Irish Examiner view: Urban living free from cranks

The '15-minute city' describes a neighbourhood within a larger urban environment in which most services and facilities are accessible within 15 minutes’ walk or cycle from home. Picture: Sam Boal/Rollingnews.ie

Amateur urbanists will instantly recognise one of the building blocks of modern urban theory, the 15-minute city.

In short, this term describes a neighbourhood within a larger urban environment in which most services and facilities are accessible within 15 minutes’ walk or cycle from home: Work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure, all in the same area. 

The benefits are obvious and far-ranging, taking in advantages of reduced carbon emissions, public safety, and a greater sense of community. 

Why, then, are so many conspiracy theorists against the 15-minute city?

The best one can say is that this is a mistaken reading of the original concept, twisted by the suspicious and the gullible from an aspiration that no-one with commonsense would disagree with to some kind of global plot designed to keep people in narrowly defined zones for the purposes of control and oppression.

Even articulating the conspiracy theory functions as a simultaneous exposé of its innate ridiculousness. 

The 15-minute city concept envisages neighbourhoods which are clearly beneficial to their inhabitants, not surveillance centres serving mysterious overlords. 

The fact that a reactionary foghorn such as Jordan Peterson has espoused this conspiracy theory would be more than enough to discredit it fatally, if there were not already a sizeable constituency happy to swallow such fantasies.

This may be the most worrying aspect of the attack on the 15-minute city, not so much the outlandish nature of the theories necessary to support the attack, but the fact that people are willing to believe those theories and attacks in the first place. 

For some, it will be a source of despair that there are people willing to believe that a walkable neighbourhood can be interpreted as a mechanism aiding government control of the masses.

For all of us, it should be a source of concern that an audience for this nonsense exists in the first place, and is being manipulated by actors such as Peterson.