Green Urbanism is From the Devil

Dr. Susannah Crockford: An email pings into my inbox-- an explosion emoji in the subject line, followed by, "URGENT!!" In all caps with a double exclamation point. I open it and read, "Stop 15-minute city surveillance, ticketing, spy street cameras." I don't really know what this jumble of words means, but it sounds bad. The email is from a right wing activist group in Phoenix, Arizona. I receive about three emails on the same subject in one week. They urge me to contact state representatives and attend a transportation subcommittee meeting at the state capitol to stop them from 'implementing the 15-minute city' framework. They attribute this framework to the 'deep state' in Arizona. They oppose specific policies, including surveillance cameras at traffic lights, lowering speed limits, and what they call 'the car reduction policies' currently under discussion in the transportation subcommittee. And it's not just Arizona. Stories and images suggesting something sinister about 15-minute cities are swirling on social media. On Twitter-- now X-- a meme shared by an account called Vero P. -Down and then a rabbit emoji and a whole emoji depicts a queue of cars five lanes deep. High fences with curled razor wire atop hems the road on either side as it leads to a small opening in a foreboding looking wall with guard towers and surveillance cameras. At the center of the wall above the small entrance is an eye inside a triangle, you know, like the one on the dollar bill. Signs to the right say, "North 144 Exit," signs to the left read, "Those with no chipRight Lane," and "You Are Now Entering America." The background has vertical strings of ones and zeros on green and black, reminiscent of The Matrix movie aesthetic. This (even more) dystopian version of the US border suggests that entry to US cities will become restricted and surveilled, and those without some sort of microchip will be subjected to more intense scrutiny. The caption above the image reads, "15-minute city in a nutshell," followed by an emoji with swirly eyes.

Media Clip: They're designing these new little mini-cities that they call districts, where your building is going to have 500 or 600 units for living, then it's going to have office space, then it's going to have retail-- all in the same building. Meanwhile, it's only going to have a few parking spaces. They're literally putting huge signs in the streets-- and they all look exactly the same-- and it says, "City of Toronto Rezoning," and they are all identical. And it has residences on top, office buildings and retail in the middle and the bottom, and then almost no infrastructure for parking. So there's not enough, there's not even enough parking for the people living there. You're supposed to live upstairs, work somewhere in the building, go to the gym or your Starbucks or your grocery store, everything in the building. So basically, you're living on lockdown your entire life, just like they wanted you to do with COVID. Remember with COVID When you were on lockdown and they said you couldn't go more than five kilometers away from your house? Well, if you don't have a car, guess what? You're never going to go more than five kilometers away from your house. And that's what the 15-minute city is designed to do.

Dr. Crockford: And on Tiktok, videos warn what 15-minute cities in Toronto might lead to. So what is a 15-minute city and why might it be a problem? Are cars about to be banned? Is the government trying to confine us to our neighborhoods? I'm Suzanne Crockford. Welcome to Miss Information, a limited podcast series created by me, Dr. Susannah Crockford, in conjunction with the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement and Axis Mundi Media. Miss Information was produced by Dr. Bradley Onishi and engineered by Scott Okamoto. Kari Onishi provided production assistance. Miss Information was made possible through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. Last week, in Episode Five, we talked about how conspiracy theories about The Great Reset became more popular during COVID-19. The pandemic was alleged to be a hoax covering up for covert efforts by international agencies like the World Economic Forum to force an economic transition to socialism. But The Great Reset wasn't the only conspiracy theory to gain traction during the pandemic lockdown era. In early 2023, I noticed a flyer in the window of one of the shops in my local high street. The title: "What Smart Cities Really Means for You." It went on to detail what it called 'restrictions on freedom of movement' from 15-minute cities, including no long distance travel to see your family, no more holidays abroad, no more choosing which doctor you want to see, no choice in which school your children will attend. It further warns that all money, shopping, travel, entertainment, daily activities and carbon footprint will be monitored and tracked digitally. Exceeding government regulations will result in losing access to those daily activities. Local governments have already agreed to the 'smart cities' concept in line with something called the UN Agenda 2030, under the guise of tackling climate change. There are links to the government's climate emergency web pages, as well as telegram and Facebook groups where you can join the cause and fight for Britain's freedom and rights. This leaflet makes the convergence of claims surrounding 15-minute cities and smart cities more clear. These urban planning proposals are, the allegations go, simply a ruse through which to extend excessive and coercive restrictions of civil liberties and human rights. What these theories suggest is something close to Foucault's Panopticon. We will be monitored all the time, tracked digitally wherever we go by the government, and minor infractions will result in severe punishments. The references to chips in the 15-minute cities memes now start to make a bit more sense. The chip is part of how our movements will be tracked and monitored and, if necessary, restricted. The ruse itself is also made more clear-- it's climate change. Under the guise of an existential threat, our freedoms will be removed. If you cared to look up UN Agenda 2030 you would find this is a real thing. It's the UN plan for sustainable development, where it sets out 17 sustainable development goals. Goals for such sinister ends as ending poverty, reducing inequality, and making cities safe, resilient and sustainable. So how seriously should we take these theories? A passing knowledge of the UN Sustainable Development Goals suggest that they are lofty but hard to achieve in reality. The UN also does not have any sovereign power; that still resides with nation states who can decide whether to sign up to these agendas or not, or if they do, sign up without doing very much at all beyond making lofty sounding promises. And again, the idea that draconian action to halt climate change is in process is not supported by the current level of action on climate change, either at the international, national or local level. The UK government recently gave the go ahead to the biggest oil and gas field in the North Sea for years, not exactly climate friendly behavior.

