A lot of these conspiracy theories are pure astroturf coming from various PR efforts by the oil and auto industries.

The media, always wary of anything that might encourage critical thinking, would have you believe that some goober in a double wide with a confederate flag in the window was cranking out gun nut quotes in the 1980s and attributing them to the founders.

"Oh it's organic. GQP have great imaginations."

This is preposterous. Coastal elites in NY and LA are spreading the nonsense

On the 15 min city conspiracy theory it looks like LA and NY shills stole the idea from similar elites in London.

The media always play dumb, of course. Here's an example where NPR scrupulously avoids any discussion on who is starting these conspiracy theories.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-climate-solution

"There is a time to run and a time to play dumb."

-- Louisiana politician

On 08/10/2023 08:02 pm, Bret Cahill wrote:

> A lot of these conspiracy theories are pure astroturf coming from various PR efforts by the oil and auto industries.
> The media, always wary of anything that might encourage critical thinking, would have you believe that some goober in a double wide with a confederate flag in the window was cranking out gun nut quotes in the 1980s and attributing them to the founders.
> "Oh it's organic. GQP have great imaginations."

"GQP"?
>
> This is preposterous. Coastal elites in NY and LA are spreading the nonsense

Aren't they the same areas where the Democrats are in the ascendant?
>
> On the 15 min city conspiracy theory it looks like LA and NY shills stole the idea from similar elites in London.
> The media always play dumb, of course. Here's an example where NPR scrupulously avoids any discussion on who is starting these conspiracy theories.
> https://www.npr.org/2023/10/08/1203950823/15-minute-cities-climate-solution
> "There is a time to run and a time to play dumb."
>
> -- Louisiana politician
>

JNugent <jnugent@mail.com> wrote:
> On 08/10/2023 08:02 pm, Bret Cahill wrote:
>
>> A lot of these conspiracy theories are pure astroturf coming from
>> various PR efforts by the oil and auto industries.
>> The media, always wary of anything that might encourage critical
>> thinking, would have you believe that some goober in a double wide with
>> a confederate flag in the window was cranking out gun nut quotes in the
>> 1980s and attributing them to the founders.
>> "Oh it's organic. GQP have great imaginations."
>
> "GQP"?
>>
>> This is preposterous. Coastal elites in NY and LA are spreading the nonsense
>
> Aren't they the same areas where the Democrats are in the ascendant?

You’re asking a politico-geographical question of Mason?

He has only one answer to use, centred on fat florid men and Brexit.

--
Spike

On 09/10/2023 03:48 pm, Spike wrote:
> JNugent <jnugent@mail.com> wrote:
>> On 08/10/2023 08:02 pm, Bret Cahill wrote:
>>
>>> A lot of these conspiracy theories are pure astroturf coming from
>>> various PR efforts by the oil and auto industries.
>>> The media, always wary of anything that might encourage critical
>>> thinking, would have you believe that some goober in a double wide with
>>> a confederate flag in the window was cranking out gun nut quotes in the
>>> 1980s and attributing them to the founders.
>>> "Oh it's organic. GQP have great imaginations."
>>
>> "GQP"?
>>>
>>> This is preposterous. Coastal elites in NY and LA are spreading the nonsense
>>
>> Aren't they the same areas where the Democrats are in the ascendant?
>
> You’re asking a politico-geographical question of Mason?

I know that that would be pointless. It was aimed at Brett Cahill.

<shock realisation>

He isn't a May Sun sock, is he?

> He has only one answer to use, centred on fat florid men and Brexit.
>
>

JNugent <jnugent@mail.com> wrote:
> On 09/10/2023 03:48 pm, Spike wrote:
>> JNugent <jnugent@mail.com> wrote:
>>> On 08/10/2023 08:02 pm, Bret Cahill wrote:
>>>
>>>> A lot of these conspiracy theories are pure astroturf coming from
>>>> various PR efforts by the oil and auto industries.
>>>> The media, always wary of anything that might encourage critical
>>>> thinking, would have you believe that some goober in a double wide with
>>>> a confederate flag in the window was cranking out gun nut quotes in the
>>>> 1980s and attributing them to the founders.
>>>> "Oh it's organic. GQP have great imaginations."
>>>
>>> "GQP"?
>>>>
>>>> This is preposterous. Coastal elites in NY and LA are spreading the nonsense
>>>
>>> Aren't they the same areas where the Democrats are in the ascendant?
>>
>> You’re asking a politico-geographical question of Mason?

