It's a global climate solution \u2014 if it can get past conspiracy theories and NIMBYs

10:00+08:00, AM. Oct. 08, 2023 By Julia Simon

Carlos Moreno, a Franco-Colombian urbanist, has been helping spread the idea of 15-minute cities — where people can access key things in their life within a short walk, bike ride or transit ride of their home. But the climate solution is seeing huge challenges, including conspiracy theories. Julia Simon/NPR hide caption

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PARIS — In the 11th arrondissement, a middle-to-working class neighborhood in the east of Paris, if you walk out your front door, you can arrive at a preschool in one minute. A bookstore in three minutes. A cheese store in four minutes. Baguette for that cheese? Bakery's across the street.

Grocery store and pharmacy, five minutes. Parks, restaurants, metro stops, a hospital: all within a 15-minute walk. I know this because I used to live there, on a tiny cobblestone street with buildings covered in vines.

This is a 15-minute city, says Carlos Moreno, a professor at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, who met me on the banks of the Seine River. Moreno says that in a 15-minute city, a person can access key things in their life — work, food, schools and recreation — within a short walk, bike, or transit ride of their home.

Paris is using the 15-minute city as part of a broader strategy to cut back on cars and air pollution, says François Croquette, the city's director for climate and ecology. Julia Simon/NPR hide caption

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Paris is using the 15-minute city as part of a broader strategy to cut back on cars and air pollution, says François Croquette, the city's director for climate and ecology.

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A tale of two cities 4,000 miles apart

Moreno says focusing on the way people want to live is key to successfully introducing a 15-minute city approach to an area. For example, besides reducing planet-heating emissions, there are lots of "co-benefits" for people who live in 15-minute cities, he says. Infrastructure that prioritizes walking, biking and public transit means less noise from cars and more safety for pedestrians and bikers. Less air pollution from cars and daily routines with more walking and biking promote health. More parks and urban trees can pull carbon dioxide from the air, provide shade, and cool down neighborhoods — all increasingly important as the planet warms.

And redesigning cities where homes are mixed in with businesses can drive more foot traffic to those businesses, Moreno says. "That is why our concept is liked by many mayors," Moreno says. "We are proposing climate solutions that generate more economic activity."

The Clichy-Batignolles neighborhood in the north of Paris has built more high-density apartments in addition to green spaces and access to amenities. Julia Simon/NPR hide caption

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The Clichy-Batignolles neighborhood in the north of Paris has built more high-density apartments in addition to green spaces and access to amenities.

Julia Simon/NPR

Paris' experience with 15-minute cities reached Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb in March 2020. Back then, in the early days of the pandemic, Bibb was a banker, stuck at home at his apartment in downtown Cleveland. He was poking around online when he found an article about the mayor of Paris and the 15-minute cities she was promoting.

A protester demonstrates against 15-minute cities in Oxford, England, in February 2023. Fifteen-minute cities have gotten drawn into a conspiracy that global elites are trying to restrict people's movements and create open-air prisons. Martin Pope/Getty Images hide caption

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Martin Pope/Getty Images

Conspiracy theories mean urban planners are getting death threats

Conspiracy theories are a growing problem for 15-minute cities. For Duncan Enright, a councilor in West Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom, the problems started at a community meeting in fall 2022. Enright and his colleagues have been trying to introduce to car-congested central Oxford to reduce emissions and address local air pollution.

, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in London, a nonprofit that studies extremism.

"Fifteen-minute cities is the latest victim in a broader trend," King says. "The unifying theme of a lot of these attacks and conspiracies is that climate change is being used as a pretext to strip people of their civil liberties."

Some prominent right-wing podcasters, including Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, have brought up the conspiracy theory on their shows. Last month, Rogan talked about 15-minute cities on his show. "You'll essentially be contained unless you get permission to leave," Rogan said. "That's the idea they're starting to roll out in Europe."

Now the language of this 15-minute conspiracy theory has made its way to some of the highest levels of the British government. Last week at the U.K.'s Conservative Party conference, the country's transport secretary, Mark Harper, said he was "calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities."

, it is false that local governments in the U.K. are deciding how often people can go shopping or restricting people's freedom of movement.

, a company that monitors misinformation on smaller social media sites, pulled data for NPR that showed more than 5,000 posts about 15-minute cities in the past year. These posts spiked during events like in August and the February derailment of a train in Ohio, with posters saying — falsely — that these were planned events to kick people off their land and into 15-minute cities. Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb says one of his city planners received online attacks for the city's promotion of 15-minute cities.

In February, thousands of protesters gathered in Oxford decrying , which they saw as an onramp to draconian societal controls. Enright and his colleagues began receiving strange messages, phone calls and, eventually, death threats.

The protests in the U.K. brought more attention to the man behind the 15-minute city idea, Carlos Moreno. Around this time, Moreno also began receiving death threats. "With the death threats it was a little more difficult to bear psychologically because it wasn't just me anymore, but my wife, my daughters," Moreno says. "So it was heavier."

The problem, Enright says, is that the prevalence of conspiracy theories is complicating his local climate work by muddying legitimate criticisms of the bus priority lane rollout with untruths.

King says that's a deliberate outcome. She notes that a lot of disinformation around climate change has moved from denying that global warming exists, to attacks on climate solutions.

