On Sunday, October 1, 2023 at 5:06:55 PM UTC+1, Simon Mason wrote:
QUOTE: Councillor Helen Hayden, Executive Member for Infrastructure and Climate, said:
“It was a fantastic day on Cookridge Street with lots of different kinds of people interested in learning more about the public e-bike hire service which has been a long ambition of this council, and it’s great to see them on the streets being
hired. ENDS
Hope the local gammons didn't get "trapped" in their homes by the WEF stormtroopers or something.
It is the year 2049, and residents of the UK city of Oxford are unable to leave their neighborhoods. If they do, a network of cameras — installed years earlier under the guise of easing traffic congestion — track their movements. If they stray too
far from their registered addresses, a £100 fine is automatically removed from their bank accounts. The only cars now allowed on the streets belong to representatives of the world government, who relentlessly patrol the city for anyone breaking the
rules.
That’s the scenario conjured by adherents of a conspiracy theory that has emerged in Britain, triggered by plans to place restrictions on through-traffic and fed by the popularity of a largely unrelated urban planning concept — the pedestrian-
friendly “15-minute city.”
The bizarre speculation burst into the real world on Feb. 18, when an estimated 2,000 demonstrators gathered in central Oxford. Five people were arrested during the demonstration, which drew groups of protesters and counter-protesters to the heart of the
university town.
At issue was the proposed introduction of six new traffic filters intended to limit car use through residential parts of the city at peak hours. Monitored by automatic license plate readers, these filters would fine drivers from outside the county of
Oxfordshire who entered central areas during high-traffic periods. Oxford residents will be allowed fine-free peak-hour access for 100 days per year, with residents of the wider county able to apply for a 25-day fine-free access permit.
Such efforts to limit vehicles have become increasingly common in UK cities, and many have faced opposition from drivers and residents. But the Oxford proposal took a weird turn when some protesters described the filters an effort to carve Oxford into
six sealed-off “15-minute cities.” That’s a reference to the hyper-local planning model coined by Franco-Colombian professor Carlos Moreno and adopted by mobility advocates, developers and city leaders around the world. Its principle holds that
daily needs like workplaces, schools and amenities should ideally be located within a short walk or bike ride from home.
Conflating walkability with a dystopian future of surveillance and oppression takes some work, but in recent weeks the term managed to get sucked into a maelstrom of British conspiracy theories. A British MP called 15-minute cities “an international
socialist conspiracy,” while conservative self-help guru Jordan Peterson tweeted Oxford’s vehicle restrictions were the work of “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” and referred his followers to the “Great Reset,” a 2020 World Economic Forum
initiative that’s become a magnet for right-wing fantasies about a Covid-fueled plot to destroy capitalism. A British TV presenter also took up that theme, insisting that the street revamp was part of a push for “one world government.” Afterward, a
leading UK Jewish organization and a group of MPs warned the network of indulging in dog-whistle anti-Semitism.
So out of proportion are the claims compared to what Oxford’s traffic-calming plan calls for that it takes some unpacking to explain how it happened.
Early misreporting of the issue helped throw oil on the fire. No local officials promised to divide Oxford into six “15-minute cities,” as some local media accounts implied. While the Oxford City Council does cite Moreno’s concept as a guiding
principle for its 2040 local plan, it’s not involved in rethinking the city’s streets. That’s the work of Oxfordshire County Council, a different body that oversees not just Oxford itself but its large surrounding county, an area of just over 1,000
square miles. What the county is proposing — without mentioning the 15-minute city concept — is a street intervention known as a low-traffic neighborhood, or LTN, which has already been implemented widely across Britain.
LTNs date back to the 1970s, with the aim of making urban neighborhoods more walkable and bikeable by restricting car access to residential streets. They are a familiar source of local-level controversy, especially recently, since they proliferated
immediately before and during the pandemic. Opponents have said that they slow down emergency services and displace traffic from affluent areas onto major arteries, where poorer residents are more likely to live. But recent research suggests that LTNs
cut traffic within their boundaries by almost half without increasing it on boundary roads, while in London the most deprived quartile of residents are more likely to live within an LTN than the least deprived quartile. LTNs continue to be contentious,
but support among London residents has been growing: 47% of respondents to a 2021 survey saying they were in favor of them and only 16% against.