Media Clip (Protest sounds):

Dr. Crockford: And yet, in February 2023 there were protests around the UK against 15-minute cities and low-traffic neighborhoods,.While some present at the protests opposed the plans on the grounds that they were inconvenient, making it more difficult to get around. Others chanted, "Say no to 15-minute cities! Protect our liberties!" Leaflets distributed at the Oxford protest encouraged people to 'question everything.' The questions they were encouraged to ask included 'What is the World Economic Forum? Research the Great Reset,' and 'Why is the news not on the news? Can we trust the media?' At the end of each question, there was a QR code leading to videos on BitChute or articles with titles such as "WEF is the Most Evil Business in the World." Some called for vandalism of CCTV cameras put up to enforce the low emission zones. Some cameras in London's actually having been vandalized, repeatedly, throughout the year. We can see here there are some overlaps with Great Reset theories about the World Economic Forum that we discussed in Episode Five-- which as a side note, if you want to do your own research on the World Economic Forum, I would recommend listening to our episode of Miss Information. So what is this all about? First, let's figure out what all these various urban planning policies mean and whether they are actually happening. A 15-minute city is an idea popular among urban planning policy makers and academics that proposes making sure amenities are within 15 minute transit time by bike or foot. Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne have all proposed creating compact, walkable neighborhoods with health, education, and businesses within roughly 15 minutes. Some of the plans involve banning or reducing car use in specific areas. The idea is conflated with a 'smart city,' which is another concept in urban planning, in which digital data is used to make resource use more efficient, improve services, and transport networks, and then lower emissions. Both 15-minute cities and smart cities are confused with low traffic neighborhoods or low emission zones, especially in the UK. A low traffic neighborhood is one in which traffic is limited, usually using permits which are purchased to drive through the area and then enforced using CCTV cameras to catch violations. London has had a low emission zone for many years now. Only vehicles which pay a congestion charge or are otherwise exempt can drive in central London. This zone has recently been expanded. The so-called ULEZ, or ultra-low emission zone, has been extended to Greater London. Opposition to this plan has been cited as the reason for recent losses for the Conservative government in by-elections, although they could just be unpopular. Urban planners advocate for these concepts as ways to make cities more walkable, livable, and, crucially, lower the emissions from traffic that are a major contributor to climate change. However, the term '15-minute city' has become so loaded and toxic that it can be used to oppose any sort of traffic management plan in a city. This is what's been happening in Arizona. I've lived in both Arizona and the UK, and the UK has far more traffic restrictions and access to public transport than Arizona. What the transportation subcommittee was trying to do in Phoenix was add CCTV cameras at stoplights to catch people who run through a red and lower the speed limits in some neighborhoods. This is far away from the London congestion charge. In Arizona cities, the car is still king. You basically can't get anywhere in Arizona without a car, unless you're lucky enough to live close enough to the light rail in Phoenix. And yet the idea, the symbol of the 15-minute city, is invoked to oppose traffic management measures as different as congestion charges and lower speed limits. So what's the real problem?

