What is a 15-Minute City?

The 15-minute city (FMC) is an urban planning concept designed to meet the sustainability targets and indicators pursuant with Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11). The international construction of 15-minute cities is a global project that is being rolled out in the UK in cities like Oxford and Bath.

The local council’s FMC objective in Bath is to establish a “movement strategy” to engineer “how people move” and “how space is shared.” This will “shift” resident “away from decades of car dependency” and will instead compel them to prioritise “sustainable travel”—walking, cycling and public transport.

The overarching ambition in Bath is to achieve “climate goals.” The local authority is, like nearly every other UK local authority, on an SDG-driven “Journey to Net Zero.” This has led to the creation of four “traffic cells” in Bath. The clearly stated reason for the zoning is to enforce a “reductions in car use.”

Bath’s Journey to Net Zero is being implemented in pursuit of SDG 11.b:

By 2020, substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans towards inclusion, resource efficiency, mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

The UN defines “inclusion” to mean the provision of “equitable access to opportunities and resources.” Therefore, the equitable access to resources—inclusion—in a 15-minute city maximises the “resource efficiency” of residents who must mitigate and adapt to UN climate policies.

The FMC project is Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) council’s contribution to the UN’s centralised and coordinated management of the distribution and allocation of all resources. Otherwise known as sustainable development or, more accurately, Technocracy.

In accordance with SDG 11.2, by 2030 people living in “human settlements” in BANES should have access to “sustainable transport.” By making car use more difficult and expensive, the plan is supposed to achieve SDG 11.6—“reduce the adverse per capita [individual] environmental impact of cities.”

The UK national move towards 15-minute cities is part of “strengthening national and regional development planning” under SDG 11.a. Thus the FMC, in compliance with SDG 11.3, is an attempt to achieve “sustainable human settlement planning and management.”

There is nothing new about urban planning to meet the needs of residents. Garden cities, neighbourhood units, and compact cities are all urban development models aimed at providing easy, or easier, public access to essential goods and services within urban communities.

Planning initiatives like garden cities sought to enhance the draw of urban living—employment, education, health care, etc.—by improving living standards through better access to green spaces, affordable housing and greater opportunities for self sufficiency. The objective was to tackle the rampant squalor and often horrific health consequences of living and working in 19th and early 20th century UK towns and cities, thereby stimulating urban economic growth. For garden city developers, the primary social engineering tools were thoughtful planning and creative design.

The FMCs—variously referenced as complete communities, 20-minute cities and 20-minute neighbourhoods, etc.—utilise an entirely different approach. While the touted FMC offer is to provide residents with access to everything they need within a 15 minute walk or cycle ride from their home—chrono-urbanism—the use of surveillance technology and punitive restrictions to coerce and/or enforce compliance is the preferred social engineering tool.

For example, Oxford has six—rather than Bath’s four—traffic cells or “15-minute neighbourhoods” as local councilors like to call them. ANPR cameras will track Oxford residents who travel by car to ensure they comply with their allocated 100 day car travel allowance. Fines will automatically be levied if they drive outside of permitted times or exceed their 100 day annual limit. Residents living outside the approved zones will need to buy the necessary permits to travel by car, for a maximum 25 days per year, across and between Oxford’s restricted zones.

Ending Oxford residents’ freedom to roam, cutting entry by car for none-zone dwellers, and restricting residents’ movement within their assigned FMC is part of Oxford city council’s commitment to the UN’s global policy agenda. Its latest 2040 Net Zero Action Plan, like Bath’s, splits the city up into Zero Emission Zones (ZEZs) which can be used to control driver’s behaviour by “raising the charges to reflect higher requirements for vehicle efficiency.”

According to Oxford’s “Plan,” The “deployment of active travel infrastructure” such as ANPR surveillance of its citizens’ movements, is designed to lead to a “reduction of motorised traffic.” This will free up “enough road space in Oxford for active travel”—walking, cycling, and public transport. SDG 11.2, in other words.

As highlighted by the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN)—which operates out of Columbia University and is heavily backed by the United Nations (UN)—the FMC concept was first formalised in 2016 by Franco-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno. This was also the year that the global Millennium Development Goals were officially transformed into SDGs as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—Agenda 2030.

UCCRN notes that Moreno emphasised the need to maximise the efficiency of “resource and service provision” including optimising the “number of residents” in an FMC. Moreno argued that FMCs should be established “in all geographies” and that “tailored 15-minute city models” could be built by deploying “advanced technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things), Digital Twins, and 6G networks.”

Moreno’s specialism is smart-city planning and he is the “special Smart-City envoy for the Mayor of Paris.” Moreno was clear from the outset that digital surveillance technology enables FMC developments.

The UN was eager to adopt the FMC model in order to use the technology to impose its SDG policies on urban centres around the world. In 2022, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the global C40 Cities network signed a strategic partnership with the multinational real estate investors NREP to accelerate the global rollout of FMCs. Moreno was also a C40 strategic partner and advisor for the initiative, as was UN-Habitat.

