What Is a 15 Minute City?

And Why Are They Controversial?

This image, taken from my balcony a few minutes ago, is a portrait of a decidedly non-15 minute city. According to Congress for a New Urbanism, a 15 minute city “may be defined as an ideal geography where most human needs and many desires are located within a travel distance of 15 minutes.” There is an emphasis on pedestrian, bike and transit in this idea. Houston is not a 15 minute city, although the neighborhood centered on my building is—I can walk easily to a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a pharmacy, even a hospital should I need to.

This concept doesn’t feel all that different from other urbanist fantasies. I have been following these arguments for decades. There is a new urbanist reading list that I can recommend: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs from 1961 is the ur-text of new urbanism. Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream affected me strongly. This book was written by architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who went on to design Seaside, Florida, a tiny townlet in the Florida panhandle designed to bring their new urbanist plans to life.

Seaside feels like a 15 minute city, but it’s not really a city. I would call it a suburb, but it is not near a city, unless you count Panama City or Mobile, Alabama. Still, good effort! I passed through Seaside while driving from Tampa to Houston, and it is charming but not something one can image easily replicated in actual, existing cities.

Most North American cities are utterly hostile to the idea of being walkable. It’s much easier to build a new freeway than to take one down. Still, a neighborhood where everything is within walking distance sure does sound pleasant. What could be wrong with it?

The ultra-right has found a way to be scared of this mostly theoretical construct. The New York Times reports:

Driven in part by climate change deniers and backers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, false claims have circulated online, at protests and even in government hearings that 15-minute cities were a precursor to “climate change lockdowns” — urban “prison camps” in which residents’ movements would be surveilled and heavily restricted.

This is the new playbook for the ultra-right. Find something innocuous and imagine the worst possible explanation, and tell your uneducated followers that this is the newest threat to decent white people everywhere. They turn “drag queen story hour” into rape-camp in the fevered brains of their followers.

There has to be something for the rubes to be angry at. It’s how they roll.

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