Dr. Crockford: Cities are growing. Increasing population leads to increasing traffic, if cars are the main form of transport. Cities are also changing. They need to change to adapt to climate change, as well as dealing with increasingly congested roads from over-reliance on personal vehicles for transport. 56% of the world population, some 4.4 billion people, live in cities and urban areas. In the US, the percentage is even higher. 83% of Americans live in cities, and that's projected to increase. By 2050, 89% of the US population and 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. Most Americans live in cities, but cities in America get a bad rep. Cities are associated with crime, pollution, and high rent. Certain cities have become dog whistles on the right for being crime-ridden, so that Donald Trump just needs to invoke "Chicago" and his supporters understand that he means a high crime city. That Chicago has a majority Black population, and the racist conflation of 'urban' with 'Black' is probably a significant source of why cities get such a bad rep, at least among Republicans. There is also an association of rural America as 'real America,' the heartland with the real American (read: white) values. Given that most Americans actually live in cities, it seems more accurate to call that real America, but that's not what anyone who uses the term: 'real America' means. Cities do face real problems of high levels of air pollution, and the more cars are used to get around cities, the more emissions will contribute to climate change. The UN estimates that cities globally consume 78% of the world's energy and produce more than 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, despite covering less than 2% of the Earth's surface. So are cities themselves a problem? Are cities bad? To find out more, I spoke to Des Fitzgerald from University College Cork.

Des Fitzgerald: So my name is Des Fitzgerald. I am a Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences here at the University College Cork. I'm also part of the Radical Humanities Laboratory. My work is very broadly on the history of urbanization and especially how we think about the relationship between urban space and mental health. So I've been thinking for quite a few years now about this kind of long standing idea we've had that there's something about city life that is psychically catastrophic for at least some kinds of people, some of the time. So just thinking about that idea and how it plays out in contemporary visions of urban space and urban utopia and attempts to reshape contemporary cities. So those ideas are in a book that I have coming out, which will be published in the United States as The Living City in November by Basic Books, and then in the UK in January as the more poetic, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow. So I think what is inherent in your question, Susannah, is the kind of contemporary consensus that has emerged out of nowhere. Which, indeed, is that cities are bad in at least some kinds of ways, right? So what I write about in my book is this kind of long standing and growing idea that there's something about the stress, noise, bustle, anonymity, all those kind of cliche images we have of urban life that we are just not psychologically able for, right? We've had this idea since kind of the mid 19th century, at least, and it's been kind of trundling along since then, but it's really exploded more recently from a whole bunch of sources, one of which is an evolutionary story, which is associated with people like Edward O. Wilson, which is the idea that human beings evolved to live on a particular kind of terrain. So the "African savannah--" I'm doing quotes there for the listeners-- and that we are psychologically adapted for that terrain, right? So we kind of need particular sorts of vision lines. We don't need big, tall things, all those sorts of things, and that the city is really the antithesis of the kind of habitat that we evolved to live in, and therefore the city is completely psychologically ruinous for us as a species. That idea has really taken hold in the last couple of decades, I would say, and we see it cashed out in a whole lot of ways. I mean, from things as basic as putting green roofs on things, or green living walls, because this idea that we have evolved to be around living things, right? So our habitat needs to be natural and green and biological, because that's what we evolved around. And the city is not natural, not green, not biological. So we fixed that, by basically covering everything in vegetation, right? That's become a really popular idea. Or even just any old, banal kind of ideas about the joy of street trees, right? I mean, that all traces back to, at least in part, these kinds of very naive evolutionary ideas, which is not that cities are bad, but that cities are bad for us as a particular kind of evolved creature. I think that what the book is trying to diagnose is the contemporary vision of the city, and the kind of mainstream trend of contemporary urbanism which is constitutionally anti-urban. And whose anti-urbanism, though, it counts for itself in, you know, fairly bourgeois liberal kind of terms around 'walkability' and 'proximity' and 'wanting to be near things' and 'aren't cars big and smelly,' you know, those kind of dull but unobjectionable ideas that everyone's kind of bourgeois neighbors are attached to. On the surface it's attached to those kinds of ideas, but in the book I claim it's really trafficking a much longer, let's say, Euro-American tradition of reactionary anti-urbanism. In which the urban comes to stand in for everything that is frightening and degenerate and too-fast and maybe too-diverse about the modern world, as opposed to a certain kind of pastoral image of the pre-modern village or Hamlet or town, right? Which, of course, never existed. That kind of doesn't matter. But there's a fantasy of returning to a certain kind of pre-modernity that I think is really prevalent all over the place now. And again one finds this both on the left and the right, I should say. And I think anti-urbanism is one of its calling cards in the contemporary world, for sure.

