How “15-minute cities” somehow became evidence of a huge global conspiracy

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings I am gonna play a little clip for you, and I challenge you to listen to it and come away thinking that this sounds devious, that it sounds like a nefarious plan to control Edmontonians. Being able to walk from home to a grocery store, doctor’s office, playground or school, not just a list of things people often look for when buying a home. But goals, the City of Edmonton has for all neighborhoods to become 15 minute communities. The where you can find employment and entertainment and recreation and you know, retail amenities within 15 minutes of your front door, a 15 minute community or a 15 minute city is a concept. That’s been around for quite a while. We covered it on this show more than a couple of years ago. It is an important civic conversation to have and you don’t have to agree with it or commit to radical changes to anything. It’s an interesting urban planning theory. We should talk about its merits and test it and see if it works. But , you can’t do that anymore. This will be met with extreme resistance from residents, but this resistance will not be publicized and all opposition will be censored at this point. Many city dwellers, those with the means at any rate, will likely decide to move to rural areas to retain their freedom. The response from the central planners will be to declare that living in rural areas is bad for the environment and will introduce all manner of taxes, restrictions, anything they need to do to force people, to cities. I found that clip by searching for 15 minute cities on YouTube. It was one of the first results. There are hundreds more like it. Each of them imagining the future of a city planning initiative as the beginning of the end for human freedom. So yes, today we’ll examine what 15 minute cities are, but more importantly, we’ll examine how they became part of what I have begun to think. As the UCU, the unified conspiracy universe in which everything announced by a government anywhere, no matter how innocuous becomes evidence of a secret plan to remake the world. I mean, if we can’t even talk about bike lanes and diverting traffic and local groceries without this stuff seeping in immediately, how are we gonna talk about. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Peter Guest is the acting business editor at Wired. Hello, Peter.

Peter Guest Hello there.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Why don’t we begin with you just explaining the concept of a 15 minute city. What is it?

Peter Guest Sure. So I mean, the term refers to a relatively simple concept, which is that people who live in cities should live within a course of an hour on foot from basic communities. So, shops, leisure facilities, green spaces, cafes, and you know, as you say, there’ve been various similar ideas around for years, just talking about ways to make urban areas more livable, less concentrated.

Peter Guest This isn’t really like a manifesto or some radical planning initiative that drives massive changes in cities, right?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings It’s more just like an articulation of a desire to make urban areas less car dependent, to have services more evenly distributed. Stop cities looking a bit like London. Can, you know where you have a center where everything’s concentrated and then people live in orbital dormitories. Right. So that’s fundamentally it. You know, the kind of things that we’re talking about here are a small community led things like cycle lanes, traffic, calming, footpaths, places where you put parks and swings and that kind of thing. You know, the kind of thing that you normally wouldn’t see breaking outside of like hyper-local media. And since you just mentioned that this is not in fact a manifesto, recently.

Peter Guest What is the conversation?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So, so look, particularly here in the UK, right. There’s already always been a little confusion caused by certain political commentators who equate these measures with more controversial, like not exactly radical things, but more traffic calming. Attempts to reduce the amount of vehicle traffic and air pollution and so on. And those things have always, you know, historically had a, a kind of reactionary element who, or communities of interest around them. The kind of people who have handwritten signs in their gardens, angry letters to the local newspaper and so on. But it’s fair to say it’s somewhat spiraled from that. And on an online, we’ve seen this term, the 15 city’s term floating around in conspiracy groups for a few months. Although the researchers I’ve been talking to have been tracking it a lot longer, it’s been kind of floating around on the, under the surface for a while. And I started noticing it in anti-vax groups in around November, December. But it’s then started getting picked up and amplified by people like, you know, Jordan Peterson, the right wing author who could have pushed it and unsettling linked it to other conspiracy theories that are out there, which I’m sure you’re probably familiar.

