Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: A 15-minute climate solution attracts conspiracies

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

15-minute cities are an urban planning idea growing in popularity. The idea is that you can get to the key places in your life - think work, education, food, recreation - in a 15-minute walk, bike or transit ride. Now mayors from Paris to Cleveland are looking to use them to reduce planet-heating car pollution and improve quality of life.But they face obstacles - from NIMBYs, to public schools, to death threats for urban planners and politicians. Reporter Julia Simon talks about her months-long reporting on a climate solution that has become a lightning rod for conspiracy theories. This reporting is a part of NPR's climate week.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey everyone, it's the Sunday Story from Up First. I'm Myesha Roscoe. As you know, NPR has been following this breaking news story out of Israel and Gaza. We'll continue to cover that story on your local NPR stations and you can visit npr.org slash mid-east updates for more. But today we also are going to bring you this very fascinating story on another topic. It has some very surprising twists. Julia Simon is NPR's climate solutions reporter. So Julia, I hear you've been reporting on an idea that's been taking hold around the world. Yeah, I traveled to two very different cities for this story. Okay, so where are we starting here?

We start in the neighborhood where I used to live in Paris. Here's some tape from when I was there. So I am on my old Parisian street, a little cobblestone passage with vines covering the buildings. And I tried an experiment with my stopwatch. Were you going for a run or something? No, no, not that, but stick with me. I'm going to start my stopwatch and see where I can go by foot in 15 minutes. Let's go.

Allons-y. In one minute, I made it to l'école maternelle, a preschool. Let's go! Farmacy in four minutes. The bakery in a little more than five minutes. I did turn off my stopwatch for a sec at the bakery. Okay, I just had to get a baguette while I'm here. Hear the crunch? A French baguette. You're making everyone jealous here. I know. A grocery store, a park, a metro. You're kidding me? Another park?

And a hospital, all in a 15-minute walk. I'm envisioning Paris, so it sounds beautiful. But it also sounds, sounds like very convenient. It was so convenient. And what I experienced is a blueprint for a global climate solution. It has a name. The 15-Minute City. This week on The Sunday Story, we're going along with Julia Simon as she explores the 15-minute city. It's a climate solution that's spreading from Paris to Cleveland, but Julia says it has some

big obstacles, including public schools, NIMBYs, and conspiracy theories fueling death threats to city planners. Stay with us. Now, our change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to our change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with NPR Climate Solutions reporter Julia Simon. She's been looking into the idea of the 15-minute city. So, Julia, did someone actually come up with this idea? I mean, it seems very almost intuitive.

Yes, his name is Carlos Moreno. We met along the banks of the Seine River in Paris. It turns out he's not French originally. He's Colombian, Franco-Colombian. He's an urbanist. He spends his time thinking about cities. He teaches at the Université Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbononne, and he advises mayors and city planners all over the world about this idea, the 15-minute city. So is this basically what it sounds like? Yeah, it's a city where you can get the key things in your life in a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or transit ride from your home. Think things like food, schools, work, recreation. And I should say there are plenty of places around the world where 15-minute cities have been there for decades, if not centuries.

Places like New York, Paris, obviously. Moreno says his idea is really about creating a blueprint or roadmap for mayors and city planners around the world. And so is 15 minutes the hard and fast rule? Could it be longer or shorter? Yeah, no. I actually told Moreno about how I was walking around Paris with my stopwatch set to 15 minutes. Lo más importante no es tanto el número 15. Pueden ser 10 o 18.

And he said the number 15 isn't so important. It could be 10 or 18 minutes. He's also pretty agnostic about whether people reach these places by foot or by bike or by public transit. Lo importante es la proximidad para acceder a servicios. The important thing with this urban planning idea is to have proximity to access services in many locations of the city and to reduce the carbon footprint. So that brings me to the key question, like, how does this directly relate to climate change? I mean, I guess I would think that it's about having people not drive to places. Exactly. Cars are nearly 10 percent of all energy-related carbon dioxide pollution, according to the International Energy Agency.