Created in 1977, the role of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) is to establish “socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities.” UN-Habitat is the UN’s “focal point for all urbanization and human settlement matters.” It works with governments, other intergovernmental agencies, civil society organizations, private philanthropic foundations, academic institutions and the private sector to socially engineer urban populations accordingly.

To this end, UN-Habitat has established the New Urban Agenda as “a framework that contributes to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).” The New Urban Agenda decrees that, in order to “contribute effectively to urban sustainability, frontier technologies and innovations need to be applied.”

Just as Moreno advocated, the UN explains what smart-city frontier technology it considers essential for urban sustainable developments like FMCs:

[Frontier technologies] currently include, among others, the Internet of things, sensor networks, machine-to-machine communication, robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, 3D printing, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, autonomous unmanned vehicles, drones, blockchain, cryptographic computing, and big data processing and visualization.

The New Urban Agenda promotes public-private investment—stakeholder capitalism—to finance the construction of such “smart-cities” to meet SDGs:

The New Urban Agenda calls for technology and communication networks to be strengthened and for smart-city approaches that use digitalization, clean energy and technologies. [. . .] Innovative funding opportunities and partnerships need to be explored and the capacity of local governments to effectively procure, test and implement frontier technologies needs to be significantly strengthened.

Frontier, or smart-city, surveillance technology is behavioural control technology. Taking a positive view of social engineering, researchers writing for the Indonesian Journal of Information Systems and Informatics noted:

The influence of smart-city technology on consumer behavior in urban environments and people’s daily routines and lifestyle habits is significant. [. . .] The development of smart-cities through the application of various technologies such as smart transportation systems, traffic management applications, and smart sensors [. . .] has changed the behavior of people. [. . .] Thus, the application of smart-city technology not only transforms city infrastructure and services, but also brings significant changes in citizen behavior.

As stated in an academic article co-authored by Moreno and published in 2021, the FMC “adds to [the] existing thematic of Smart Cities.” The aim being to construct “sustainable and inclusive cities, as depicted in the Sustainable Development Goal 11 of the United Nations.” Technological behavioural control, and an unwavering commitment to SDG 11, lie at the heart of the FMC vision.

The team of researchers, including Moreno, wrote:

Artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, Machine Learning and Crowd Computing and others is expected to actualize the proposed 15-Minute City concept. [. . .] Aligning with calls of technological integration in cities to achieve the dimensions outlined in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, [. . .] the use of diverse technologies, smart devices and sensors can lead to this actualisation. [. . .] The use of Blockchain, smart contracts and fiscal instruments can be tallied to urban development rights and transaction costs to ensure both efficiency and performance while catering for long term policy agendas [Agenda 2030].

It is, therefore, relatively easy to define a 15-minute city (FMC): An FMC is a smart-city development within a predefined urban zone that uses frontier technology to socially engineer the population’s adherence to global policy agendas.

This is a fact: something that is known to exist, especially something for which proof exists, or about which there is information.

Yet, despite the obvious, openly admitted purpose of FMCs, you would be hard pressed to know it. Chrono-urbanism is the only aspect of FMC planning that is ever discussed in the mainstream. To point out that FMCs also deploy frontier technologies to control people’s behaviour is widely, and ludicrously, said to be a conspiracy theory.

In a May 2024 interview with the smart-city specialist Moreno, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) discussed how his FMC idea apparently became a “conspiracy theory.” Claiming that, for example, Bath’s and Oxford’s FMC Zero Emission Zones are imaginary and that sharing proven facts about FMCs constitutes “disinformation,” the RICS gave Moreno the opportunity the thank the “press and the fact-checkers” for putting people straight about what Moreno called “false information and conspiracy theories online and on social networks.”

Moreno said that alleged FMC conspiracy theories were fuelled by “violence and hatred.” Contradicting everything else he has said and written about FMCs, he countered the alleged conspiracy theorists by pretending that the sole purpose of a 15-minute city was “to create urban environments [. . .] where essential daily necessities are accessible within low-carbon proximity”—chrono-urbanism.

The interviewing RICS journalist didn’t think it necessary to question Moreno about FMCs’ use of frontier smart-city technology. Indeed, despite the fact that Moreno’s academic specialism is smart-city design, RICS described him only as a professor of “architecture” and neither RICS nor Moreno even mentioned smart-city technology or SDG 11, as if they too don’t exist.

This denial or reality appear to be common tactic used by those who promote FMCs or among those who are instrumental in building them. For example, when residents opposed the construction of Oxford’s FMC architecture, the city council’s response was not to alter its plan but rather to drop use of the term “15-minute city” from its published plan to impose FMCs.

In 2023, a multidisciplinary group from the universities of Liverpool and Edinburgh provided a thoughtful explanation supposedly enabling us to separate the reality of FMCs from the conspiracy theories:

The 15-minute city itself is a simple idea. If you live in one, it means that everything you need to go about your daily life – school, doctors, shops and so on – is located no more than a 15-minute walk from your house. [. . .] The idea flourished in the wake of COVID, when lockdowns and working from home had more of us ditching the car and recognising the need for well-served local neighbourhoods.