> I know that that would be pointless. It was aimed at Brett Cahill.

Apologies all round for the misattribution.

> <shock realisation>

> He isn't a May Sun sock, is he?

No, his postings are too intelligent for that to be so.

>> He has only one answer to use, centred on fat florid men and Brexit.

--
Spike

Cities where people can live a short walk from work, school and other daily essentials rather than braving traffic-clogged highways or long commutes: utopian ideal or dystopian nightmare?

In 2023, apparently, it depends on who you ask.

Some conservative commentators and conspiracy theorists are increasingly convinced the concept of a “15-minute city” — an urban design principle recently embraced by cities ranging from Paris, France to Cleveland, Ohio — is the latest nefarious plot to curtail individual freedoms.

“You won’t be able to use your own car on certain roads and highways without the government’s permission and consent,” claimed one Instagram user in a recent video that’s been liked more than 5,400 times. “You will be constantly monitored by surveillance cameras to ensure that you don’t leave your designated residential zone without first being authorized to do so.”

But urban experts and city officials stress the idea has nothing to do with regulating people’s movements or taking away other freedoms. In some cases, they say, it’s being wrongly conflated with local plans to mitigate traffic-clogged roads.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: “15-minute cities” are designed to restrict people’s movements, increase government surveillance and infringe on other individual rights.

THE FACTS: The urban planning concept is simply about building more compact, walkable communities where people are less reliant on cars.

The conspiracy theories took off late last year in the United Kingdom, as the concept was conflated with an effort to impose new traffic restrictions to ease congestion in and around the famous university community of Oxford.

The county government of Oxfordshire approved a system of “traffic filters” for six busy roads on which drivers will need a special permit to travel during daytime hours.

But Tony Ecclestone, spokesperson for the Oxford City Council, said the county’s initiative is separate from the council’s endorsement of the 15-minute cities concept, which is a key part of a city planning document it’s developing.

He pointed to a fact sheet the county and city governments issued jointly in December to set the record straight.

The fact sheet states that the filters aren’t physical barriers that will confine people to their local area, but instead traffic cameras that will photograph the license plates of any non-compliant drivers, who could then be subject to a fine. Drivers will still be able to travel to any part of the city at any time, but may have to take a different route.

The 15-minute neighborhoods proposal, meanwhile, aims to ensure that “every resident has all the essentials (shops, healthcare, parks) within a 15-minute walk of their home,” the fact sheet says. The goal is to “support and add services, not restrict them.”

Urban planning experts credit Carlos Moreno, a professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, with popularizing the 15-minute city concept. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has been one of its most visible proponents, making it a central tenet in her successful re-election campaign in 2020.

Dan Luscher, creator of The 15-Minute City, a blog devoted to the design concept, argues it’s “first and foremost” about choice, not coercion.

“It is about creating neighborhoods and cities with urban amenities close at hand, and with convenient and safe options for getting around,” he wrote in an email. “It is about enabling people to get their needs met within their own neighborhood, not confining them to that neighborhood. It is about mobility, not lockdown.”

Robert Steuteville, of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a D.C. nonprofit that advocates for walkable cities, agreed, adding the notion also isn’t all that novel: most cities built before 1950, when highways and suburbs became dominant, were 15-minute cities.

“The point is to provide more freedom of choice as to where a person can comfortably and affordably live in the city, not to prevent freedom of movement,” Nate Storring, co-executive director of the Project for Public Spaces, a New York nonprofit advocating for better urban design, wrote in an email.

Conspiracy theorists are tapping into COVID-19 pandemic-era vitriol against lockdowns when they falsely portray the concept as a “climate lockdown,” notes Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They’re also drawing on far-right tropes about global-minded organizations pushing a “socialist agenda” and a “ Great Reset ” of society, he said. Indeed, a related conspiracy theory circulating online recently falsely claims the United Nations and the World Economic Forum will “forcibly remove” people living on polluted land and require them to live in “smart cities.”