The director of climate for Paris told me 15-minute cities can help transition cities away from cars and their pollution. Plus, Moreno says there are lots of other co-benefits that come with them. So co-benefits, that's a word that we're hearing a lot more around climate solutions, but tell us what that means to the average person who doesn't like studying this stuff. 15-minute cities promote walking and biking, which also promotes health. Less cars means less noise, more safety for pedestrians and bikers, more parks and urban trees pull carbon dioxide from the air, and they provide shade and cool down neighborhoods. These are co-benefits. So how has Moreno's idea inspired the Paris

city government? Like what has the city been doing? So the 15 minute experience that I had in my neighborhood, it's not everywhere in Paris. So the city of Paris is really trying to make sure that people across the city can have that kind of experience that I had. And that means emphasizing proximity. They're developing multi-use buildings. They're converting old military buildings, old shopping center, and old parking structure into buildings with a mix of apartments, offices, businesses. So it's a way of taking the old and revamping it with, you know, our new climate circumstances in mind, right? Right. And Paris, like many cities, needs more housing. And they're investing in amenities for these neighborhoods. Neighborhoods across the city have new parks, urban gardens, expanded hours for child care nurseries.

They've built 600 miles of protected bike lanes. And now across the city, streets in front of schools have banned cars. They call them school streets. Oh, I mean, I can just see, you know, all the kids just walking to school. It seems like very safe and like a very good idea. It does. But I wanted to see how this 15-minute city idea is spreading. So I called up this guy.

I remember March of 2020, I was living downtown and everything was shut down. This is Justin Bipp, who's now the mayor of Cleveland. At the time, he was working at a bank in downtown Cleveland, staying in his apartment, avoiding coronavirus. I saw a news article about this big phenomenon being created in Paris around the 15-minute city, and I read up on it. I'm like, the dots are connecting for me now. I thought about my childhood growing up in Cleveland and how I lived in a 15-minute city neighborhood at the time. I thought about my childhood growing up in Cleveland and how I lived in a 15-minute city neighborhood at the time. I thought about my experience in living in London where I'd walk to school or walk to a restaurant or walk to catch a bus to get a haircut.

And he thought, I want more of this for Cleveland. So how is he putting this into place? So Bibb is new in office. He came in last year. And what his office first did is look at their city and make this 15-minute city index. They found that there are lots of places in Cleveland where you might technically have a 15-minute city, but the walk isn't so nice. The sidewalks are terrible. There might be buses, but they don't run frequently. There are grocery stores, but they don't have good food options. There's been a lot

of disinvestment in Cleveland and other U.S. cities. But as they started to do this work, they began to face other obstacles. So what are these obstacles? I spoke to researchers and they talk about four main obstacles for 15-minute cities. The first is conspiracy theories. And to understand it, we're going to start in West Oxfordshire in the UK. My name is Duncan Enright, and I am a county councillor on Oxfordshire County Council. And he's basically trying to make new bus lanes. Downtown Oxford can be really car congested. And also we know we face a climate emergency. Air pollution is terrible. About a year ago, he's at this community meeting.

He recognizes some faces. There are a lot of people he doesn't recognize, though. Anyway, at a certain point in the meeting, one of them stood up and said, what about 15-minute cities? And to be honest, first, I'd never heard of that phrase. And so it became a bit agitated. So we had to suspend the meeting. And I went over and talked to these people. And they were explaining all about this theory about the World Economic Forum, trying to institute this policy everywhere of 15 minute cities, by which they meant you would only be able to travel 15 minutes from your home. Oh, okay. Okay, so that's taking a dark turn. So the conspiracy theory is that 15 minute cities are a way for the World Economic Forum to somehow do some type of control or something? What exactly is the conspiracy theory?

Yeah, the accusation, completely unsubstantiated, is that a cabal of global elites are using or will use 15-minute cities to sneakily implement state surveillance, to limit people's freedom of movement, and to keep people in a position of subservience to the government. Here's Enright explaining his conversation with these conspiracy-minded folks. I couldn't work out and I asked them and they didn't have an idea why anybody would be stupid enough to try to do something like this. And I explained to them that my job is to make travel easier so people can go wherever they like to find opportunity, jobs, education. That's my job is to make travel easier so people can go wherever they like to find opportunity, jobs, education. That's my job, is to make it easier to get around, not to stop people going

more than 15 minutes. So it was a real surprise that this came up, almost diametrically opposite to everything I stand for. Well, I mean, basically he was just proposing creating bus lanes, right? Right. He's really about promoting buses, reducing cars in Oxford. And Enright was surprised that this got sucked into the orbit of this conspiracy theory about 15-Minute Cities. But people who study misinformation aren't surprised. Really, 15-Minute Cities is the latest victim in a broader trend that we have seen spiraling over the past five years or so. This is Jenny King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London. She says while climate misinformation used to deny

that global warming is happening, now she says attacks often focus on climate solutions. And she says they often pivot back to these big overarching conspiracies. Things that are at a fundamental level, unsubstantiated, but also impossible to disprove because they are built on imagined futures and kind of fantasized villains. This all sounds very familiar to the things that we hear in so many other areas of misinformation. Right. And the conspiracy around 15-minute cities