Dr. Crockford: Being against the city is associated with being for a certain politics-- a right wing, reactionary politics. Anti-urbanism can be a form of reactionary politics. Trad accounts on Twitter are an example of this. For example, Culture Critic, an account with 800,000 followers that posts pictures of architecture that it considers traditional and therefore superior, has an avatar as a Greek statue's head. A recent post had two pictures of the Neue Elbbrücke Bridge in Hamburg. The before picture had Neo-Gothic archways, the after is a double helix design. The caption reads, "Reminder that the only things more destructive than aerial bombings are the egos of architects and urban planners." The original bridge was pulled down to add an extra lane to the road. Comments underneath deride 'progress' as going backward. The more you see of accounts like this, the more you realize that they are motivated by more than a love of a certain style of architecture. It's a previous period of history that they admire when they see life as better, more beautiful, less urban. This halcyon golden age past is rural, with a specific architectural style reminiscent of Europe in the 17th to 19th centuries, or maybe America in the 19th century, if the fantasy has more of a pioneer aesthetic than gothic cathedrals. The 'past' these accounts imagined doesn't exist and never did. But that doesn't matter. That's not the point. What they are selling is the fantasy of return. The principle underlying this fantasy is summed up in the meme, "reject modernity, embrace tradition" that has spread on traditionalist and conservative social media. It's making a political point that the old way was better. In anti-urban discourse there's a fantasy of pre-urban pasts that was also better, simpler and significantly less diverse. Again, urban here is used as a coded racial dog whistle. Being against the city is being against diversity. A similar movement occurred when suburbs in the US broke away from diversifying inner city areas, often incorporating as separate cities, even though they were functionally the same place. It worked as a form of de facto segregation known as 'white flight.' There is a longer history of redlining and racial segregation through infrastructure behind these anti-urban politics. Redlining is the denial of services to customers deemed risky or hazardous based on their race or ethnicity. Often, certain ZIP codes stand in for a race, so that living in a majority Black neighborhood becomes a reason to perceive a customer as risky. This practice was particularly pervasive in mortgage and home loans as a way to perpetuate de facto segregation by only offering mortgages to homeowners who were White in majority White areas, for example. Other neighborhoods had restrictive neighborhood policies where people who were Black were simply not allowed to move there if it was over 75% White already. This meant that underserved areas continued to lose revenue through lower property taxes and lower home values, meaning services couldn't improve in an infrastructural doom loop. So when right-wing spokespeople react against 15-minute cities, what are they really reacting against?

Des: So the 15-minute city, in its current iteration, is mostly associated with French or French Colombian urbanist called Carlos Moreno. He says something at the start like, 'Oh, cities are incredibly dysfunctional, and what is dysfunctional about them is how much time we waste getting around them, because we set them out of these big multi-scalar ways that it takes forever to get from point A to point B, and this is time that is wasted. And so to fix this, what we need to do is to reconfigure the city such that everything is more or less accessible, either by walking or biking within 15 minutes. So you can get to work, you can get your kids to school, you can get to the hospital, you can do your shopping right within this 15 minute thing. And then you will not waste your time trafficking your way across the city in these kinds of big, dead journeys.' So this idea that, like, 'good urban life' should be centered on proximity and walkability, is, you know, at least a kind of a mid 19th century idea. It's something you see in the work of people like Robert Owen. It's something you definitely see in the Garden City movement, that's quite explicit in the Garden City movement. So you get that in the Garden City movement, and then you get it again in the 1960s and 1970s and what came to be known as new urbanism. And people might know the work of Jane Jacobs, especially in that Jane Jacobs wrote a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's a terrible book, by the way, but extremely famous. And in that book, basically, Jane Jacobs advances what I would consider, you know, a very distinctively North American bourgeois notion of good urban life, which is basically that everyone lives in Greenwich Village. And you can go to school on the corner, and you have your baker, and you have your grocer, and you know the grocer's name, and you walk to the grocery and you walk home, and that's how, that's what good urban life looks like for Jane Jacobs. So this kind of more recent iteration that we're calling the 15-minute city-- I'm just saying it has a long, kind of strange, multiple trajectories, all of which kind of say what makes for good urban space is relatively small scale, walkability and the proximity of stuff.