“Even for those unversed in the vocabulary of the alt-right, the notion of distant elites ripping apart one’s way of life in order to conform to their notion of an optimal city can be a difficult one to stomach,” Ratti wrote in an email.

In Cleveland, Mayor Justin Bibb hopes his northeast Ohio city can become the country’s first to implement the planning framework.

But there’s been no talk of imposing new traffic regulations or restricting personal freedoms, confirms Marie Zickefoose, Bibb’s spokesperson. City officials have so far conducted a land use study and are working on updating city policies to encourage a better mix of amenities along main commercial and transit corridors, she said.

“The goal of the 15-minute city is to provide convenient and equitable access to necessities like healthcare, schools, grocery stores, jobs, and greenspace,” Zickefoose wrote in an email. “Our transportation system and neighborhood configurations currently provide this access to residents with cars, which leaves out almost a quarter of our residents..”
___

This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

On 09/10/2023 05:19 pm, Simon Mason wrote:
> Cities where people can live a short walk from work, school and other daily essentials rather than braving traffic-clogged highways or long commutes: utopian ideal or dystopian nightmare?

Neither.

But a practical impossibility.

It is simply not feasible for everyone in a big city to be within
fifteen minutes' walk of a major supermarket (or "superstore", as the
road signs call them).

The away with-the-fairies idea that people could get every daily
requirement within a fifteen minute walk could only, even in the
craziest of theories, be realised by forcing shoppers to use traditional
(and nowadays useless) specialist local shops, like those of butchers,
bakers, grocers, greengrocers, dry-cleaners, chandlers/hardware shops, etc.

And in such inefficient retail facilities, that would be at phenomenal
retail prices. Prices for daily goods have plummeted in real terms since
the advent of supermarkets with large car-parks where shoppers can
(literally and metaphorically*) fill their boots.

[* Apologies for the six syllable word, May Sun.]

> In 2023, apparently, it depends on who you ask.
>
> Some conservative commentators and conspiracy theorists are increasingly convinced the concept of a “15-minute city” — an urban design principle recently embraced by cities ranging from Paris, France to Cleveland, Ohio — is the latest nefarious plot to curtail individual freedoms.
>
> “You won’t be able to use your own car on certain roads and highways without the government’s permission and consent,” claimed one Instagram user in a recent video that’s been liked more than 5,400 times. “You will be constantly monitored by surveillance cameras to ensure that you don’t leave your designated residential zone without first being authorized to do so.”

Oxford is the start of that.

Go on... deny it...
>
> But urban experts and city officials stress the idea has nothing to do with regulating people’s movements or taking away other freedoms. In some cases, they say, it’s being wrongly conflated with local plans to mitigate traffic-clogged roads.
> Here’s a closer look at the facts.
> CLAIM: “15-minute cities” are designed to restrict people’s movements, increase government surveillance and infringe on other individual rights.
> THE FACTS: The urban planning concept is simply about building more compact, walkable communities where people are less reliant on cars.

What does reliance on cars have to do with the government?

What does it have to with anyone at all other than the car-user?
>
> The conspiracy theories took off late last year in the United Kingdom, as the concept was conflated with an effort to impose new traffic restrictions to ease congestion in and around the famous university community of Oxford.
> The county government of Oxfordshire approved a system of “traffic filters” for six busy roads on which drivers will need a special permit to travel during daytime hours.
> But Tony Ecclestone, spokesperson for the Oxford City Council, said the county’s initiative is separate from the council’s endorsement of the 15-minute cities concept, which is a key part of a city planning document it’s developing.
> He pointed to a fact sheet the county and city governments issued jointly in December to set the record straight.
>
> The fact sheet states that the filters aren’t physical barriers that will confine people to their local area, but instead traffic cameras that will photograph the license plates of any non-compliant drivers, who could then be subject to a fine. Drivers will still be able to travel to any part of the city at any time, but may have to take a different route.

What's the difference?

And has OCC been buying shares in local filling stations and is now keen
to increase car mileage?

