human.
One thing I noticed when travelling through the states is how many American cities have no city centre with just pedestrian traffic. Everything is made with cars in mind, everything is a thoroughfare. In the city where I live in the Netherlands, I can get on my bike and be in the city centre within fifteen minutes. It's faster to get there by bike, than it is by car. and the city is better for it.
I like going to the market on foot, visiting the city centre on foot, going to pubs, and restaurants, and everything you want out of a city on foot, bike or public transit. You guys would like it too if you convinced city planners to give it a try.
Unfortunately auto manufacturers have lobbied billions of dollars to make sure that never happens. Plenty of us would love to try it, but as long as money rules politics it will never happen.