Again, this propagandist dross omits all of the inconvenient facts. There is no mention of SDG 11 or of smart frontier technology. The surveillance, restrictions, limits, additional costs, fines, and other forms of enforcement and coercion—ubiquitous in FMCs—are disregarded entirely. This type of propaganda is called Half-Truth, but other propaganda techniques were also used in the piece.

The academics wrote:

Among other things, the charge sheet against 15-minute cities is that they are a “socialist”, or even “Stalinist”, attempt to control the population by actively preventing citizens from straying more than 15 minutes from their homes.

This combines the propaganda techniques of the Straw Man and Disinformation.

The allegation that FMCs are “Stalinist” comes from a meme shared by one hidden and anonymous Reddit account. More recently, the same claim has been promoted by the Telegraph which dug out an appropriate quote. This false account—disinformation asserting people object to FMC’s because they think them “Stalinist”—is used as a straw man to utterly misrepresent and distort people’s real concerns about FMCs. If that doesn’t work, FMC critics can also be labelled far-right.

What this reveals is a fear driven refusal to report facts, a desperate denial of the truth, and an attempt to deceive the public. Undoubtedly this is because it is much easier to entice people to live in what they imagine to be a modern-day garden city than it is to convince them to incarcerate themselves in a digital gulag. Sadly, this deception seems to be relatively successful.

Told that anyone who expresses concern about the construction of FMCs are conspiracy theorists, far right, or both, the terminally duped, reliant on whatever the mainstream tells them, appear to genuinely believe FMCs are being built for their benefit.

Following a 15-minute city related comment I recently posted on X, among the trolls and the bots that responded, some seemingly real people replied with comments like:

It’s about people being able to live, work and socialise in a local community. All this stuff about zones and travel restrictions is utter bull.

or:

It’s going back to a world where we didn’t have to own a car just to pop to a local shop.

and:

Why would you want to make people travel more than 15 minutes for essential services? Make it make sense.

No one opposes the use of behavioural control surveillance technology in FMCs wants to live in communities where there are no local amenities or poor access to essential goods an services. They are not arguing against living in healthier, less polluted, more pleasant environments, nor are they opposed to reinvigorating the UK’s rapidly declining high streets.

To those who assume FMCs are as described to them by the likes of the BBC, perhaps it is worth pondering a few questions.

Who doesn’t think we need to improve our transport infrastructure? Who wants to drive miles to find a bank, a butchers, a greengrocers, or a pharmacy? Who doesn’t want to be able to access a doctor or a dentist, child-care, decent schools or lovely green spaces within easy walking distance of their homes?

In the leafy suburbs, people who can afford to do so pay incredibly high housing costs to be able to do just that.

Chrono-urbanism is not a bad idea, or a new idea for that matter. If there was any sign of inward investment into struggling communities to enable chrono-urbanism to work, that would be fantastic. But there isn’t.

Not only are all the tyrannical aspects of FMCs denied by those trying to sell the digital infrastructure to a deceived public—either by refusing to acknowledge reality or deploying the conspiracy theory canard—as yet, no one who advocates for FMCs has explained how surveillance and enforcement will revitalise hitherto neglected communities. Who will provide the essential goods and services modern chrono-urbanism promises to deliver within a 15 minute radius?

The pseudopandemic policy response, that FMC proponents highlight as an impetus for FMC development, continued the destruction of UK SMEs and further hobbled the UK’s functioning economy. These government policies transferred wealth away from the general population to concentrate it in the hands of global investor shareholders and the multinational corporation they control. Are we supposed to believe the government now seeks to remedy the slew or urban problems it was largely responsible for creating by building 15-minute cities?

Leaving aside its blatant oppression, the prospect of living in a 15-minute city does not remotely suggest a return to some sort of urban idyll that arguably never existed in the first place. The local butcher and the greengrocer won’t return, they’ve been priced out; doctors surgeries won’t suddenly be accessible, and providing beautiful green spaces won’t be a planning priority. You are deluding yourself if you think that is what the global FMC project is about.

In all likelihood, in a 15-minute city, your local unmanned AI controlled convenience store—owned by your friendly local multinational retail corporation—will require you to submit your digital identity to buy food; your local-GP will be available locally via a convenient online video consultation; your prescribed drugs will be delivered by drone and all your retail purchasing desires will be met by processing your orders online and shipping goods to your door from distant mega-warehouses.

If and when the next round of lockdowns arrive, if you already live in your allocated FMC zone, why would you ever be permitted to leave?

Do you really imagine the 15-minute city is being rolled out globally because the UN and its private sector partners, and other stakeholders, want to improve your quality of life?

Iain Davis is an independent journalist a researcher from the UK. You can read more of Iain’s work at his blog IainDavis.com (Formerly InThisTogether) or follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his SubStack. His book Pseudopandemic, is now available, in both in kindle and paperback, from Amazon and other sellers. You can claim a free copy of his new book “The Manchester Attack” by subscribing to his newsletter.

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