Motorists who live in Oxford will be able to apply for 100 daylong permits to drive through the filters per year. to 7 p.m., drivers in private cars will be automatically fined if they cross through the filters without a permit. In early February, UK politician Nick Fletcher raised the conspiracy in Parliament, calling 15-minute cities an “international socialist concept” and claimed they “will cost us our personal freedom.”Īnd last weekend, online theories spilled into real life protests, as thousands of people, many from outside the area, took to the streets of Oxford to protest the traffic filtering and 15-minute city proposals.The “traffic filters” are license plate recognition cameras, not physical barriers. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea.” In December, Canadian clinical psychologist and climate skeptic Jordan Peterson posted a tweet attacking 15-minute cities: “The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. Anything can become a lightning rod for manufactured controversy and when an issue starts to receive attention, a host of different actors “flood into the space,” she added. Yet “disinformation is opportunistic,” especially when it comes to climate, King said. It “gives people the freedom to live locally, but does not force them to do so.” “The conspiracy theorists are right that you can’t make a real city out of self-contained enclaves – those would just be villages,” Carlo Ratti, an architect, engineer, and Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, told CNN.īut it misinterprets the idea, he said. The idea of 15-minute cities fits neatly into the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, partly because it is easy to spin that way. “And that has been weaponized by a vast ecosystem of bad actors.” The pandemic left millions with genuine trauma and real concerns about government overreach, King said. From there it filtered down to more extreme conspiracy communities, King said, including QAnon-affiliated groups and anti-vaccine groups.įox News took it up, along with high-profile climate deniers. The term “climate lockdown” started swirling around, pushed by right-wing think tanks and climate-skeptic media figures. The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative, billed as an effort to tackle inequality and climate crisis post-pandemic, fanned the flames. Scientists slam Joe Rogan's podcast episode with Jordan Peterson as 'absurd' and 'dangerous'Ī series of media articles arguing we should rebuild a post-Covid world that could maintain the drops in planet-warming pollution were seized upon to turbocharge a narrative claiming governments wanted to limit freedoms in the name of climate action. Ottawa has proposed 15-minute neighborhoods, Melbourne in Australia plans to adopt 20-minute neighborhoods and Barcelona, in Spain, has been implementing a car-free “superblocks” strategy. The city has banned cars from parts of the Seine, added hundreds of miles of cycling routes and created mini parks. In Paris, Mayor Anne Hidalgo based her 2020 reelection campaign, in part, on a plan to create 15-minute cities. “This idea takes inspiration from many urbanists, starting from Jane Jacobs, who in the last decades have been advocating for compact, lively, and therefore more walkable urban environments,” Alessia Calafiore, Lecturer in Urban Data Science and Sustainability at the University of Edinburgh. Around a fifth of the world’s human-caused, planet-warming pollution comes from transportation, and passenger cars make up more than 40% of this.Ĭarlos Moreno, a professor at the Sorbonne University in France, is credited with first coining the term 15-minute cities, but the broad concept is not new. The aim is to make cities more livable and connected, with less private car use – meaning cleaner air, greener streets and lower levels of planet-heating pollution. Plans unveiled for high-tech '10-minute city' in Seoul
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