On a grey Saturday afternoon in February last year, I wandered up from my home in Oxford to the city centre to buy groceries. The first thing I noticed were the police officers on horseback, the second a shouty crowd in Broad Street, the wide avenue that has Blackwell’s bookshop on one side and Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre on the other. The main surprise, however, was that while the protesters generally looked normally bobble-hatted and middle class, many of the placards they waved were plain nuts: “Jail the government for treason. Say no to human enslavement” was one, “Smash the New World Order” another. Some were anti-Covid vaccinations, some anti-BBC. One was about puppies.
An astonishing number of posters, however, complained about local roads policy. People were clearly angry about Oxford’s LTNs, the low-traffic neighbourhoods being introduced by the county council, led by the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, but with the support of the city council, which is Labour. “Your City = Open Prison” ran a small placard. A banner proclaimed, “Our community our choice: No to 15-20 minute cities.”
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In Paris, Carlos Moreno, a 64-year-old South American-born science professor at the un-ergonomically named Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, was taken aback by the protests which, while largely peaceful, managed to rack up five arrests. Moreno is regarded as the father of the 15-minute city, his name for neighbourhoods in which all the necessities of life — from shops, to parks, to schools — are in walking or cycling distance of people’s homes. Since outlining his vision in 2016, nearly 100 city mayors across the world have endorsed it. A book, The 15-Minute City, to be published in the UK in May, details the plans for its adoption and, in some cases, the ways it has been adopted already in Paris, Milan, Portland in Oregon, Cleveland, Buenos Aires, Sousse in Tunisia, Melbourne, Busan in South Korea and Edinburgh. The concept has, it must be said, proved largely popular.
“Oxford was the first demonstration,” Moreno says. Dressed in the black rollneck of an homme sérieux, he is speaking from Paris against a Zoom-generated cartoon of a sunny city built round a park. (The very fact that we are speaking by video call, he says, demonstrates how people’s idea of “proximity” has changed since the Covid lockdowns obliged so many to work from home.)
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“They were protesting with insane arguments,” he continues. “These people said I wanted to create a new climate lockdown, that I wanted to constrain people to live within short perimeters, to have an electronic passport for living in this one territory. Never, never, never have I proposed to constrain people to live in one area. Never have I proposed this ‘open-air jail’ but I received a lot of violent attacks on social networks, Instagram, TikTok. It was thousands of messages, including death threats for me, for my wife, for my daughters. Being totally honest, I think this movement was related to the rise of the ultra-right. The Patriotic Alternative movement took part in [the] Oxford [protest] and, of course, the climate-sceptical people and the antivax movement.”
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The protests also received the support of Canada’s Old Testament sage Jordan Peterson, who told his five million followers that “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” were planning to impose 15-minute neighbourhoods by “fiat”. It was all linked, others brooded online, to the World Economic Forum’s post-pandemic recovery plan, whose branding as “the Great Reset” even the WEF, which meets yearly in Davos (and at which Moreno spoke a few weeks ago), admitted could sound like “some nefarious plan for world domination”.
Today, Moreno comes to Oxford, at the invitation of Oxford University’s Transport Studies Unit, to explain his vision at an open meeting. His welcome may not be unqualified. For a conference in Buenos Aires, the city employed guards to protect him: “Two policeman early in the morning until late in the evening. Totally insane.” In Oxford, the university will supplying whatever security it deems necessary.
Is he afraid? “No. I was born in Colombia.”
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The meeting allows questioners to “challenge his views”. Does he expect protests? “I’m not a guy for refusing discussion; the opposite. I’m not a politician, I’m a scientist. I am totally open for discussing constructive opinions with other scientists. I am totally open for receiving criticism. However, I refuse totally to discuss with the extreme right or the extreme left, because we have [opposition from] both extremes.”
Moreno points out that although they make a lot of noise, when the local elections came last May, extremist candidates made little headway. This was true even in east Oxford, where the local social media forum, Nextdoor, had been dominated for two years by rows about the introduction of low-traffic neighbourhoods, and where the local restaurateur Clinton Pugh has said the extra travel time required to get to his restaurants has resulted in a loss of trade and forced him to ask his actress daughter Florence Pugh for financial help.
The two councils, whose councillors and officers had, they said, faced abuse, put out a statement to correct the “misinformation”: the new filters being introduced will not be physical barriers but traffic cameras; all parts of the city will remain reachable by car, if sometimes by longer routes; Oxford residents and residents of nearby villages will be able to apply for permits to drive through the filters 100 days a year; permits will be available for regular trips to hospitals and, in theory at least, they should be easier by car since there will be less traffic.
The irony for Moreno, as he prepares to enter the dragon’s den, is that although the city and county council have announced ambitions to deliver what amount to 20-minute neighbourhoods, the present low-traffic neighbourhoods are not part of it, and are merely designed to make quieter and safer streets. Trial traffic filters are aimed at alleviating a decades-long problem with congestion. This is traffic management; Moreno’s plan goes way beyond that.