Peter Guest Jordan Peterson, our greatest export here in Canada. Can you explain maybe just what’s gone on in the UK recently that has kind of given more life to this? There’s a couple of planning initiatives I gather that have, I don’t wanna say provided evidence because it’s not that, but that have, have added fuel to this fire. Sure.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So, there’s been a few places in the UK which have had this 15 minute cities thing, again, somewhere in their literature. And also we’ve had a lot of places which have been trying to reduce traffic flow through the center of towns and so on. Some of that is, you know, linked to the pandemic. As more people have been working and living in, you know, suburban areas. There’s been a desire to kind of reduce the amount of traffic on the streets. So those have been in places like Oxford, Canterbury. You know, Oxford has put in place a few relatively straightforward measures that are supposed to reduce the amount of, of traffic coming through the town. They’re, they’re not actually even in place yet. They’re gonna be, gonna get next year, on one level, there’s just a cast of usual suspects who have got angry or kind of performatively angry about these traffic calming measures. And a lot of them exist in that kind of right wing commentary act whose obsession is with state overreach at the moment. So the idea, everything, whether it’s human rights laws or public health measures or cycle lanes, reflects a kind of totalitarianism.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Is that kind of like Spit Flecked, pub Boy raging against change that they’ve built careers on? Right. And that kind of exaggeration like idea that reducing traffic in the center of Oxford is a slippery slope towards Stalinism has put them in like quite adjacent to some of the more out there conspiracy theories, right?

Peter Guest And that’s fed into this wider conspiracy universe. And it’s really kind of picked up that flywheel of conspiracy theory as it meets mainstream concerns and back again. Right, and this is the meat of the conspiracy stuff that I want to get into. It’s kind of like a, I don’t know, if you look at, you know, the Marvel Cinematic universe, this is like a universal conspiracy, uh, theory that kind of explains everything.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Can you, can you tie this in to the bigger, broader conspiracies, like, Qanon and the, the alleged great reset. Like, where does this fit in and, and how does it play off that?

Peter Guest Sure. So, so there are people who’ve done vastly more research than me on this, but who can kinda work you through the evolution of individual narratives, right? But in, in broad terms, that there seems to be like an organizing meta conspiracy that’s out there that surround the idea that there are hidden deep states whose intention is to control and limit our fundamental freedom. Right? And that isn’t new. The idea of the Illuminati running the world is really old. It overlaps with sort of centuries old anti-Semitic tropes, millionaire cults, new world orders, you. Anti-Christ coming through all that kind of thing. And that’s something you seem with Qanon, right? This idea that there’s a satanic cannibal pedophile cult secretly running America.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I mean, it’s clearly insane, but it’s borrowed tropes that were already out there, right?

Peter Guest All the way back to sort of blood libel the protocols of the elders of Zion. And so this kind of smear of weird conspiracies. They’re, they’re not quite interlinked, but as you say, they exist in the same kinda sy cinematic universe of nonsense, right? And they give a narrative connection between white supremacists and anti-vaxxers and ultras, chauvinists, and all sorts of other subgroups within that meta conspiracy. And if you think of that as the kind of basic tenant of the faith that governments are gonna control us, stop us moving around, stop us interacting with one. You can kind of see how it’s possible to spin up the idea that an urban planning initiative that says you can’t drive your car through the center of Oxford is actually the slippery slope towards locking us into ghettos and we shouldn’t need saying it’s completely not true. Yeah. But there is that, there is that almost conceptual link where you can kind of trip a synapse and move across into it. Um, and then when you have this kind of slightly impenetrable, consciously elite looking groups like the World Economic Forum, Launching initiatives in the middle of a pandemic with names like the Great Reset.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings You know, it’s not great branding for the conspiracy world, but it gives a brand for the, for the conspiracists to keep the thing moving online and, and again, just call gives this kind of center of gravity for them to be able to kind of coalesce this stuff around. So if we look at 15 minute cities as just a basic urban planning concept, and you know, to you and I, it’s Walkable Cafes, it’s a grocery store in every neighborhood. It’s accessible transit and bike lanes and, and doctors and that kind of stuff. What does a 15 minute neighborhood look like to somebody who believes the worst of this stuff?

Peter Guest I mean, that’s a really hard question to answer. I think there are little aspects of this that you see through the messaging that that people who are poons of it get right. And we talk to people who are sort of saying, hey, I’d like more bike lanes in my area of London, and they’re being sent pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto and said, this has been tried before. You know, that’s the kind of rhetoric which is out there, this idea that you’re going to be tagged and controlled and your movements will be watched and, you know, you’ll have to take, get a permit to move from one part of Oxford to another. I mean, that’s, that’s the, that’s the story that’s being told on these conspiracy forums.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Is it just being told in conspiracy forums, how public, uh, in the UK at least, which is where you can speak to, and, and I mentioned in the intro to this, you know, how it’s gaining steam, here in Canada, particularly in Edmonton.

