“15-minute cities” is not a policy | Chris Bayliss

After what feels like little more than 15 minutes, people are talking about “15-minute cities” again.  Normally at this point, I would pay readers the basic journalistic courtesy of offering a crumb of context as to why an issue had suddenly regained currency. On this occasion though, I feel comfortable enough admitting that I don’t know why this idea — if it can really be called that — is back in play. 

I will do my best briefly to sketch out what people mean by “15-minute cities”, but I will caveat this by saying at the outset it is impossible to do so in a way that the concept’s enthusiasts won’t regard as misrepresentation. 15-minute cities is an approach to urban planning theory under which most daily necessities are reachable within a quarter of an hour — on foot, by bicycle or occasionally a mixture of either with some form of public transport. The idea is to encourage “mixed-use, walkable” urban areas, and it all sounds jolly nice. It has been trialled successfully in a number of places; mainly the sort of places that were already like that beforehand, such as Paris. 

The problems begin when you start to think about how you make it happen in places that aren’t already like that. In a broadly free-market system, if an amenity were already economically viable somewhere, it would be there. If there are basic necessities of life missing from an area where people are living, it is generally for one of four reasons. Sometimes, it is because planning regulations mean that one cannot get approval to build amenities in a residential area — and on that issue the 15-minute cities concept might be a useful way of budging anti-business local government into a more reasonable position. But that seems more of an American problem than a British or European one. For all that British planning regulations can be stifling, we don’t generally have sprawling acres of housing from which shops, cafes, or doctor’s surgeries are banished. 

The other three reasons that a place may lack necessities relate to the nature of the people living in the area in question — either they are too few, or they are too poor and/or criminal, or they are too mobile as a result of private transport. Since we are (theoretically) looking only at densely populated areas, the “too few” reason shouldn’t be a problem. I am very much in favour of making places richer and less criminal, but this cannot be done by wishful thinking alone. Yet it is the question of how the idea interacts with private vehicular mobility that generates the acrimony around 15-minute cities. Clearly, claim the doubters, changing those habits is going to require some degree of coercion.

15-minute cities are rooted in an American approach to a thoroughly American problem

In order to untangle the competing claims of bad faith and “wilful ignorance”, we have to understand the strange and winding journey that brought together the ideas the 15-minute cities drew upon, since they were originally conceived in American academia a few decades ago. The concept has subsequently made its way via radical urban politics in Latin America, to the world of European NGOs drowning in grant money, and then on to British metropolitan techno-utopians from which it has eventually ended up in the dreary, lanyard-strewn wasteland of provincial local government. Some of the themes and the branding have remained the same, but the original reasoning is long since forgotten.  

The favourite term used by British supporters of 15-minute cities to describe the sceptics is that we are “car-brained” — that we have had our critical faculties rotted by the American obsession with the automobile. We are accused of regurgitating American ideas about the freedom afforded by private motor transport in ways that are inapplicable in the British context. Yet in reality, 15-minute cities are rooted in an American approach to a thoroughly American problem; namely the human geography of race politics. 

During the Civil Rights Era, various levels of American government set about the task of dismantling the plethora of instruments by which racial segregation had been enforced. While we most typically associate segregation with the former slave states in America’s southeast, there had been slightly less overt administrative approaches taken in northern cities to keep whites and blacks functionally apart. Over the 1960s and 1970s, the Federal and in some cases state governments required suburbs to accept “fair shares” of racially non-discriminatory low income housing in order to qualify for various forms of financing. From that point on, discerning Americans with the means and inclination to do so would need to find more subtle methods to ensure that their neighbours were people of a similar *ahem* “socio-economic” profile to themselves.

The automobile, along with single-unit detached housing set in sprawling, residential-only developments provided the key. If white Americans could no longer rely on overt discrimination, they could choose to live in settings that were only accessible to those with the wherewithal to own and drive a car. “The American Dream”, such as it is, is to attain the means to live in such a manner. It is no exaggeration to say that much of American academia, and quite a lot of American government, is obsessed with finding ways to break down this de-facto segregation. While the American Left may struggle to accumulate the political power to ban this kind of lifestyle, they have largely succeeded in problematising it, and presenting it as socially barren and unconducive to human flourishing. 

The ideas around the 15-minute cities concept were spawned in such waters, although the specific terminology would come later. Academics could point to a variety of poor legislation and municipal boondoggle that made mixed-use, walkable urbanism on the old-world model difficult to re-create in America. But in almost all of the discourse around the idea, the car was enemy number-one; American urban planners had constantly centered the automobile, and this had made American cities difficult and unpleasant to navigate on foot. However the primary impulse within academia and progressive politics was car-free urbanism as an alternative to car-centred suburbanism, rather than urbanism as the pursuit of better designed cities. 

These ideas were borrowed by urbanists in Latin America from the 1970s onwards, and became a pillar of progressive municipal politics in the region. Belated economic development in Latin America led to a rise in car ownership, and the urban to suburban migration by the middle classes that we previously saw in the US and Europe. Left-wing politicians correctly saw this as a political threat, having relied on a communal urban culture as the bedrock of their powerbase. Drawing on the politics of the US counterculture, leftist mayors such as Bogotá’s Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa closed roads to vehicle traffic, widened bicycle lanes, and organised vast weekly cycle rallies as a symbol of opposition to encroaching car culture. Similar phenomena emerged in countries such as Chile and Uruguay, and to a more limited extent in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. 

