Fifteen-minute cities are suffering their 15 minutes of fame

When people drop the inverted commas from an awkward idea, something has changed. Witness the 15-minute city, which for years was known as “the 15-minute city”, because no one really understood what it meant. Suddenly, everyone from rule-making guru Jordan Peterson to Conservative MP Nick Fletcher seems affronted by their varying understandings of what low-traffic, liveable city neighbourhoods are designed to achieve.

Over 2,000 people marched through Oxford in protest at the idea earlier this month, and consternation has spread as far as Edmonton, Canada, where city planners are facing similar resistance. In a matter of weeks, the 15-minute city has undergone a social media acid bath and emerged, bedraggled, as a toxic hashtag and a “dystopian hell”. (A direct quote from a protester’s placard.)

The 21st-century idea, which links to ancient town planning, began loftily: a utopia that fantasised a greener, healthier, time-saving urban existence with improved density of services, culture and retail, thereby reducing carbon-emitting car journeys. To its defenders, if the idea could influence even tiny fractional changes along these themes, then city life would be enriched from the neighbourhood up. Paris, the capital of 15-minute city thinking, has already evicted parking spaces by the thousands, built new cycle lanes and planned a glade-like pedestrianised Champs-Elysées. Re-elected mayor Anne Hidalgo calls it “season two” of the ville du quart d’heure show.