Peter Guest It’s not just the, the deep conspiracy forums like how public, are some of the commentators pushing this stuff. There are some quite public figures who have been involved in pushing this from the beginning. Right. And again, this isn’t, so my research people have, have looked at this among the kind of climate change denying groups prior to the, even prior to the pandemic, right? We’re trying to push these idea of climate lockdowns and so on. And so these people who are very public are still out there, are gonna pushing this kind of idea. But we’ve also seen it kind of get into the not quite the mainstream media, but certainly on the fringes of the mainstream. So you have. Right wing TV channels like GB News in the uk hosting people who are, have repeated these things. We actually had a member of Parliament, Nick Fletcher talk about this in parliament. Right. He talked about this on the House of Common saying this international socialist concept, and, and to be fair, he was, he was kind of laughed at for that, but. It’s certainly infected that kind of main, the fringes of the mainstream to the point where it is bouncing back and forth between the kind of conspiracy forums and, and places that I was, they said normal people, but places where the mainstream viewer would see it.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings In terms of 15 minute cities in general, you know, if we can somehow push the conspiracy stuff to the side, is this a conversation that could be a normal, debatable, constructive chat about urban planning and what we want our cities to look like and, and what kind of discussion could we be having about these cities if we weren’t being flooded with this crab?

Peter Guest I mean, so, so look, I’m not an urban planning expert in the slightest, right? Sure. But what, what we can see is that these places have become lightning rods, right? So we’ve, you know, we’ve heard counselors having death threats, protests, even this weekend in Oxford. You know, people turning up with banners with all sorts of conspiracy theories on them in Oxford City Center. You know, and this is, this is kind of corrosive to the normal conduct of politics. You know, people in public life do expect a degree of debate. Uh, and here you have people coming in from all over the country to accuse people who are kind of elected officials, civil servants of being tyrants because, you know, or tools are a fascist regime. Just cause they’ve asked people could they you please use the ring road rather than driving through the center of town. Right. Right. And, and so yeah, it is, it’s corrosive to, to local discussion. It’s corrosive to the ability of us to, of societies and communities to kind of. Some relatively basic decisions.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Here’s a question for you. You mentioned earlier when we talked about the great reset, that it’s obviously not great branding for the W E F mm-hmm , and when I kind of think about the term 15 minute cities, which as I mentioned so innocuous, it’s tempting to ask like, does it even matter? Whether it’s this debate, whether we brand it as something different. If it wasn’t 15 minute cities, would we be having the same fight over whatever we called it, you know, walkable towns?

Peter Guest I don’t know. Yes. Um, I think is the answer. Yes. And again, this is, you know, this is some research. It was done by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Right. Uh, which was around the idea of, of climate lockdown as a concept.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Peter Guest And the, the research that they did find, even before the pandemic in the kind of 2019 beforehand, there were people who were unsuccessfully trying to get this idea of climate lockdown trending as a concept. Right. And it didn’t go anywhere. No one was really interested in it until we had Lockdowns. Exactly. And so this is what happens. The pandemic gives us a lived experience of confinement. Right. There’s a point of reference where people around the idea of what lock dance means, so it gives a solidity to the fiction. But there’s another thing as well, which is that, I mean, the pandemic isn’t over, but the normalization of it that we have now has meant that all of those internal conspiracies are a bit lost.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Right.

Peter Guest They’re a bit detached.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm. So the anti-vaxxers, and they know Bill Gates is putting microchips in vaccines and all that kind of stuff, that they’re adrift. , which leaves this infrastructure of channels and groups and influence. It’s kind of idle, right? There’s a conspiracy group in search of a theory and there’s an economy around that too, right?

Peter Guest Absolutely. There’s an economy around it. And look, there’s careful how I say here, but you know, there’s an economy around it in the sense of the influences themselves. There’s an economy on the platforms that they’re hosting them.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So there are economic incentives to, to spread conspiracy theories?

Peter Guest Absolutely.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings If it’s going to be, a fight over conspiracy, no matter what we call it, and this is such. Simple civic discussion that we should be having. What does that say about just the state of public discourse and public debate over anything that impacts like our day-to-day lives at this point?

Peter Guest So look, I tend to answer that question only in interviews where I’m allowed to swear.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Go for it. We’ll bleep you if we have to.

