The Alarming Truth about 15-minute cities

On December 3rd, Jo Nova, an Australian Writer and Researcher, penned an article entitled, ‘Climate lockdowns coming? You will be tracked in your suburb and happy about it’, which caused an outburst of alarm. Below are some extracts from this excellent article.

Sometimes dubbed ‘climate lockdowns’, 15-minute cities involved a traffic experiment in Oxford city where the local council is trying to create a ‘transport social credit scheme’ that punishes users for taking their cars outside six designated zones. These are policed by cameras and gates leaving residents effectively ‘locked down’ in order to “save the climate”.

The town councillors, in accordance with government goals, were trying to convince people to use public transport in line with self-inflicted ‘green goals’ by enforcing the issue with surveillance cameras and fines. Attempting to validate their decision in the eyes of an angry public (many of whom originally thought the proposal was some kind of joke) has been more difficult. Feedback to the proposal was direct and to the point:

‘The scheme will cause outright chaos.’ 

‘You are destroying communities and businesses, and the heart of Oxford.’ 

‘Everyone will be disadvantaged regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation. Well done, you’ve ruined Oxford for everyone.’ 

‘The council have laid out who they believe should get permits and have just gone by what is correct in the days of WOKE. That is why a hard-working person who needs to drive to work maybe miles away can only do so 100 days a year at cannot use their cars at weekends?’

Very few are buying the hackneyed, ‘Covid made us do it’ approach as listed in ‘The surprising stickiness of the “15-minute city”, the World Economic Forum’s love letter about why the world should embrace the ‘safety’ of a cell-like city:

‘With Covid and its variants keeping everyone home (or closer to home than usual), the 15-minute city went from a “nice-to-have” to a rallying cry.’

In an interesting twist, 15-minute cities have painted themselves as the opposite of the more familiar ‘smart cities’, accusing the smart city Utopia of being a ‘soulless failure’ even though both projects have the same WEF parent, and many cities – like Melbourne and London – appear on both the 15-minute and smart city list. In truth, these two city structures are manifestations of the same idea – excessive government overreach where one model controls movement and the other stalks its citizens digitally. They are symbiotic projects – Net Zero parasites latching onto our metropolises until they die. At no point have our political leaders been stopped by the media and asked why they are inviting unelected and unaccountable international organisations to ‘plan’ our cities.

This nightmare idea, although attributed to the ‘World Economic Forum’ (WEF) is not their original. To stop this toxic global urban planning machine, we have to dig out the roots and sever them. When the United Nations floated its ‘Sustainability Development Goals’ in 2015, no one paid much attention to SDG Number 11 ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’. The 17 SDGs replaced the defunct 8 ‘Millennial Goals’, whose only purpose was to be used as conversation fodder at endless international talkfests where world leaders nodded along to noble promises about ‘eradicating extreme poverty’ while peddling arms deals under the table.

Sustainable Cities – the larger movement that spawned 15-minute cities – is a solution to a problem that only exists because of the UN’s process of encouraging political leaders to make private agriculture economically nonviable for families. This has resulted in a mass exodus toward cities (and it is about to happen again with thousands of Dutch farmers forced from their land to meet Net Zero targets). With the population increasingly condensing into cities – crushed by unsustainable and unregulated migration from the third world drawn to the West’s welfare system – the United Nations has suddenly decided that urbanisation is a problem that has to be ‘solved’ by 2030 because cities are responsible for ‘70 per cent of global carbon emissions’ and ‘60 per cent of resources use’. Obviously… An empty paddock uses less resource than a skyscraper.

Enter the recent hysteria where the world at large was made aware of Oxfordshire County Council, which has volunteered itself as a guinea pig for the climate agenda. The BBC praised the imposition on Oxford by saying it would ‘cut unnecessary journeys and making walking, cycling, and public and shared transport the “natural first choice”’. Telling residents where they can drive in their own town using the ‘experimental traffic regulation order’ sounds like something Orwellian, lifted from the height of communist rule in Europe, but the proposal was approved on November 29th by the council’s cabinet. Of course, a selection of the council’s favourite identity groups are being granted exemptions while ordinary, hard-working individuals who run businesses are expected to cop all the restrictions and pay the bulk of the fines – no doubt because they are seen as the city’s ‘evil capitalists’, even if they don’t say that last part out loud.

If you’re clinging onto the ideology that this measure isn’t about control – it’s about ‘saving the planet’, Oxford’s council admits that the system will probably have the opposite effect.

‘Everywhere in the city can still be reached by car, although car drivers without a permit will need to use a different route during the hours of operation of the traffic filters.’

Angry Oxford residents pointed out that the ring road would end up a nightmare, with smaller roads becoming heavily congested as vehicles try to pick their way around ridiculous ‘traffic filters’ incurring longer journeys and using more fuel, thus adding to the total emissions, rather than reducing them.

 But this hasn’t stopped the UN from convincing politicians that in this “wonderful globalised world” people should be forced to live inside 15 or 20 minute ‘bubbles’ and encouraged not to venture out because doing so could ‘endanger the planet’. Embracing ‘accessible neighbourhoods’ is really a way of concealing, via pleasant language, the government’s intention to trap people inside microcosms, locking us in very real cells and punishing us financially if we choose to wander beyond the city walls.

The ‘climate crisis’ and Covid pandemic were jointly credited for the ‘accelerated need’ to implement the 15-minute city. In July of 2020, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group officially published their intention to sign onto the project as part of the World Economic Forum’s notorious ‘Build Back Better’ mantra. What we are watching develop is modern feudalism – a network of tiny city states ruled over by all-powerful councils that act as manor lords, telling the peasants where they can go. Far from ‘revolutionising the way we think about urban homes’, it has fuelled a deep regression back to the Medieval period. We’re even being forced to walk between towns and carry our goods by hand.

There is nothing ‘smart’ or ‘convenient’ about 15-minute cities – even though that is what their name is meant to imply. These days you’re ‘dumb’ if you don’t want the government to watch you, foolish if you enjoy privacy, greedy if you partake in capitalism, and ‘backward’ if you want don’t want the UN throwing a few cockroaches onto your Christmas BBQ.