Dr. Crockford: Okay, so have 15-minute cities been built anywhere?

Des: The closest thing that I've been to, to a 15-minute city that appeared in the modern world is Poundbury. And people may or may not know, Poundbury is a small enclave attached to the town of Dorset in Dorsetshire, started to be built from the 1980s into the 1990s-- still being built today-- on land owned by the now King Charles. But at its heart, it's kind of a small, very walkable place. It's mixed use. So one of the things they're very proud of is that you can have little factories here and there in amongst the houses. You don't have that kind of stereotypical modernist-zone-vision in which 'this is where you rest,' 'this is where you sleep,' 'this is where you work,' sort of thing, that things are kind of much more mixed up. So you kind of get shops and, yeah, a little factory or two, or industrial spaces on residential streets, and it's a kind of enclosed, relatively small oval.

Dr. Crockford: Toronto is one city where the 15-minute city idea seems to have been embraced. The Toronto Star called it 'a way to solve trenchant problems with affordable housing, traffic, congestion and crime.' Neighborhoods would be self-sufficient with access to schools, daycares, medical services, shops and parks, all within 15 minutes by bike or foot. Local streets would be vehicle free. The aim, it's claimed, is not to make it impossible to drive, but to make it so that you don't have to. The Downsview neighborhood in Toronto, a former airfield, is in the process of being redesigned as a 15-minute city. The plans have even won a design award mapping out living space for 80,000 residents with affordable housing markets and urban farming that's intended to be both socially sustainable and equitable. Here's the originator of the idea, Carlos Moreno, describing the concept in a TED talk:

Media Clip (Carlos Moreno, Ted Talk): Our acceptance of the dysfunctions and indignities of modern cities has reached a peak. We need to change that. We need to change it for the sake of justice, of our well being, and of the climate.

Dr. Crockford: This sounds really nice, and when redesigning an old airfield site, planners are able to build new neighborhoods and housing according to the utopian aims of the 15-minute city. However, in most pre-existing city neighborhoods, redesign is not an option. Instead, 15-minute city plans take the form of restricting traffic, making it more difficult to get about.

Des: Like, I think the notion of the 15-minute city definitely traffics on a fantasy of something that's going to be built. But it's not clear to me at all that we're talking about building anything. What we are talking about is a kind of reshaping space that already exists in ways that will work well for some people and will not work well for others. And you kind of restrict cars in a certain way, you encourage bicycling, and you don't enclose neighborhoods, but there's at least a kind of sense of the marking out of a psychic or ideal enclosure around a particular kind of neighborhood, right? That one starts to think in terms of neighborhoods, and that the way traffic is made to flow and low traffic neighborhoods are designed encourages that kind of psychic creation of different kinds of enclaves or neighborhoods at that 15-minute scale.

Dr. Crockford: So what are some of the objections to what seem like fairly benign traffic calming measures? So, what are the legitimate– the real objections to this idea?