Peter Guest The answer is like, we’re in a very difficult place. The tension between free speech and moderated speech and the dangers of algorithmically influence discourse and the, as you said, the kind of both political but also commercial incentives for the amplification of extreme views. They are not easily reconcilable, and I think we’ve seen regulators, we’ve seen judiciaries around the world trying to figure this out, and none of them have managed to do so yet. So we’re in a difficult place. I’m not sure where we go. I made some cracks during this interview about how ridiculous this is.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings It’s very tempting to make those jokes anytime this crap pops up as you point out in your article, it’s a short jump from making those jokes to something that is absolutely not a joke. How far are we away from, again, I can’t believe I’m saying this from something like 15 minute cities, which we have covered as a pleasant little civic story in the past, becoming something that can spark, real world hate and violence?

Peter Guest So look, I’m gonna say there’s two things here before we get to the violence, right. That I get very concerned about. And one, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m actually very nervous saying this because it can give fuel to the wrong fires. But like a lot of the work that I do in the last decade has been about surveillance and about authoritarian technology, which is real.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm, right?

Peter Guest There are real concerns around surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties and rights, and not just in countries. You’d expect to see it right in Europe, in North America. Whether that’s, you know, racial disparities and surveillance and facial recognition, authoritarian and creep in policing the tension between privacy and security.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings These are things that we have to have conversations about and we can’t, because these conspiracies create such a gravity that it begins to polarize even those technical debates. Right?

Peter Guest So we can’t even have an honest conversation about that. So that’s what one level where these things are. But the other is, as you say, you know, the potential for violence is real. And in the UK we often feel quite insulated from these conspiracies. You know, maybe it’s the same in Canada, because we almost see this as an American phenomenon, a US phenomenon. Yeah. And we think, oh, they’re mad over there, but it won’t happen here. But it’s growing here and there. Right.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And these things exist on a continuum, right?

Peter Guest We’ve seen a member of parliament. in the UK murdered a few years ago by someone who was radicalized by rightwing conspiracy theories. Mm-hmm. . Now, last year we had someone through a fire bomb, a migrant detention center. Again, apparently radicalized by misinformation. We’ve had, um, massive protests outside, uh, migrant detention facilities just to l like two weeks ago. Again, radicalized people, but who are there with banners that are fundamentally based on conspiracy theories. You know, we are not in a very rational place in our politics here right now, and there’s a lot of extreme language flying around. If you have conspiracy theories being repeated in parliament and people in positions of influence willing to use them to, to build up their bases, you know, that’s a dangerous place. And the extremity of the language, language in these conspiracies makes the potential for violence enormous.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Peter Guest You know, it’s not my words, but someone I interviewed said, you know, it’s only rhetoric until suddenly it isn’t. That was gonna be my last question, but I’ll ask just one more, and I’m not gonna get into like, oh, how do we solve this? Because there’s probably a million things and it’s very, very difficult.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings But if I could give you, you know, the ability to make one change, enact one policy, where would you start combating this? I think I’d be a far more effective journalist if I had that sort of solution. I am, I’m actually not sure it is soluble.

Peter Guest Yeah, I know that’s a really depressing way to end. But, you know, the tensions that we have, as we said earlier are between, for example, giving people the freedom to, to say things that are, that are difficult, that are challenging, that move, move, you know, that challenge, the status quo versus giving people a platform and a bullhorn to. To spread hate speech, spread violence, but misinformation, you know, these are tensions that we have not resolved, but what we do have now is, is an amplification that’s very difficult for us to understand. So maybe talking, thinking out loud perhaps, but maybe one thing that we really need is more transparency as to how algorithms work on platforms.

Peter Guest How are things being amplified? Why are they being amplified? And there are moves, you know, some kind, some, some regulators. You know, I think we’ve saw it in in the Netherlands, and I maybe have to check this. Certainly for some parts of Europe, we are seeing regulators thinking, well, maybe we need to understand how the algorithms work, just so we understand what the scale and shape of the problem is.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings And I think maybe that’s a good place to start. At least we can start somewhere. Peter, thank you so much for your time. Very welcome. Thank you. Peter guest writing about conspiracies and 15 minute cities in Wired. That was the big story. You can find more at the big story podcast.ca, and you know by now how to get in touch with us. You can find us on Twitter at the Big story fpn. You can email us hello at the big story podcast.ca, and you can always call and leave a message. (416) 935-5935. The big story is available. On your favorite smart speaker and in your favorite podcast player, and of course, just by hitting the play button on our website. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.