The 15 Minute City

In 2020, the "15 minute city" became a popular concept among urban planners. By 2023, it was the target of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 1:14Roman 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.

• 1:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:36Roman Mars?

  That's producer Chris Perube.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:52Roman Mars?

  Last year, there were demonstrations happening in countries around the world protesting against an urban planning concept called the 15 Minute City.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  These protesters 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.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Because as a planning concept, the 15-minute city is completely inoffensive.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Fergus O'Sullivan is reporter for Bloomberg City Lab.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  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?"

• 3:06Roman 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.

• 3:26Roman Mars?

  Okay, so Chris.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yes, Roman.

• 3:28Roman Mars?

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

• 3:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:44Roman 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.

• 3:52Speaker 01

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

• 3:56Speaker 03

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

• 4:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:14Roman Mars?

  Yeah, he's a delight. So much energy. I enjoy talking with him, too.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Totally. He's got this constant broad smile, this trimmed beard. He just like brings a lot of positive energy.

• 4:25Speaker 03

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

• 4:36Speaker 01

  So before he coined the term 15 minute city, for years, Professor Moreno, he'd been thinking about urban planning, and he concluded, basically, the way that we are laying out cities, it just does not work.

• 4:47Roman Mars?

  So let's talk about what's wrong with the way we have laid out cities.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so Roman, we're gonna have to do a little bit of urban planning 101. If you're a regular listener of 99% Visible, you probably know these ideas, but we're gonna just recap a few and radically Oprah simplify some things. Is that okay?

• 5:04Roman Mars?

  That sounds good.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so that is the voice of Le Corbusier.

• 5:42Roman Mars?

  Corbu!

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Corbu!

• 5:44Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:58Roman 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.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:26Roman Mars?

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

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and urban planners take up Corbus 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.

• 7:01Speaker 03

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

• 7:07Speaker 01

  This, again, is Professor Carlos Moreno.

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Massive production of cars has started when Mr. Henry Ford has produced the first Model T. The worldwide presence of massive car is just after the Second War. What was the impact just in 7 decades of the presence of car?

• 7:32Roman Mars?

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

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. So with zoning, people are getting separated from things like work and school and, you know, movie theaters, leisure, and more and more people are taking cars to get to these places.

• 7:57Roman 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.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:23Roman Mars?

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

• 8:35Speaker 02

  It's a very simple concept, and something that Carlos Moreno would admit to is that it is not a new concept. This is the direction in which planning has been moving, pretty much from the late 10th century, starting back in the 60s with people like Jane Jacobs.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  That's Fergus O'Sullivan again from City Lab 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, he 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.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  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?

• 9:41Roman 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.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  This is not a question to build a Louvre museum every 15 minutes. This is not a question to build a cancer hospital every 15 minutes.

• 10:02Roman Mars?

  So, I mean, the concept sounds nice. It sounds simple. But how does it actually work?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  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 type zoning, right? 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.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  We wanted 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.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Of services.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Rather than saying cars would be banned, it would be cities would be rethought so that cars no longer have such a dominant space. Instead of saying, you know, you have six car lanes converging on a, 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, 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 sort of go to tourist places and having it everywhere, all the way across the urban fabric.

• 11:45Speaker 01

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

• 12:01Roman Mars?

  And as O'Sullivan pointed out there, 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.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then the 15 minute city also gives them kind of some language to what it is that they're doing, right? So a couple of cities actually jump on the bandwagon right away. They say, we want to be 15 minute cities, right? 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, like partly under the guise of having a more livable city and also around the concept of fighting climate change.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  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 places, Paris is suffering from extreme heat in the summer and they're desperate to try and cool that down.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And I gotta say, there is a visible difference in the city, right? Like, you see a lot more people on bikes. You see areas where cars cannot go in Paris now. 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.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:59Roman Mars?

  And because kind of everything had changed, we were rethinking everything about cities. Like, 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, that it was really nice to be close to amenities.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and lots of mayors and urban planners, like, 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, you know, 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.

• 14:44Roman Mars?

  Like what?

• 14:45Speaker 01

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

• 14:52Roman Mars?

  Okay. I mean, I've spent some time in Cleveland, Ohio. It's not especially dense. It's not that walkable of a city as I remember.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  No, totally. But Cleveland's planning commission, they set up a pilot program to change the city's zoning with the goal of, you know, becoming a 15-minute city. And another municipality, I was surprised by this, it's a Canadian city I never would have expected to take this up.

• 15:15Roman Mars?

  It always comes back to Canada with you.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I am guilty as charged as resident Canadian guy on 99% invisible.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  The 15 minute city has become a very worldwide popular movement. In North America, for example, in Canada, in Edmonton, close to Toronto.

• 15:36Speaker 01

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

• 15:43Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, like days and days drive away, right?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I looked it up. It's like a 36 hour drive if you do it straight.

• 15:50Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  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. Like, it's one of those places where, you know, in theory, you can get around without a car. Lots of people do, but it's not super walkable in places.