Falafel's Drive In is on a car-friendly boulevard in San Jose, Calif., where we struggled to cross the four lanes of traffic by foot. San Jose is trying to build denser neighborhoods, but it's a challenge. Julia Simon/NPR hide caption

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Other obstacles for 15-minute cities include zoning, schools and NIMBYs

Many U.S. cities see potential benefits for implementing the 15-minute city model. But America has huge obstacles to creating higher-density urban living that have long been woven into public policy.

Lots of those obstacles can be found in California's third-largest city, San Jose. I met Brilliot, a planner for the city of San Jose, at Falafel's Drive In. It's on car-friendly Stevens Creek Boulevard, where we struggled to cross the four lanes of traffic by foot.

Some challenges to building 15-minute cities across the U.S. are financial. Many banks are still reluctant to provide loans for mixed-use developments, because they are still a relatively uncommon way to build communities. Other barriers have to do with parking: Many cities require that developers make parking spots when they build new housing or businesses, and that takes up space and diminishes neighborhood density. And some obstacles involve public schools, says , an urban and regional planning professor at University of Colorado, Denver.

When urban U.S. couples have kids, they often leave cities for suburbs, which they think have better schools, she says. "If we want regional sustainability, we have to look to these urban places and why aren't people staying in them and thriving in them, and a lot of it comes back down to the urban schools," Makarewicz says.

But one of the biggest obstacles to creating 15-minute cities in the U.S. is zoning restrictions, says , professor of urban and regional planning at University of Michigan. "The single-family zone absolutely dominates residential land in all of our metropolitan areas."

and were mostly geared toward building single-family homes.

Single-family zoning reduces neighborhood density, because you can't fit as many people on a lot with a house compared to a lot with an apartment or a duplex, Levine says. And single-family zoning often precludes establishing nearby retail businesses, which are the amenities that make 15-minute cities possible.

Brilliot says he's seen the limits of zoning firsthand. San Jose is working on a project called "urban villages," their version of 15-minute cities, he says. Brilliot and I drove to the new urban villages — apartment buildings with both low income and "market rate" units and some amenities close by.

We parked and walked along the tree-lined pedestrian-friendly passageway that connects the new buildings, past a playground, a dog park and benches. Along the other side of the building is a nail salon, a coffee shop and a popular brunch spot.

But once we left the quiet, tree-lined street, we were back in a loud, car-dominated area. Surrounding us were blocks and blocks of single-family homes.

Brilliot explains that the urban villages are in a special corridor of "mixed-use" zoning sandwiched in between single-family zoning. "These properties here were developed because they're on the corridor, but going south of here into the single-family neighborhood," Brilliot says. "Generally, that's the approach. We don't — for the most part — plan to encroach in the single-family neighborhood."

The problem is there's only so much land zoned for mixed uses in San Jose. About 94% of residential land in San Jose is zoned for single-family homes, Brilliot says. He says they'll eventually have to think about converting neighborhoods full of single-family properties into higher-density developments, including duplexes and fourplexes.

Michael Brilliot, deputy director for citywide planning for San Jose, Calif., is building urban villages — with a mix of apartments and amenities nearby. He says it's the city's version of 15-minute cities. Most of San Jose is dominated by single-family neighborhoods that aren't so dense. Julia Simon/NPR hide caption

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Julia Simon/NPR

Many challenges to rezoning to build things like 15-minute-cities can come from the communities themselves, says , assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Minnesota.

. The Minneapolis challenge comes primarily from environmentalists, who see new apartments posing a threat to wildlife migration. "There is this vein of NIMBYism in the American psyche, arguably," Burga says.

But Burga adds that given the history of U.S. urban planning, which includes , some mistrust of planners is understandable.

"I would be remiss in demonizing NIMBYists," Burga says. "I can have my reasons why I don't agree with them, but I think it's more productive to bring them to a conversation."

Along the Seine River in Paris, cars used to zoom by making noise and pollution. Now the city has converted some streets along the Seine into places for pedestrians and restaurants. Julia Simon/NPR hide caption

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Along the Seine River in Paris, cars used to zoom by making noise and pollution. Now the city has converted some streets along the Seine into places for pedestrians and restaurants.

Julia Simon/NPR

15-minute cities are not predestined; they take political will

Levine says when Americans visit a place like Paris or Amsterdam and experience 15-minute cities, what they are experiencing wasn't inevitable.

"The result that many Americans find desirable — 'Wow, isn't it wonderful? We go to Europe, we can walk, we can take the bus, we can take the train, etc.' — is a policy choice. It's not preordained," Levine says.

Much of Europe was just as enamored with cars after World War II as the U.S. was, Levine says. But European cities like Amsterdam and Paris — and other cities like Seoul and Mexico City — have deliberately chosen to move away from cars.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed that some urban spaces can get transformed away from cars in a relatively quick period, says , a professor of urban design and mobility at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. "We have seen that we can make radical changes if we see the urgency," she says.

But not all political leaders and communities see the urgency of addressing global warming or the housing crisis, she says.

And Moreno says there isn't a or magic wand. "There's no magic wand to 'poof!' transform it," he says. "It's a question of political will."