Front Burner - The ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy spreads to Canada

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

The concept of 15-minute cities — where a person’s daily needs in a city are accessible within a 15-minute walk, bike or transit ride from their home — is a few years old. It’s been picked up by many cities to guide urban planning and design. But in recent months, the 15-minute city idea has also been seized on by people who fear it’s an elaborate conspiracy to limit individual freedoms, mobility, and to create barricaded sectors to keep them trapped. In this episode, Tiffany Hsu, a reporter who covers disinformation for the New York Times, breaks down the actual idea, where it came from, and how it got twisted into a dystopian conspiracy. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everybody, it's Jamie. Before we get into today's episode, which is super interesting about a conspiracy theory I actually hadn't heard of until recently, I just wanted to say that today will be my last show for a while. I'm heading off on maternity leave. I'm excited, of course, but will definitely miss doing the show and working with this amazing team day in and out. Also, thanks so much to all

of you for listening, for sharing your thoughts and perspectives. We're so lucky to have such smart and thoughtful listeners who actually want to have a conversation about complex things. And we're just really, really appreciative of all of you. You'll be in good hands while I'm away. My colleague in Washington, Alex Panetta, will be here for the next little while hosting, then some other great people. And I'm really looking forward to being back with you all next winter. All right, back to the show. Earlier this month, the Council for Essex County in southwestern Ontario held a relatively routine meeting.

Essex is right next to Detroit, and the council wanted public feedback on its new city plan. You know, the type of plan that will guide the county's development over the next 30 years. Thank you for joining us this evening in the Essex County Civic Center, and there are folks also that are watching on live stream. But the council was overwhelmed by how many people turned up to speak. People spilled out of the room and filled the hallway. We're more than happy to have you here. We have fire limitations within this room, and that is why the numbers are limited.

Weirdly, a lot of the people who turned up had a different topic they wanted to talk about. Now the county has received a number of inquiries about whether this topic is about the concept of 15-minute cities. It is not. It has nothing to do with 15-minute cities. You can trust me on that. It is not. Just a minute. Just a minute. I'm in charge of this meeting, not you. I will not tolerate outbursts. I will not tolerate disrespect. 15-Minute Cities is this idea that urban design can be done so people's daily needs, think work, groceries, school, restaurants, are close enough to their homes so that they can get there within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.

So the meeting gets started, but barely. The crowd doesn't quiet down, and the councillors cut things short. I'm hearing comments from out in the lobby that are probably making us a little more uncomfortable about threatening nature. I think it's best that we call this for the night. It's a strange scene, but it's not the only time this has happened in Canada in recent months. Back in February, a local city planner in Edmonton and a notorious anti-COVID lockdown and anti-mask protester had words about the concept of 15-minute cities. You said we were never confined to our neighborhood, but they certainly tried under COVID. And let's just pretend for a second we go along with the 15-minute city plan,

and now we have these wonderful districts. How much easier would it be for them to literally lock us down into a little tiny 1.5 square kilometer? Is there going to be a stipulation in this policy that says, look, we will never have barricades here? No, we didn't consider that because... We didn't consider that because that's the exact plan that we have considered. Because, in fact, there's infinite things that the plans will not do. We're not going to neuter your chinchilla, for example. We're not going to come...

But that's not something that's going to come in our mind. No, no, hold on, hold on. The crux of what's happening here is that this mundane city planning concept geared at helping people do all their daily things without a car has morphed and been twisted into a sinister conspiracy theory. To help me understand what's behind it and how it all got started, I'm joined by Tiffany Hsu. She's a New York Times reporter who covers disinformation. Tiffany, hi. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me.