• 16:08Speaker 05

  It's a lot more challenging. It's not impossible, but the default is obviously the car at this point.

• 16:16Speaker 01

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

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Hello, my name is Erin Rutherford. I'm a city councillor in Edmonton, Alberta, and I represent a ward in the northwest of the city.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:53Roman Mars?

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

• 16:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  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 and a city that allows people to not have to drive an hour one way in traffic?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  So by 2022, Paris, Edmonton, 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.

• 17:47Roman 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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• 21:22Roman Mars?

  So we're back with Chris Perube, and now we have to talk about the messy conspiracy part.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:43Roman Mars?

  It was a brutal time.

• 21:44Speaker 01

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

• 21:53Speaker 02

  That there were a lot of conspiracy theories around lockdowns. There was a lot of people 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-minute cities activism.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  So that's Fergus O'Sullivan again. He's a reporter at City Lab, who says 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.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  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, have some kind of permit to get in and out of these zones.

• 22:51Roman Mars?

  And of course, there's no part of the 15-minute city that says anything about this whatsoever. I mean, there's congestion pricing, maybe it's kind of mixing with that as an idea, but like, there's nothing about 15 minutes inherently that involves anything remotely like this. So then how does this conspiracy form and then spread?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  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, you know, this 15-minute city thing, it sounds a lot like lockdowns. And as this is happening, people are making all these leaps in logic, right? That you're going to need a permit to leave your neighborhood and things like that.

• 23:30Roman Mars?

  You know, 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.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  It is a kind of potentially a form of tyrannical authoritarian control, even some people assess some sort of harbinger of a world government.

• 23:59Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it always comes down to that, of people getting paranoid about a world government.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  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?

• 24:13Roman Mars?

  Right, I know about this.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in 2020, the World Economic Forum during the pandemic, they 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? You know, 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.

• 24:38Speaker 07

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

• 24:50Roman Mars?

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

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially when it's coming from the World Economic Forum and the British Royal Family. Like, yeah, that 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, right? Like, 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?

• 25:38Roman 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.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:55Roman Mars?

  The fightin' Leafs.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Uh, the, the varsity blues, but thank you. Um, so he doesn't teach there anymore, actually. So over the last decade, Peterson has become pretty notorious. He has these ideas about masking lineity, you know, and refusing to use transgender people's pronouns. Uh, very famously, he advocated for the all meat diet. Uh, so, you know, believe it or not, I'm not a huge fan of the, the thoughts and works of Jordan Peterson.

• 26:21Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it doesn't sound like you have a lot in common besides your alma mater.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  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, "The great..." It, no, I'm not gonna do his voice. I'm sorry.

• 26:39Roman Mars?

  I wouldn't know if you-

• 26:40Speaker 01

  It's a very muppety sounding, just trust me, 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 of 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."

• 27:18Roman Mars?

  So they're really lumping in a lot of grievances in one message there.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it becomes this weird magnet for a lot of things. And to be clear about this, like Oxford was proposing some pretty strict traffic measures. Like, 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 like walk or take public transit. Um, and this wasn't even part of their 15-minute city plan, weirdly, but the protesters, they 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. Like, they are actually protesting him in Oxford.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  I was in Paris. I, I, I received the photo of the demonstration for saying, "Moreno is Pol Pot, Moreno is Hitler, et cetera, et cetera." It was very, very difficult.

• 28:14Roman Mars?

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

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, at first, he's confused, right? Like, this whole idea sounds ridiculous. Like, he's an urban policy professor. And now, there's these protesters out there saying he's like at the center of world events.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  This is the psychological bad moment for a scientist. Because I am a scientist, I'm not politician. I'm not candidate.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Just a scientist.

• 28:48Speaker 01

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

• 28:54Speaker 02

  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 warned you about them.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  It'll essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  That's true. Highly. How are they gonna put us in there?

• 29:10Speaker 06

  The idea they're starting to roll out in Europe.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Who seems to me that they're using the climate change narrative to will have travel restricted.

• 29:21Roman Mars?

  I mean, one of the ironic things about this to me, in this like whole mishkosh, is that the 15-minute city doesn't strike me as a left-wing idea at all. Like, if anything, it really hearkens back to an old way of thinking about city planning, that about, you know, kind of small towns. Like, it's kind of weirdly conservative.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. And I think a lot of city planning people agree with you about that.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  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 is makes it slightly paradoxical that people that like Jordan Peterson, who are all about going back to some idea, their idea of what was 100 years ago or so, against it.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  So after the protest in Oxford, all this stuff on the internet, things actually escalate even more, right? So, city councillors in Oxford start getting death threats, and Professor Moreno starts to get death threats.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  This was a very complicated period for me, for my wife, for my family, because I received a lot of threats. Death threat. I was on their police protections. This was a very, very complicated situation.

• 30:50Roman Mars?

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

• 31:00Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable. And like, it's obvious, like, at this point, the entire situation is just clearly out of control.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:21Roman Mars?

