When you’re younger, you know all the things that are controversial, divisive and outrageous. You hear about them the minute they break and have your own opinion on them 30 seconds later. That’s because “being young” is all about being “with it”, even if “it” is “a massively depressing culture war”.
When you get older, however, you get both slower and busier. Before you know it, you’ve missed a whole rabidly polarising international issue, simply because you spent the weekend vacuuming the basement.
Forgive me then, younger people, when I admit: this month was the first I became aware of what a hot potato the idea of “15-minute cities” is. I’d seen the phrase a few times before but, to be honest, I just assumed it was a Channel 4 travel show where two comedians covered eg Antwerp in a quarter of an hour by using Google Maps. I guessed Romesh Ranganathan was involved in some way.
• Is the 15-minute city the future of urban living?
• What are 15-minute cities and why are antivaxers so angry about them?
Turns out: no. Unlike almost everything else in the world, Ranganathan is not involved in all this. For 15-minute cities are, depending on your political affiliations, either a) a perfectly sensible piece of urban planning that makes places more pedestrian-friendly, or b) THE BEGINNING OF BIG BROTHER’S OPEN-AIR PRISONS/DEATH CAMPS. The last is no exaggeration from me, by the way: there’s a popular meme on Twitter/X that runs, “They call them ‘15-minute cities’ because if they were called ‘concentration camps’, no one would want to live in them.”
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Of course, the meme is absolutely correct: no one does want to live in a concentration camp. So, how “concentration camp-y” are 15-minute cities? I can’t lie — having done two hours of research on them, even if I drank six espressos and worked myself up into a paranoid froth, there really is no aspect in which 15-minute cities resemble Buchenwald. It’s so benign — bordering on reassuringly dull — that the idea it’s provoked online panic is like discovering there’s a cohort of people absolutely freaking out about reruns of Trumpton.
In a nutshell, it’s about “walking to the shops”. I know. Not usually a trigger issue. The idea is to tweak future town planning so that anyone in a populous area lives no more than a 15-minute stroll from a doctor, shop, hairdresser or park.
It’s such a laughably mild and practical suggestion that seeing it co-opted into the Portfolio of Online Conspiracy Theories — alongside antivax and 5G mast protests — is like finding out that Donald Trump’s latest bugbear is the Blue Peter dog. Which could, of course, happen.
What I find surprising is how this rhetoric has travelled from “extreme right-wing nuttery” to the heart of the Conservative Party. Earlier this month, transport secretary Mark Harper provoked nervous laughter when he suggested that 15-minute cities are “sinister” and would be used by “local councils to decide how often you go to the shops”. Councils? The guys who can’t even fund libraries? I doubt they have the resources to instigate an Asda-denying police state. Then Rishi Sunak — in his new role as “defender of the motorist” — seemed to support Harper by saying 15-minute cities would “aggressively” restrict “where people can drive”. The flipside — that badly planned, car-dependent cities aggressively restrict where people want to walk — was not addressed.
This Tory pivot is deeply intriguing. It means that the kind of people who pride themselves on representing Middle England are now attacking the classic vision of Middle England. How many times have we heard tearful burghers deliver, over port, the Lamentation of the High Street: bewailing that one can no longer fill a wicker basket while strolling around the butcher’s shop, the baker’s, the grocer’s and the tweed trouser boutique — all crushed by out-of-town shopping centres?
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Surely 15-minute cities are, essentially, an actual plan for bringing back the high street. It’s about local things for local people. Vintage Tory stuff. Consider John Major’s infamous cycling spinster — she’d go nuts for the 15-minute city cycle paths. So safe on her way to evensong. And if you want to hear “the thwack of willow on leather”, you’ll have to get in your car and drive to Dan’s Cricket World Multiplex 20 miles away — unless there are more parks in local areas.
I am frankly amazed that a notion that seems so inherently conservative — making towns adorable again, like the ones in Ladybird’s Shopping with Mother — has somehow madly been rebranded as “sinister”. It’s not a rational response. It is instead a 15-minute hot take.