Past opposition to LTNs, however, didn’t take the current bizarre conspiratorial tack, nor have the essentially local debates over their implementation been a target for activists from outside the affected area. In Oxford, protesters pounced on the
issue as a “lightning rod” for waging a broader culture war, says Milo Comerford, head of counter-extremism policy and research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that studies extremist movements.
Their arguments show a peculiar mix of international and homegrown tinfoil hat-ism. “A lot of the conspiracy’s hallmarks are very American, being at its core about a kind of freedom of movement that’s defined by automobile-friendly cities,”
Comerford says. “The odd thing is that it doesn't really make sense in the context of Oxford. Its medieval center has always been pretty pedestrian and cycle-friendly. In fact, the conspiracy has slightly been imposed on Oxford.”
He cites the experience of the pandemic as a critical factor in the protest’s origins. As many people in the UK and beyond genuinely struggled with Covid-19 restrictions and fears of a dangerous-but-invisible force, their anxieties fueled a rich online
ecosystem of misinformation. “Covid has been a Pandora’s-box-opening moment,” says Comerford, one that has forged “unlikely coalitions between people who were previously hardened conspiracy theorists and those who were scared in the context of
the pandemic and got drawn in.”
A 2021 report from ISD tracked the rise of the “climate lockdown” conspiracy during the Covid crisis, which found broad buy-in among anti-vaccination and far-right groups. Amplified by conservative media outlets in the US and UK and threaded with
antagonism for climate action, this narrative holds that Covid-19 was “merely a precursor to future ‘green tyranny,’” the report states, “and that both governments and global elites would curtail civil liberties under the pretext of climate
change.”
Accordingly, some Oxford protesters see the town’s car-calming initiative as an extension of a sinister authoritarian agenda. In videos and memes dispersed via social media, their vision of the 15-minute city often references the extreme social
confinement enforced in Wuhan and other Chinese cities amid China’s now-discarded Covid Zero policy.
The pandemic provided ready-made “architectures” of protest, Comerford says, “built to respond to any issue of the day. It’s important to know that these episodes are essentially issue-agnostic.”
It’s also important to know that the UK’s wave of 15-minute-city protest employs a very fundamental misunderstanding of the concept.
“We just applied a term to something that has been there all along.”
Many Oxford protesters fixate on the notion that authorities intend to break cities up into small, fenced-off zones within which citizens will be confined by physical barriers, facial recognition tech, or other means. These grimly totalitarian scenarios
do indeed sound alarming, but they have nothing to do with the reality of 15-minute-city-style urban thinking.
The term doesn’t describe a discrete area with barriers — it’s a planning approach that tries to ensure that schools, health-care facilities, parks and other amenities are spread equitably across neighborhoods, limiting the need for lengthy
commutes and expanding job access. The time span in the name refers simply to what a person can easily reach from their home. Every resident’s 15 minute radius is going to be different; a city of a million homes will have a million overlapping 15-
minute cities.
If this idea sounds familiar — or very familiar — that’s because it is. The general concept reflects the dominant direction of urban planning for at least the last 20 years, in which cities have tried to move away from the rigid single-use zoning
popular in the earlier 20th century toward a mixed-use template that integrates homes, businesses, cultural venues and workplaces within the same areas. Carlos Moreno didn’t dramatically innovate on this approach; he merely packaged it a very effective
way, by placing the ordinary resident at the heart of the urban plan.
That doesn’t mean that the 15-minute cities framework doesn’t raise legitimate concerns. Critics of hyper-local planning policies have highlighted how they might displace less-affluent residents, as seen in Barcelona’s “superblock” system,
where through-traffic is restricted to a small part of the city grid to cut pollution and increase car-free public space. Others dismiss the approach as hopelessly utopian for North American cities planned around automobile use, which are not just low
density but have social and racial segregation operating at a far more entrenched level than zoning alone can address.
Such concerns, however, are typically voiced by progressive foes of corporate overreach, not the far-right conspiracists who converged on Oxford and saw eco-tyranny on the march because their drive to the grocery store may be slightly extended.
Meanwhile, the leaders of that city, whose central street plan took shape around eight centuries before the automobile’s invention, have been left scrambling to understand the strange forces they unwittingly tapped. “We just applied a term to
something that has been there all along,” says Councillor Alex Hollingsworth of the Oxford City Council. That’s the body that first invoked the 15-minute city template for its long-term planning, but didn’t draw the street changes that triggered
the current protests.
About the controversy, Hollingsworth sounds understandably bemused. “What is more British,” he asks, “than a corner shop and a pub you can walk to?”
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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