The new plan is designed to put driving, rather than walking or cycling, at the heart of government policy on urban planning. “The plans aim to stop councils implementing so-called ‘15-minute cities’ by consulting on ways to prevent schemes which aggressively restrict where people can drive,” the government said in its press release.
In an interview published over the weekend, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak unveiled his government’s new plan and slammed the 15-minute city concept. “Politicians always want to make short-term decisions, take the easy way out, without any thinking about how that is actually just going to impact ordinary people,” Sunak told The Sun.
The idea of a 15-minute city has been around for almost a decade and was first posited in 2015 by Carlos Moreno, a French urban designer and professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris. He described his idea as cities that “should be designed so that within the distance of a 15-minute walk or bike ride, people should be able to access work, housing, food, health, education, culture, and leisure.”
Conspiracies surrounding the concept began bubbling up on social media channels in 2020, linked to claims of a looming climate lockdown in which the use of cars and other fossil-fuel-powered vehicles would be banned. When lockdowns happened for a year after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the conspiracy-addled internet went into overdrive, and the idea of a 15-minute city mutated to become a Stalinist climate lockdown plot designed by globalist groups like the World Economic Forum to more easily control all aspects of people’s lives and turn local communities into prisons.
The conspiracy has taken hold among right-wing audiences in the United States on social media, with psychologist turned right-wing conspiracy theorist Jordan Peterson boosting it in a tweet late last year that has been viewed almost 8 million times.
During the wildfires in Hawaii this summer, many conspiracy theorists on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, claimed that a direct-energy weapon was used to purposely start the fire that destroyed the city of Lahaina to make way for the creation of a new 15-minute city.