The association with South American leftism lent this type of politics a radical chic in Europe. Carlos Moreno, a Colombian former M-19 partisan who had fled to France and become a professor of robotics, first brought all of these concepts together under the name “15-minute cities” in Europe in 2016.  Many of these ideas would have been very timely and sensible in the 1970s, when European cities were choked with traffic and the associated pollution, but by the mid-2010s there had been at least 25 years of traffic deterrence policy and public transport promotion in almost every city in the continent. It is extremely difficult to find an urban locality in Western or Central Europe where life’s daily necessities cannot be reached within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle. But whilst the 15-minute cities concept was theoretically focused on urban areas, it was put together by — and seemed to be especially popular among — people who liked to talk about how they already lived in that way.  By extension, they implied that everybody else ought to be able to live like that too. As in America, what was branded as an idea to build better cities was in reality a discursive tactic to problematise suburban living. 

Nevertheless, the idea caught on in Britain, among both metropolitan policy wonks and techno-optimist types, and also with provincial local government. But the questions remained — which type of area would the policy be applied to, and how would they get there. In practice, it has generally been applied to the sort of relatively small cities which attract a large influx of people who work in the city centre, but who live in outlying towns and villages from which they commute by car. As one would imagine, such places experience severe road congestion.  

Oxford is a prime example of this, and has been one of the most prominent case studies of 15-minute cities in Britain. The City Council endorsed the concept of “15-minute cities” in its plan for 2040, back in 2022. It was intended to be an “overarching thread” in planning policy, with the intended outcome of “15-minute neighbourhoods” with all of the necessary amenities, but it did not come with any concrete steps that were to be taken immediately; it was an approach to questions of planning that would arise as time went by. In other words, it was more of an aspiration than a policy.  But at the same time, Oxfordshire County Council (a separate entity from the City Council) continued to battle with the very real daily issue of congestion, applying the sort of policies, such as traffic filters, which irritate motorists when they are first brought in, but which sometimes work and which are occasionally regarded as having been a good idea with the benefit hindsight. London’s congestion charge being an example.

Despite being completely separate, the County Council’s traffic measures became mixed up in public conversation with the City Council’s utopian-sounding but ill-defined 15-minute cities policy. The traffic filters were camera-enforced restrictions on key roads, limiting the number of times private vehicles (with exemptions available to residents who applied) could use them to 100 times per year, with fines for excess use. There would be no road blocks, but motorists would have to re-route around ringroads to avoid crossing the city if they had exceeded permissible use. Anybody with the most basic understanding of public relations should be able to see that this is a policy requiring considerable care in the way it was announced. Residents being forced to apply for permits to travel to other areas of the city, and video surveillance, sounds a bit dystopian. But such schemes have been applied, in Paris and other places. 

Rather than careful communications, the traffic filters became jumbled up with climate politics, “equity” and 15-minute cities. This was just after the country had emerged from COVID-19 lockdown, and there was a large subset of the public who were quite reasonably alarmed about how flimsy our most basic civil liberties had been proven to be. Opposition to the traffic filters metastasised into a broader conspiracy theory, which spread across the country as people noticed their own local authorities were signed up to 15-minute cities. Oxford City Council dropped all references to 15-minute cities in 2024, and other authorities followed suit, citing that it had become “toxic” as a result of far-right and anti-green conspiracies. 

As far as 15-minute cities enthusiasts were concerned, a perfectly healthy aspiration to have amenities within easy reach had been stymied by pure ignorance and extremist-tinged conspiracy theory. To make matters worse, provincial dolts and online nutters had been indulged by mainstream conservatives who knew the conspiracies were nonsense, but who  were simply too wedded to their cars.  From that point on, when asked to articulate how they intended to turn the aspiration of 15-minute cities into practical reality in places where it wasn’t already the case, the enthusiasts would be reduced to spluttering rage at what they regarded as the wilful ignorance and laziness of sceptics, who wouldn’t do the reading, and who indulged in conspiracy-laced insinuation. 

But for all of their apoplexy, the policy work on the idea simply does not exist. It really, genuinely does not. The idea’s supporters will send you endless links to web pages with yet more links, and you can follow them for hours and hours searching in vain for a straightforward articulation in plain English about how we make amenities pop up in peripheral, suburban places where they do not yet exist. What you will find is online brochures, details of competitions where theorists will submit proposals for the opportunity to win a lump of grant funding, and lots of glossy puff pieces with images of attractive young urbanites on bicycles. You will also find mainstream media articles “debunking” conspiracy theories. But you will not find a plan. 

What 15-minute cities enthusiasts fall back on in the absence of meaningful policy is details of the kind of traffic calming measures that were tried in Oxford, along with things like bike lane network expansion and park & ride schemes. These are all perfectly nice ideas in theory, but they are clearly not going to lead to the transformation that underpins 15-minute cities.  And it was the conflation of these ideas with 15-minute cities that first inspired the so-called conspiracy theories.

15-minute cities is not a policy; it is a pose

What we end up with is a classic case of motte-and-bailey argument, in which we are asked; “surely you want to have the amenities of life available within 15 minutes?”;  “yes” we reply “but how are we going to make that happen”. We are then left to fill in the glaring blank space in the idea ourselves, and we reason that these amenities will only pop up when our current way of doing things; i.e. driving to a big supermarket, is closed off to us.  When we point this out, the 15-minute cities people call us conspiracy theorists, and ask why we are so afraid of a few bike lanes and traffic filters. 

This may seem a tiring exercise, but for many of them, this circular argument is the entire point. 15-minute cities is not a policy; it is a pose. It is a means by which the Zone 1-2 dwelling, bicycle-riding urbanist can signal superiority to the Alan Partridges driving their Rover 800 Vitesse into Norwich City Centre, and by which the Oxfordshire Lib Dem can tease his right-wing associates for being unlettered conspiracy theorists. 15-minute cities is just another iteration in the tedious politics of status-signalling. It is best left ignored.