Michael Moynihan: Crackpot theories are coming to a 15-minute city near you

In recent months we have seen plenty of such demonstrations, with other cliched descriptions being pressed into service.

The far right are at it; the conspiracy theorists are protesting; the far right-conspiracy theorists are up in arms about this, that, and the other. Immigration and Irishness are great bugbears at the moment, for instance, but soon the carnival will roll on and another target will have to be found, the more unlikely the better.

Such as?

Unlikely though it sounds, it appears that the 15-minute city is now moving into the crosshairs of the permanently annoyed.

Regular readers will be familiar with this concept in urban living — the idea that if everything a person wants is within fifteen minutes of their home, travelling by foot, bike, or public transport, then it would be beneficial on many fronts.

The logic is simple. If it took you a quarter of an hour to get to your place of work, the local shops, the schools your children attend, your health provider, your leisure facilities, and so on, then that would be better for you and better for the environment.

It would reduce our dependence on the car and would improve our health individually and collectively by reducing emissions. That improvement in health and wellbeing would have a knock-on effect in terms of sustainability and improve the quality of life generally in the city.

There would certainly be an improvement in community spirit: surely it would be preferable to have people strolling to the shop, saying hello to each other, rather than zooming past each other in cars and raising everyone’s blood pressure?

Of course, if you take a step back, that’s a description that would fit Cork in past decades. Zones as various and distant as Blackpool and Blackrock, Barrack Street and the Lough, and plenty of other parts, existed in just that way.

In an era before car ownership and suburbanisation spread Cork out to all points of the compass, those areas were nearly self-sufficient independent communities, with the city itself seen almost as a separate entity that was occasionally shared.

(I remember an elderly man telling me many years ago on top of Dublin Hill that he hadn’t been to Cork for a few weeks. I knew exactly what he meant.)

As an idea, it has been popularised by Carlos Moreno of the University of Paris, and it has gathered pace as more and more cities around the world realised the benefits that could accrue from adopting the concept and putting it into practice themselves.

Conspiracy-mongers

So where do the conspiracy theorists come in?

Well, earlier this year Moreno “started receiving death threats,” reported The New York Times.

“People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that ‘sooner or later your punishment will arrive’ and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.”

Why? Moreno told that outlet his 15-minute city concept had been folded into a pungent stew of outlandish notions: “Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life ... This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

In this worldview, the 15-minute city is an instrument of government control, a weapon deployed to curtail people’s freedom of movement by keeping them penned into these smaller zones within the greater urban area. Travel restrictions in the pandemic form part of the mythology here, as do traffic cameras and mobile phone towers, but in this crazed theory the key element is the restriction of car speed because the car is seen as some kind of avatar of basic freedom.

Don’t give yourself a migraine by trying to puzzle out the logic — there isn’t any — and reflect instead on the most obvious retort.

If the 15-minute city is a reversion to the kind of neighbourhoods we had long before the car released people to live in disparate areas, then were those old neighbourhoods also part of a government control scheme?

(Doubtless those committed to the bit would say yes, but no matter.)

For those readers who do not wear a tinfoil hat, the cast list opposing the 15-minute city is a reverse endorsement. As in, if oddity hawkers such as Jordan Petersen, Neil Oliver, and Nigel Farage are against an idea, then it’s likely to find favour with normal people everywhere.

Tory conference

I raise this farrago of bad-faith cynicism here because even though the good Professor Moreno has described it with considerable understatement as “insane”, it has entered the political mainstream across the water through the efforts of this month’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his fellow Tories.

This week they had their party conference, and among the highlights were Transport Minister Mark Harper calling himself “proudly pro-car” and describing the 15-minute city concept as “sinister”.

He added: “What is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV.”

Hold in your laughter, difficult though that is for several reasons.

For instance, one of the other departments in the government Mr Harper infests has already debunked the 15-minute conspiracy theory. Six months ago. Well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a simple mind and all that.

On another front, taken to its ultimate logical progression in Ireland, if this theory were true it would mean Cork City Council and other local authorities are deciding how often you go to the shops while simultaneously playing their appointed roles, keeping their populations divided and docile.

Quiet at the back, please.

Those with an eye on the bigger picture will point to the fact that the Tories are circling the plughole when it comes to the next election in Britain. They’ll try anything in sheer desperation.

True enough. But as we have also seen in recent months, there is a willingness to import crackpot theories into this country. Repackaging deranged Tory notions for an Irish audience comes with inbuilt ironies too numerous to list, but here I prefer to warn Cork readers specifically.

You think the 15-minute city model is appropriate to your Leeside quartier because you want quieter and safer streets for children, convenient local services, and fewer cars, but apparently, you’ve been hoodwinked and misled, taken in by a vast global conspiracy!

Why would a vast global conspiracy use bike lanes in Blackpool and bus corridors in Douglas to keep us in line? Don’t ask. You’ll only encourage them.