as this way to trap people in open-air prisons is getting some pretty big loudspeakers. It made it onto the Joe Rogan show last month. It will essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave. Really? Yeah, that's the idea. They're starting to roll out in Europe. And earlier this month, the transport secretary of the UK talked about 15 minute cities in a big speech using language very similar to the conspiracy theories. He talked about how we don't want local governments in the UK limiting how often people go to the shops, which isn't happening. Pura Technologies, a company that monitors misinformation,

pulled data from NPR. It showed thousands of posts about 15-minute cities that spiked during events like the August fires in Maui and the February derailment of a train in Ohio, with people writing falsely that these were planned events to kick people off their land and into 15-minute cities. Some online posts attack the Cleveland mayor's office. The fact that Mayor Bibb wants to lock down Cleveland in an open-air prison. And we should be clear, they're not rolling this out in Europe to restrict people's movement to 15 minutes. So we should we should be clear about that. Important fact check. Important fact check. Yes. Yes. But like I would imagine that like with everything else, these conspiracy theories can have an effect on policy and the rolling out of these 15 minute cities.

Like, are they having an impact? Yeah, a big one is these threats of violence for urban planners and politicians. Duncan Enright, that local politician in Oxfordshire, after he went to that meeting and heard how his bus lane was getting mixed up in 15-minute cities, he started getting these weird messages, phone calls. In February, thousands of people marched in Oxford against 15-Minute Cities. Enright and some of his colleagues started getting death threats. The police became involved, so it rapidly escalated. And the uproar in Oxford led to a lot more notoriety for the man behind the idea,

Carlos Moreno. Around this time of the Oxford protests, Moreno was getting a lot of death threats too. They were violent. People accused him of wanting to trap people in concentration camps. They called him Hitler and Pol Pot. Moreno says it was difficult to bear psychologically because it wasn't just him getting threats. It was his wife, his daughters. He said it was really heavy. And Moreno says while the death threats are now subsiding for him, he says he knows other people working on climate solutions

who continue to get threats of violence. Moreno says these attacks give his colleagues, other researchers, scientists, a reluctance to publish articles about their work. And he says this is what the conspiracy mongers want, to silence us. And misinformation can also mix in or drown out actual legitimate policy criticisms of climate solutions, making it really muddied and difficult to have these conversations. Jenny King at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue says this is deliberate. In the end, it actually doesn't matter if 99% of the public believe in climate change. If they are still confused about the viable pathways forward, or you're able to embed real fear and seeds of doubt about the solutions that are on the table, you end up with the same outcome, which is no legislative agenda, no meaningful policy proposals, no local action. So trying to slow down that process of policymaking. So conspiracy theories, that's the first obstacle. That seems like a big obstacle.

What's obstacle number two? Zoning. Don't zone out. I promise it's important. Okay. To understand it, I visited another city, one a lot closer to my home base in the Bay Area. San Jose. Hi. Are you Michael? Yeah.

Hi. Nice to meet you. Michael Brio works in city planning for San Jose. We met at the Falafel Drive-In in a very car-oriented neighborhood in the city. Can we cross here? We'll have to do a jaywalking. Oh, okay. We had to jaywalk, Aisha.

The nearest crosswalk was so far. Oh my goodness. I'm always scared to jaywalk. Yes, we made it. We made it. When we finally crossed the street, Brio got talking about single-family zoning, which is very dominant in San Jose. So single-family zoning, that really means that for big areas of cities or suburbs, people can only build one house on one lot for one family. Right. Here is Jonathan Levine, professor of urban and regional planning at University of Michigan. Would I say that it's

a problem? Would I say that it's big, it's enormous. The single family zone absolutely dominates residential land in all of our metropolitan areas. Levine says this is not some accident of history. There's a direct through line to the dominance of single family zoning and policies of segregation. Federal incentives for single-family homeownership were fundamentally restricted to whites. Its roots are in racial exclusion. And to this day, we can show that exclusionary zoning and single-family zoning tend to exacerbate racial segregation. In San Jose, a guy like Michael Brio has this problem. He and his colleagues are trying to build more low-income and market-rate

apartments for San Jose. I mean, I hear about this all over because there's a housing crisis and like there's just not enough homes for people in this country. And San Jose has climate goals. In single-family zoning, you can't establish retail businesses near homes. People end up relying on cars, which increases emissions. But in parts of San Jose, there are these zones. They call them mixed-use zones, mixed-use corridors. And Brio is using them to make what he calls urban villages. He says it's his version of 15-minute cities. There's a park, a little playground.