Des: 15-minute cities have become an object of a certain kind of conspiratorial thinking, in which the fear is that what is being called a 15-minute city, or indeed a low traffic neighborhood, is really a kind of Trojan horse for restricting people's movements in urban space. Locking them down a bit like they were locked down during COVID. And instituting a much more total system of surveillance that kind of watches people as they move in and out of particular kinds of space. So there kind of emerged a strange, mostly far-right driven, or certainly far-right led protest movement around broadly understood 15-minute city ideas, especially in Oxford, was the kind of real flash point of it. Which understands itself in those terms of what the 15-minute city really is, is a plan to radically restrict people's freedoms. And not just in terms of, like, won't let you drive your car down streets, but actually will like, quote, unquote, lock you into your 15-minute neighborhood, or radically restrict your capacity to move in and out of it. So that's the kind of conspiratorial objection, I would say. And it's because that conspiratorial objection is so removed from reality-- I feel comfortable saying that-- that we have this kind of lazy, kind of bourgeois discourse of like, what are these people objecting to? This is fine. So my own basic view on this is that the 15-minute City is a fundamentally anti-urban vision. It's an idea that is fundamentally grounded on the notion that cities, at large scale, are a problem. That, like, traversal across the scale of a huge metropolis is problematic and bad and that we should be living in are kind of much smaller-- I was going to say much more homogenous but that's probably not fair-- but at least smaller, let's say more locally oriented enclaves. But I'm troubled by a kind of unthinking anti-car discourse, which really seems to imagine a kind of very particular, probably single, male, able-bodied urban resident who has a bike and can walk around. You know, we have a kind of a stereotype of the kind of SUV driving suburbanite, right? Is that's who drives to the city, and that's who we want to get rid of, because that's a bad figure. And of course, that's in some ways true, but also people who drive are like elderly people, disabled people, people with kids, primarily women, doing kind of caring labor for kids, often migrants, living in places that are underserved with public transport, living in quite segregated areas that are quite far out so they can't walk or bike from like, say, like outer East London, for instance. Those are people who use cars. So I often think, like, the car is a bit of a dog whistle. Like, the 15 minutes is also, to me, a tremendously– it's just your bourgeois idea. It's like, what makes a good city? It's easy access to consumer goods. Like, I can get to, like the butcher easily and buy my chops. You know, I can get to, like the nice wine shop. It is such a middle class idea of what cities are for. And that's the Jane Jacobs thing, right? This is like, it's just a bourgeois fantasy of, like, access to economic and lifestyle goods, right? I mean, there's a real instrumentalization of we're in cities to get stuff, so we should make it more efficient to get that stuff, right? As if all the in between is just inefficient, wasted time. You know, I think contemporary urban spaces, in all kinds of ways, are deeply dysfunctional. If we were to take seriously the question of what does a good city look like, we would not start, in my view, with asking, 'can you get to a library within 10 minutes,' or 'can you get to your grocery shop within 15 minutes?' We will be talking about rent and job security and inequality and mental health and a whole series of things that are just not on the table in this intensely bourgeois, aestheticized vision of the 15-minute city.

Dr. Crockford: The restriction on movement that some interpret in traffic calming measures and 15-minute cities recall the restrictions on movement during COVID-19. Lockdowns figure as a form of cultural trauma, making some people resistant to anything they perceive as an infringement on their civil liberties. This COVID-induced fear resonates through the vaccine rumors we discussed in episode two, as well as the great reset theories in Episode Five. So who is calling 15-minute cities a form of lockdown? Here's one prominent spokesperson in the UK, Piers Corbyn, a former weatherman, brother of politician Jeremy Corbyn, and well known climate denier.

Media Clip (Piers Corbyn): We've been here as part of the auction protest against their 15-minute City Smart/City Plan, which, of course, is part of all the zoning plans going on around the country. So we're here to unite all the fight backs against all types of zoning, low traffic neighborhoods, 15-minute cities, ultra low emission zones, clean air zones, all of them. They all have the same aim: to control you, to cost you, and to con you into believing in the man made climate change story, which is used as the backstory for them. But that story is used for many other things, so we have to break that story as well as break the implementation of these things in terms. [Interviewer: Thank you. What would you say the main barriers are to freedom or democracy in the UK today?] The main barriers are people complying to nonsense coming from on high, which can be overcome. And I think we can win these times. There's opposition in Oxford, which is huge, but if people comply to any rules they put out, then the other side will win. So you have to not comply to the rules. That means driving at will without paying any fire. Now in London and in Birmingham, people have been not paying. In Birmingham, the Council has given up with their clean air zone because people are not paying. In London, 1/3 of people already are not paying the ULEZ. I myself have run up a bill of 44,000 pounds for not paying the charges on top of the charges for not paying the charges until it goes off. We think we can win because of the action from below. 11 boroughs out of London are saying they're opposing the plans, and five of them are going to take Sadiq Khan to court, and two of them are refusing to pull up the cameras. We don't want any of the cameras. We should take down the cameras. Physically take down the camera, because they are illegal things. Take down the cameras. You refuse to comply. Drive at will and pay nothing, and the courts will not be able to cope. [Interviewer: Mac from Brum, earlier, who suggested that paintballing cameras out. Want to look out infrastructure.] Anything that takes them down or puts them out of action. Yes, yes.