Before we get into how this idea went so sideways and got picked up by conspiracy-minded groups, can I ask you to walk me through where the actual idea came from? Sure. So the idea was conceptualized a couple of years back by a Parisian professor named Carlos Moreno. He's a lovely guy. I spoke to him over Zoom a few weeks ago. And he told me that he's had a multi-decade career, pretty quiet, where he worked for a bit with robotics, did some scientific research, and eventually started to think about sustainability and city living. And he drew from decades and decades of inspiration in thinking about how to make urban living something that was more sustainable, more focused on the resident. So he's thinking about things like the British Garden Cities in the 1800s, this idea of neighborhood units in the 1920s, the urban activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, who's thinking about higher density in cities, short blocks, mixed use, that sort of thing. Even the new urbanism and walkable cities movement in the 1990s.

in the 1990s. So in about 2010, he starts thinking about this idea that comes to be known as the 15 minute city. I would like to offer a concept of cities that goes in the opposite direction to modern urbanism, an attempt at converging life into a humansized space rather than fracturing it into inhuman bigness and then forcing us to adapt. And the concept is pretty simple. Every resident should be able to reach daily necessities, basic amenities, within 15 minutes on a bike, by foot, or via public transportation. So you should be able to get to work, to do your shopping, to go to parks, to have your entertainment,

all within a pretty short trip. And that's his idea, that for every person living in a city, they have this slightly different radius of where everything they need is located. Our acceptance of the dysfunctions and indignities of modern cities has reached a peak. We need to change it for the sake of justice, of our well-being, and of the climate. And I know this is something that planners and planning types have talked about for a while, right? Like it was part of a main world campaign in Paris. And just for listeners of our show, they might have even heard it on FrontBurner recently. We were talking about a plan to create more housing in Vancouver and the concept of a 15-minute city came up.

I just want to clarify here, like, the idea isn't to actually separate cities into sections, right? But to design them in such a way that from any point a person could get all their daily necessities within 15 minutes, right? Exactly. And that's what's so strange about what's happened to the concept of the 15-minute city. Exactly. And that's what's so strange about what's happened to the concept of the 15-minute city, because the way Mr. Moreno conceptualized it, it was all about walkability and freedom of movement, freedom of choice. And for that to become this nightmare scenario about authoritarian control is very odd. To give you a bit of the history of this, Mr. Moreno formalizes the concept in 2016. In 2019, the mayor of Paris uses it as a cornerstone of her ultimately successful re-election campaign. During the pandemic, the C40 mayors, which is a collection of mayors from all around the world, they adopt it as a sort of post-COVID recovery plan.

Urban travel is a central pillar of the plan, and Paris is fast becoming a big biking city. And Hidalgo has declared war on the pollution caused by motorists, cutting the number of car parking places, increasing electric vehicle charging points, and dropping the speed limit in the French capital to just 30 kilometres an hour. This is a popular and very respected idea for many years after Mr Moreno comes up with it. It's instituted in cities all over the world because they see the value of having a sort of lifestyle that is easily accessible for people.

It's this idea of community of communities or small town wins a big city. So then now explain to me how and I guess why it turns into this dystopian conspiracy theory. When does that start? There is a frankly pretty funny tweet that an architecture professor put up shortly after this conspiracy theory started to take root. And he says, last year, if I had to guess what would be the batshit conspiracy theory of 2023, I would have never guessed it would be, quote, town planning where you can walk to the shops. This is really a pretty benign idea.

It's not especially sexy. The idea is make a city where the residents don't have much trouble or don't need much time to get to where they want to go. But what happens is that it starts to gain traction at a time when much of the world is going under quarantine because of COVID-19. A warning to anyone stepping foot back in B.C., you must have a specific plan to self-isolate. Today, I'm ordering the mandatory closure of all non-essential workplaces in the province of Ontario. Community peace officers, in addition to police, will now be able to issue tickets to enforce COVID-19 public health orders. Premier Legault announcing that as of Friday, New Year's Eve,

the province-wide curfew will be reinstated. Restaurant dining... The pandemic plays a huge role in adding fuel to this particular fire. There have been many, many years of conspiracy theorists who talk about government overreach, who worry about their personal liberties being taken away, who claim that the authorities are out to get them, to try to lock them into place. The pandemic exacerbates a lot of those fears. You get a lot of people who are kind of cooped up at home for an extended period of time.

They go onto social media. They're looking for companionship. They're looking for people to talk to because it's a lonely time for a lot of people. And so you get this effect of these existing conspiratorial thoughts gaining root on social media, finding more viewers, finding more people who say, this feels like what I'm experiencing now. Grand reset, the prime minister is now talking about this idea that he's going to renovate Canadian society to fit his Trudopian ambitions. This is not a time to re-engineer society to his liking. It's not a time for government to take advantage of the crisis in order to massively expand its powers

at the expense of Canadians' freedom. And, and combining that with the fact that social media at this point in time is, is already splintering. It's already fragmenting into encrypted chat groups, like Telegram, like Signal, like WhatsApp. And you get this siloing effect of a lot of different people talking about unfounded rumors in a lot of different places. And it becomes hard to control. It's so interesting to me that this concept of a 15-minute city, it's a relatively old concept, right?