> The 15-minute neighborhoods proposal, meanwhile, aims to ensure that “every resident has all the essentials (shops, healthcare, parks) within a 15-minute walk of their home,” the fact sheet says. The goal is to “support and add services, not restrict them.”

And it is to be achieved by restricting people.

> Urban planning experts credit Carlos Moreno, a professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, with popularizing the 15-minute city concept. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has been one of its most visible proponents, making it a central tenet in her successful re-election campaign in 2020.
> Dan Luscher, creator of The 15-Minute City, a blog devoted to the design concept, argues it’s “first and foremost” about choice, not coercion.

It certainly isn't about choice to take the most efficient and shortest
route, is it?

> “It is about creating neighborhoods and cities with urban amenities close at hand, and with convenient and safe options for getting around,” he wrote in an email. “It is about enabling people to get their needs met within their own neighborhood, not confining them to that neighborhood. It is about mobility, not lockdown.”
> Robert Steuteville, of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a D.C. nonprofit that advocates for walkable cities, agreed, adding the notion also isn’t all that novel: most cities built before 1950, when highways and suburbs became dominant, were 15-minute cities.

Those cities still exist. Remind us why they are (especially in the USA,
but also in the UK) seen as places where no-one with a choice wants to live?

> “The point is to provide more freedom of choice

Ahem... he actually means LESS freedom of choice.

You don't give anyone more freedom of choice by giving them less freedom
of choice.

What you MIGHT hope to do is give SOME people more choice by restricting
the choices of many others. Choices they have worked for.

> as to where a person can comfortably and affordably live in the city, not to prevent freedom of movement,” Nate Storring, co-executive director of the Project for Public Spaces, a New York nonprofit advocating for better urban design, wrote in an email.
> Conspiracy theorists are tapping into COVID-19 pandemic-era vitriol against lockdowns when they falsely portray the concept as a “climate lockdown,” notes Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
> They’re also drawing on far-right tropes about global-minded organizations pushing a “socialist agenda” and a “ Great Reset ” of society, he said. Indeed, a related conspiracy theory circulating online recently falsely claims the United Nations and the World Economic Forum will “forcibly remove” people living on polluted land and require them to live in “smart cities.”
> “Even for those unversed in the vocabulary of the alt-right, the notion of distant elites ripping apart one’s way of life in order to conform to their notion of an optimal city can be a difficult one to stomach,” Ratti wrote in an email.
> In Cleveland, Mayor Justin Bibb hopes his northeast Ohio city can become the country’s first to implement the planning framework.
> But there’s been no talk of imposing new traffic regulations or restricting personal freedoms,

....except (so far) in Oxford, eh?

And, of course, in London (which is the high order* centre for many
government services, especially health services, for the Home Counties).

[* Apologies for using terms and referring to concepts which you have no
hope of understanding, May Sun.]

> confirms Marie Zickefoose, Bibb’s spokesperson. City officials have so far conducted a land use study and are working on updating city policies to encourage a better mix of amenities along main commercial and transit corridors, she said.

That will restrict capacity. Main corridors need to be as much like
motorways/freeways as possible. Services at the side of the road
conflict with that. Such things need to be away from main route frontages.
>
> “The goal of the 15-minute city is to provide convenient and equitable access to necessities like healthcare, schools, grocery stores, jobs, and greenspace,” Zickefoose wrote in an email. “Our transportation system and neighborhood configurations currently provide this access to residents with cars, which leaves out almost a quarter of our residents.”

"grocery stores", eh?

Told you...
> ___
>
> This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.

Don't feel that kidding yourself (you're good at that) is the same thing
as kidding people who are cleverer than you.

Birth of a conspiracy theory

So, how did this fairly mundane strategy become a flashpoint for a spiraling climate-related conspiracy theory?

For years, certain actors within the fossil fuel industry have been trying to whip up anger about climate action by rebranding it as “climate tyranny,” said Jennie King, head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on disinformation and extremism.

Pre-2020, however, they struggled to get traction, she told CNN.

That changed with the pandemic.