He took me there. In front of us was a line of apartment buildings, this pedestrian walkway, trees with purple flowers. This reminds me of when I was a kid, I used to play Sim City. Oh yeah. Yeah. On the other side was a nail salon, across the street was a Safeway. There's also a very popular breakfast place. I've never been there called The Breakfast Club. It's super popular. Well, I mean, this all seems like really nice and lovely. What is the issue? The problem is that there's just only so much land zoned for multiple uses in San Jose with both apartments and a breakfast spot.

We came out of the urban village and we were surrounded by single-family homes. Brio says they'll eventually have to think about converting neighborhoods full of single-family properties into more dense developments like duplexes and fourplexes. But sometimes there are challenges to changes like this. They come from the communities themselves, which brings us to our next obstacle. I would guess that it's the not-in-my-backyard folks, NIMBYs. That is correct. There is this vein of NIMBYism in the American psyche, arguably, which has to do with certain imaginaries, the single-family home, you know, being able to access things with your car. You know, this is part of our culture. Fernando Borga is a professor of urban planning at University of Minnesota.

And his city, Minneapolis, made big news in 2018 by being the first big city to outlaw single family zoning. But right now, the city's plan is seeing a legal challenge coming primarily from environmentalists. They see new apartments posing a threat to wildlife migration. Well, I mean, that's, you know, that's really tricky because more dense urban living in the big picture can be better for the environment, for climate, by reducing car emissions. But then you're worried about, you know, wildlife and animals and all of that. It's complicated. And there are different type of NIMBYs, neighborhood defenders, whatever you want to call them. Some are environmentalists, some are not. Some are in white neighborhoods. Some are in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods that have been paved over by freeways.

Borges says some mistrust for U.S. planners is understandable. I would be remiss in demonizing NIMBYists. I can have my reasons why I don't agree with them, but I think it's more productive to bring them to a conversation. And a lot of climate solutions, whether it's 15-minute cities or new renewables, they're going to require reimagining land. So researchers say bringing neighbors to the table is key. So what's the fourth obstacle we're talking about with 15-minute cities? This one surprised me a bit, but it's actually public schools. I talked to Keri Makarovic, urban planning professor at University of Colorado Denver, and she says her research found when urban U.S. couples have kids, they often leave cities for suburbs, which they think have better schools.

They kind of opt out of more sustainable urban living. We want regional sustainability. We have to look to these urban places and why aren't people staying in them and thriving in them and a lot of it comes back down to the urban schools it's all about the schools i mean i always it's always about the schools oh i definitely get that um but julia you've spent all this time thinking about 15 minute cities and and the last few months and all of these obstacles for them. So are you hopeful that the U.S. and other countries around the world can actually achieve this? There's something that Jonathan Levine said that really stuck with me. When we travel to Paris or Amsterdam, it can feel like the 15-minute cities are just inevitable in Europe because

Europeans have just never been as car crazy as Americans. And Levine says, no, actually, Europeans loved cars after World War II. The difference is that these cities decided to move away from cars. What that demonstrates is the result that many Americans find desirable. Wow, isn't it wonderful? We go to Europe, we can walk, we can take the bus, we can take the train, etc. It's a policy choice. It's not preordained. Seoul, Mexico City, Bogota, cities around the world have made policies to promote public transit, walking. We saw in the pandemic, cities can move away from cars and transform streets quickly. Of course, I mean, it seems like this would be harder in some places than others. Like, I mean, you have some cities

that are more dense, but others, you know, are very spread out, you know, so they're starting from very different places. Yeah. In spread out car-centric San Jose, Brillo says he sees the work he's doing as a planner in terms of decades. He says it's going to be a generational shift. But ultimately, Moreno says this question of how fast we move comes down to politicians and communities. No como una varita magica en Magic Wand. Para decir, puff, se transforma. politicians and communities. Carlos Moreno says there's no verita magica, there's no magic wand to poof, transform cities. Transforming cities, he says, comes down to a question of political will.

Julia, thank you so much for this reporting. Thank you so much, Aisha. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Andrew Mambo and edited by Jenny Schmidt and Neela Banerjee. Our engineer for this episode was Maggie Luthar. Thanks to Gene Demby, Jennifer Ludden, also Arielle Redding, Jerry Holmes, and everyone who helped to make NPR's first Climate Week. You can check out more stories about climate solutions at npr.org slash climate week. The Sunday story is made by NPR's Enterprise Storytelling Unit. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Myesha Roscoe.

Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.