And that it's been around for a while and yet it's suddenly picking up all of this steam. Why does that tend to happen? Because I've seen this with other kind of conspiracy theories as well. Yeah, this happens a lot with rumors and false narratives. I talked to a researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Jenny King, and she says that conspiracy theorists often engage in this continual process of throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. And then once something sticks, it becomes a tool in their arsenal, right? So when you get frigid temperatures and it causes like power outages, climate denialists will almost always try to pin the blame on like renewable energy. And so you see this one photo gets circulated a lot that shows a helicopter spraying what looks like

chemicals to thaw frozen wind turbines. It turns out the spray is hot water and the spraying is a test. But that photo circulates all the time whenever there's bad weather. So Jenny King's point is that the conspiratorial framing of 15-minute cities has reached critical mass and it's going to emerge forever likely like she says on any given day there's probably a thousand new pick your own adventure kind of like composite conspiracy theories or extremist ideas or unsubstantiated claims and a lot of those kind of fade into obscurity but once they cross the threshold and become a part of the public conversation, the way 15-Minute Cities has, they're going to be used until the end of time.

Just take me through some examples of what these people are worried about here when it comes to the 15-minute study? Like when people are turning up at the Essex Council meeting or in Edmonton to raise their concerns, like what are they concerned about? I think first it's important to understand that the way a lot of conspiracy theories work is that it becomes a really messed up form of telephone, right? You get one idea and over time and through many people, it warps into something completely unrecognizable. And so this idea that is about freedom of choice and freedom of movement warps into this worry that people are going to be confined into like a prison camp, that they're going to be locked into zones.

But thanks to COVID and COVID lockdowns, the truth was revealed that we're all apparently clamoring for these 15 minute cities. Creepy local authority bureaucrats would like to see your entire existence boiled down to the duration of a quarter of an hour. You in your area will only be allowed within that 15 minute zone that you've been allocated. You know, their movements are going to be monitored, that cameras are going to watch where they go, that they're not going to be able to use their cars, their cars are going to get taken away. There are many, many variations of this basic idea that the authorities are going to take control of their freedom. And talk to me about how that manifests itself this December in Oxford in the UK. That feels

like maybe a really good example for us to illustrate here. really good example for us to illustrate here. Yeah, the Oxford example is really interesting because it both reflects how a very simple concept becomes muddled beyond recognition, and it also showcases how these things become complicated. So the Oxford City Council has a long-term city planning guide. And in that guide, they mentioned the 15-minute cities. They want to use it as a model for sustainable future development. However, the Oxfordshire County government is implementing an experiment called LTNs, low traffic neighbourhoods. And these two ideas, the low traffic neighbourhoods and 15 minute cities, become conflated inaccurately.

The conspiracy has conflated two plans. One long-term intention to spread facilities among neighbourhoods and one traffic restriction trial due to be brought in next year, which will use cameras and a permit system to track car journeys among certain roads across the city and potentially fine people if they use them too often. Low traffic neighbourhoods are meant as a way to adjust the flow of traffic, to limit cars kind of piling into crowded areas during certain times. The 15-minute city is more about resident accessibility.

They're different concepts. What happened in Oxford is that people heard Oxford. They ignored the difference between the city government and the county government. And they said, oh my God, Oxford is trying to limit things. They're trying to limit us. And they came out in droves. Thousands of people came out and protested.

It's going to lead, you can say it's going to lead further and further. There are going to be more and more restrictions. Once it's established with digital ID and digital currency, people are going to be totally controlled by the elite. Essentially, what they're doing to Oxford is they're restricting people's freedom to move because they're like they're splitting it up into seven districts. So you have to pay the government in order to get around the block. And it's going to kill small businesses. It's going to kill tourism. It's going to be crazy. They said that there would be police battalions out locking down parts of the neighborhoods.