“The 15-minute city is a radical change of our lifestyle, of our work style. The 15-minute city wants to provide more local services in proximity, to reactivate the local economy, to create more jobs, more local commerce, more schools in the district, more future activities, theatre, cinema, restaurants, cafés, public spaces to enjoy, accessible on foot or by bike. This is not a punishment.”
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In his book he writes that cities’ “good old days” ended in 1933 with the Athens Charter of city planning, which prioritised new roads along which cars could speed from one city zone — residential, recreational, retail, commercial — to another. His prelapsarian alternative vision places people and their localities back at the heart of planning decisions. By reducing travel to offices, out-of-town supermarkets, shopping malls and leisure centres, we regain the precious gift of time. As an academic he employs jargon — “polycentric proximity”, “topophilia”, “chrono-urbanism”, “isochrones” — but what he really wants is for us to have more lovely days in our neighbourhood.
Although he had worked on his ideas from 2010, it was after Cop21, the 2015 Paris climate change conference, that Moreno relaunched his 15-minute city vision, emphasising its potential for tackling global warming. He writes that “urban activities” account for 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. What accelerated the idea’s implementation by cities round the world, however, was Covid. Many found they could work at home quite easily and, freed from hellish commutes, fell back in love with their local environments (which is the meaning of topophilia, incidentally). The problem, Moreno acknowledges, is that those who saw lockdown as the state’s move against individual freedom of movement think the 15-minute city is lockdown by another name.
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In fact, he says, the idea is neither right nor left wing. He has worked on implementing 15-minute districts with Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, and Valérie Pécresse, the rightist president of the densely populated Île-de-France region around central Paris. In Britain, he points to Nicholas Boys Smith, adviser to Tory governments, who has written: “Fifteen-minute cities are not a socialist plot. They are a repackaging of a timeless, even a Scrutonian ideal: of the need for home and for neighbourhood.” (Roger Scruton was a conservative philosopher.)
But even if the idea is bipartisan, I see practical objections. If, as one Labour Party figure in Oxford admitted to me, there are winners and losers with LTNs (depending on which road they live by), maybe some 15-minute citizens will lose out too. Moreno, who has not owned a car for 34 years, is fit and relatively young. In 10 or 15 years however, will he be biking around Paris, walking to the boulangerie of his choice? Won’t he need a car?
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“Andrew, the question is not about whether or not to have a car. The question is what is the role of the car,” he replies. “Were I an elderly or disabled person in a bad situation, maybe I’d need a car for crossing the city. OK. But is it necessary to park my car in a public space for a whole day when I need it only for 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes?”
I think he is suggesting taxis. I have another query. Walking and biking are good for us and pleasurable but are few people’s choice on a cold wet day. Aren’t 15-minute cities best located in the Mediterranean and South America? “This is a good point,” he says, “because in reality, at the core of the 15-minute city, is not bikeability but accessibility to more local services, more local shops, more medical practices and [therefore] more jobs.”
My final killer question is this: is he not straying from town planning into social engineering? In his book he talks of “combatting gentrification, elitism and the concentration of certain socio-political categories in the same area”. Disarmingly he seems to accept this. Urban planners work under the political mandates of elected politicians, “but we need to mix people”.
You will not, however, hear those words from the Oxford councillors fighting to defend low-traffic neighbourhoods. Before I talk to Moreno, I have a coffee with Andrew Gant, a Liberal Democrat politician (and at one point Queen Elizabeth’s choirmaster) who is Oxfordshire county council’s cabinet member for transport management. He will not be meeting Moreno when he visits Oxford (Moreno confirms he is not speaking to councillors on the trip) and, he adds, the 15-minute city concept is not something he has ever mentioned in relation to the new schemes. But, I say, isn’t Moreno a significant figure in the debate?
“Well, not specifically. I’ll be frank, I have not read this book. I mean, I’m familiar with his ideas, obviously, and I am going along to hear him when he is in Oxford. I’ll be interested to hear what he has to say but there are lots of people who’ve written about all this kind of stuff because congestion is a problem every city in the world faces.
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“It’s really important for us to try to put across that this will be a much better place as a result of the vision that we have. And a reason it’s not coming across, necessarily, as well as we might like is that there are people who make it their business deliberately to mischaracterise it. The Conservative government does that. The prime minister has done that and the secretary of state for transport. And the language they use is deliberately misleading when they talk about restrictions and stopping people from travelling.”
If those Oxford protests puzzled Moreno, they did me too. When I got home that day I realised that because I live fairly centrally, I am 15-minute man personified. From my house I walk to shops, parks, theatres and cinemas, a skating rink and lido, my doctor’s surgery — even city-centre demos. When Moreno says “we need to deploy this proximity to the outskirts of cities”, I agree with him.