  Okay, so please tell me who Mark Harper is.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  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. You know, there was lots of chaos. There were a lot of people moving in and out of cabinet.

• 31:39Roman Mars?

  This is head of lettuce.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  There was the head of lettuce, obviously, that outsurvived 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 protesters.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 32:15Roman Mars?

  This is so ridiculous. These are not serious thinkers. These are not serious men.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  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, right? And they're facing these protests and this pushback. Even somewhere like Edmonton is facing this stuff.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Earlier this year in 2024, Edmonton City Council were going to finalize the city plan, which includes this concept of districts, you know, and 15-minute radius to all of the amenities that you need, like we talked about earlier. And in the spring, they are having public hearings about it. And there were people who brought some reasonable concerns to the table, right, 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. 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.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  I don't think Edmonton, 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.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  So these protesters are coming. This is completely new for like an Edmonton city planning meeting. Aaron Rutherford admits that there might have been something of a branding problem in terms of their proposal that maybe set some people off.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  It's unfortunate that, you know, they're named districts because a lot of people think that that is very like 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.

• 34:07Roman Mars?

  I hadn't thought about that, but that's

• 34:09Speaker 01

  That is actually, you know, I could sort of see how it conjures that image. Yeah.

• 34:12Roman Mars?

  Well, I mean, but still, it's just like, it's the word district. It's like you live in a school district too, you know?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  You do.

• 34:19Roman Mars?

  So it's so funny to me that Hunger Games has a bigger footprint than all of social studies education.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, apparently. So councillor Rutherford says that this kind of anger, it's pretty new, but it's actually not surprising to her because it's a tone that she is hearing pretty much in every part of her job.

• 34:39Speaker 05

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

• 34:51Speaker 01

  So municipalities like Edmonton that are pursuing the 15 minute city, they're faced with this choice, right? Like, do we backtrack? Or do we forge ahead with this policy that is getting this kind of visceral angry reaction?

• 35:04Roman 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.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Totally. And actually, what one city did is they just went ahead with the plans, but they just dropped the name 15 minute cities.

• 35:19Roman Mars?

  So it's just like the 16 minute city.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  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, all of these things that individually aren't automatically going to face the same kind of resistance.

• 35:57Roman Mars?

  I mean, we've seen this before, like when, you know, something comes up, like the Green New Deal, and it becomes kind of unpopular and lots of negative associations sort of get attached to it. The people who are really, you know, diehards that are for the fundamental, you know, concepts they're in, just stop calling it the Green New Deal.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:13Roman Mars?

  You know, it's the same thing, and it's just part of the, you know, Inflation Reduction Act.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Right. This kind of thing happens all the time.

• 36:18Roman Mars?

  Yeah, it's smart to me. I don't know. It just seems like smart politics.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:29Roman Mars?

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

• 36:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:46Speaker 05

  I think we're almost doing a disservice, 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 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 distrust further.

• 37:17Roman Mars?

  I can see why she wanted to stick to her content on this.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:20Roman Mars?

  But what ended up happening in Edmonton then?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Well, in June, the city put their plan to a vote and they kept the language intact, you know, 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."

• 37:43Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And to be clear, this doesn't change anything at all.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:47Roman Mars?

  This is just an additional thing to make people, you know, feel better. Like this is a little bit of an act of political theater, just playing along with the game that they've set up.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Right, because freedom of movement is actually guaranteed under Canadian law, right? 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 the city councillor and she was worried about giving credence to disinformation around the 15-minute city.

• 38:13Speaker 05

  My logical brain and my, 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, you know, making a redundant sentence in a document swayed me.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:52Roman Mars?

  And then, of course, there's Carlos Moreno, the delightful Carlos Moreno, the father of the 15-minute city.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Right. So for a while, he kept getting these death threats, but eventually, you know, those started to calm down and people actually started standing up for him in public. You know, there was this article in the New York Times that was defending him and he started seeing petitions online.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Professor Moreno noticed people on the internet were actually starting to move on and eventually the vitriol and the threats, those stopped.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  And he even published a book called The 15 Minute City, where he kind of doubles down on these concepts, on 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, it 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? Like, it's going to be concentrated at the municipal level. And if something like The 15 Minute City has to go through this gauntlet, you know, marches and disinformation and death threats, if this is the price of putting forward something like The 15 Minute City,

• 40:18Speaker 01

  how many people realistically are going to stand up and try to make a positive change? Like, how many people are going to be like Carlos Moreno?

• 40:30Roman Mars?

  Thank you so much, Chris.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Thanks, Roman.

• 40:36Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, with editing help from Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martine Gonzalez, music by Swan Real and George Langford, fact checking by Graham Hesha. 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 Aguru. Our executive producer is Kathy Tu, our senior editor is Delaney Hall, our digital director is Cora Colston, our intern is Taylor Shedrick. The rest of the team includes Jason DeLeón, Gabriela Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaShamadon, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Nina Potuck, Jaka Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

• 41:20Roman Mars?

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 05

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