I mean, none of this was supported, but this is what was filtered through a lot of the back channel messages where these conspiracy theories were taking root. Right. And like most conspiracies, they're kind of based on these little nodules of truth, right? Like, I know one of the things that was discussed in Oxford was that, you know, people might require permits to drive on certain roads. That was something that was discussed. And then, you know, this just gets taken to the millionth degree. And then it gets these high- boosters. Right. I'm thinking of people like Jordan Peterson and the conservative MP in the UK, Nick Fletcher. Right. What are they doing? Yeah, this is this is a prime example of of legitimate anxieties that in this case were bred by an extended period of being cooped up because of the pandemic. Yeah. And being co-opted by opportunistic actors who have a long-running anti-government and climate denial agenda. So you have people like Jordan Peterson who take a buzzword and spread it to their millions of followers without fully explaining the context of what's actually happening. We've talked about how this is wrapped up in the anti-COVID, anti-masks that people cooped up in their houses,

people feeling like the government is already restricting them, conspiracy theories running rampant around that. But also, how does the anti-climate change stuff fit into this? change stuff fit into this? So the 15-minute city concept is one that builds heavily on the push for more sustainable living, right? The idea is if you can walk places, if you can use public transit or bike, that's probably better for the environment. So the environment is a key part of Mr. Moreno's ideology. What happens is that protests and concerns about pandemic lockdowns then dovetailed with this belief that climate activists were pushing for climate lockdowns, there's this climate tyranny at play that, you know, they're going to, that they're trying to rebuild the world in a climate-friendly way by restricting personal freedoms.

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Tiffany, conspiracy theories aside for a moment, I'm curious, like, are there legitimate criticisms or like a legitimate conversation to be had about this 15-minute city debate that is being sort of overshadowed by all of these conspiracy theories here? Oh, absolutely. There's actually quite a bit. There's one post in the London School of Economics blog that's written by a Harvard economist that makes an excellent point that an idea that's crafted by a Parisian professor in a European city might not necessarily translate to, say, an American city, because American cities are very, very different. The economist's point is that American cities are built with segregation baked into the foundation. There are qualities to an American city that don't translate super easily into this idea of neighborhoods within a broader city, right?

A lot of American cities are very divided, and they are that way by design. And so to completely rebuild a city that exists at the scope of a lot of major American cities might be kind of a tall order. So there are a lot of concerns that if you try to create a 15-minute city like Nodule in one of these cities and you don't create it elsewhere in the city, what's actually going to happen is that that single 15 minute city nodule then becomes prohibitively expensive for people who are already there. So there are very valid concerns about the 15 minute city concept in execution actually exacerbating like income inequality and racial disparities. Yeah, it is actually a really interesting conversation about how we build and design cities and who could or could not be left out here. You mentioned Carlos Moreno. I wanted to bring him up again with you before we go. I know in your piece, you talk about how he's received

like all of these threats and abuse just because he's the guy that came up with this idea. And I'm wondering, like, what did he tell you about the impact all of this has had on on his work? He kept using the word shocked with me. I mean, this is this is a man who has spent 40 years kind of quietly doing research. I mean, he's well-respected in the academic community, total strangers who were saying things like, we hope that drug lords kill you and your family. You know, you should be run over by a cement roller. You should be like nailed into a coffin, like all sorts of really violent and aggressive and hateful rhetoric. rhetoric. And, you know, Mr. Moreno, who travels a lot for work, is saying, you know, he has to now talk to the French consulate in the countries that he travels to, to ask for protection. And this has left him just completely stunned. He says that people in his position, academics,

researchers, scientists, are often totally unprepared to deal with this sort of thing. You know, they don't know what the resources are that are available. They don't have, you know, the mental health help that they might need. You know, one of the things that he said to me that really stuck was, I'm a scientist. All I do is try to use science to better the world. I don't understand how someone who doesn't know me could hate me so much for something like that. Huh. That's really interesting. Tiffany, thank you so much for this. This was a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming by. Yeah, thanks for having me.

All right, that is all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Lauren Donnelly, Rafferty Baker, Matt Alma, Jodi Martinson, Derek Vanderwyk, and Imogen Burchard. Our sound design was by Sam McNulty and Mackenzie Cameron. Our intern is Constantina Varlocostas. Our music is by Joseph Chabasim. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos, and I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.