Dr. Crockford: You can hear how Corbyn and others conflate 15-minute cities with low traffic neighborhoods and low emission zones. They are described as having the same aim. They are all part of the same plan. But these things are not the same. Restricting traffic sounds good, especially in the context of climate change and high air pollution. However, you can hear in the clip how climate denial mixes with 15-minute city conspiracy theories through claims that these climate lockdowns are forced on us due to the 'hoax' of climate change. These theories are connected. Those that think climate change is a hoax are more likely to reject the legitimacy of climate solutions, and when changes to your urban environment reduce your ability to drive your car where you want for a reason that you don't think is real, then you're more likely to lash out, especially if those traffic management policies involve fines rather than increasing access through better public transport. This can lead to non compliance with traffic restrictions as a form of civil disobedience, such as refusing to pay fines or vandalizing traffic cameras. Legitimate concerns about how urban planning is changing our daily lives can be taken advantage of by conspiracy theorists. They combine different policies on traffic management and conflate them as all leading toward the same nefarious aim. Efforts to mitigate climate change are targeted as undermining the economy, making already pressed people worry more for their financial future. The thing is, infrastructure can exacerbate systemic inequalities and present barriers to mobility. One way urban inequalities are expressed is through who does infrastructure connect and who struggles just to get around. And these systemic inequalities produced by infrastructure can compound long term problems of income inequality. In the UK, wages are the same as in 2007 when accounting for inflation in the US as well, productivity has increased, but wages have not risen with inflation, creating wage stagnation at 1970s levels. This means prices rise, especially for rent and transportation costs, but wages have not risen enough, leaving many people worse off overall. They're paying more and earning less in real terms. Living standards have not improved from many and in cities, many feel things have got a lot worse. Yet, somehow, elites get even richer. Billionaires make more billions. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk compete to get into space, but many people can barely afford to rent a two bedroom apartment. The idea that the economy is rigged by the few who benefit does not seem so far fetched to the many who do not. And the increasing socio-economic inequalities make it easier to believe that this state of affairs is a plot by elites to ensure it is so. The problem with 15-minute cities isn't that they will lock us down in our neighborhoods. It's that they may, likely, involve limiting movement under the name of traffic regulation and cutting pollution, but without investment in improved public transport or rebuilding cities to make amenities within a walkable distance, people won't be able to meaningfully stop using their cars so much. So any traffic management plans that make it harder to drive without also making cities more walkable, or buses more frequent, or trains much cheaper, will limit people's mobility around urban areas. And it is nearly always the most marginalized people who will face the harshest consequences of infrastructural inequalities. But that's not who is protesting 15-minute cities. The 15-minute city sounds like an elegant urban planning solution to some of the most pressing problems facing societies globally. We do need to cut pollution and car use. Many people would like more amenities within a short walking or biking distance from their home. But except in a few cases, that's not what's really being implemented. What people are facing is traffic restrictions and criminalisation through increased fines and tolls without meaningful change to city layouts or public transport. Without addressing the root causes of urban inequalities, frustration and anger against traffic management policies is rising. And it's this anger that is capitalized on by conspiracy theories that conflate 15-minute cities with related proposals to make outlandish claims that the 15-minute city will be an urban lockdown forced upon us by elites using climate change as an excuse. There are real problems with the idea; a 15-minute city is, in fact, not a city. A place where you can reach all amenities within 15 minutes is a village or small town. Why do we think urbanism is bad? Would there be a way to imagine cities with affordable housing and adequate public transport links to address inequalities and climate change at the same time, is there a way to redesign the city with climate justice in mind, not just the convenience of people looking to go shopping? Protests and conspiracy theories make it easy to support the 15-minute city idea and skip over thinking critically about why it might be bad actually, or if not bad necessarily, then poorly implemented. We will continue the focus on how conspiracy theories capitalize on inequalities and political inadequacies in the next episode when we're going to talk about elections and disinformation. How are authoritarian politicians using disinformation on social media to advance their political campaigns? What happens when the conspiracy theory is spread by the most powerful political leader in the country? For now, thank you for listening. This has been Miss Information. I'm Susanna Crockford, and remember, misinformation matters.