Scientists slam Joe Rogan's podcast episode with Jordan Peterson as 'absurd' and 'dangerous'

A series of media articles arguing we should rebuild a post-Covid world that could maintain the drops in planet-warming pollution were seized upon to turbocharge a narrative claiming governments wanted to limit freedoms in the name of climate action.

The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative, billed as an effort to tackle inequality and climate crisis post-pandemic, fanned the flames.

The term “climate lockdown” started swirling around, pushed by right-wing think tanks and climate-skeptic media figures. From there it filtered down to more extreme conspiracy communities, King said, including QAnon-affiliated groups and anti-vaccine groups.

Fox News took it up, along with high-profile climate deniers.

Ordinary people were swept along, too. The pandemic left millions with genuine trauma and real concerns about government overreach, King said. “And that has been weaponized by a vast ecosystem of bad actors.”

The idea of 15-minute cities fits neatly into the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, partly because it is easy to spin that way.

“The conspiracy theorists are right that you can’t make a real city out of self-contained enclaves – those would just be villages,” Carlo Ratti, an architect, engineer, and Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, told CNN.

But it misinterprets the idea, he said. It “gives people the freedom to live locally, but does not force them to do so.”

Yet “disinformation is opportunistic,” especially when it comes to climate, King said. Anything can become a lightning rod for manufactured controversy and when an issue starts to receive attention, a host of different actors “flood into the space,” she added.

In December, Canadian clinical psychologist and climate skeptic Jordan Peterson posted a tweet attacking 15-minute cities: “The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea.”

In early February, UK politician Nick Fletcher raised the conspiracy in Parliament, calling 15-minute cities an “international socialist concept” and claimed they “will cost us our personal freedom.”

And last weekend, online theories spilled into real life protests, as thousands of people, many from outside the area, took to the streets of Oxford to protest the traffic filtering and 15-minute city proposals.

There are, of course, plenty of criticisms of 15-minute cities, including their potential to fracture cities, furthering existing inequalities between richer and poorer areas.

And Enright, in Oxfordshire, acknowledged local people have legitimate concerns about the traffic filtering plan. They will continue to consult, he said.

But this successful spinning of a huge conspiracy theory, by miscasting the intentions of 15-minute cities, has worrying long term implications for climate action, King said.

Governments, both local and national, may find it very hard to implement any policies that even touch on the climate crisis, she warned. “They are the most vulnerable at the moment to this enormous surge of hostility and public mobilization.”

The idea that everyone should have basic amenities within a 15-minute walk from their home shouldn’t be a controversial one.

It’s a simple urban-planning idea that proposes that we make cities more accessible to everyone.

However, conspiracy theorists, led by right-wing commentators, are using the idea to push false claims about restrictions on freedoms and surveillance technology.

Transport Secretary Mark Harper is the latest figure to conflate the 15-minute city with a right-wing conspiracy theory, which he did during his speech at the Conservative Party Conference.

In his speech, he said: “I’m calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-minute cities. There’s nothing wrong with making sure people can walk or cycle to the shops or school, that’s traditional town planning.

“But what is different, what is sinister and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they ration who uses the road and when, and they police it all with CCTV.”

He said: “So today, I am announcing that the Government will investigate what options we have in our toolbox to restrict overzealous use of traffic-management measures, including cutting off councils from the DVLA database if they don’t follow the rules.”

So how did an award-winning urban-planning idea derail into a right-wing surveillance state conspiracy theory?
What is a 15-minute city?

A 15-minute city is an urban-planning idea that households in cities should have amenities, like a doctor, school, and local shop, for example, within a 15-minute walk.

People would be able to get to work and visit cultural facilities within a short walk or cycle.

The idea is that 15-minute cities are accessible to everyone, without the need to drive.

While the aim of the 15-minute city is to create more accessible and enjoyable places to live, it would, as a result, decrease the need for cars, creating less emissions.

The urban-planning model was developed by French-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno and won the Obel Award for 2021.

Moreno first introduced the idea in 2016, but it was popularised in 2020 by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, as part of her re-election campaign, according to Dezeen. Moreno served as scientific advisor on the campaign.

Why have conspiracy theorists co-opted the idea of a 15-minute city?

Conspiracy theorists have jumped on the 15-minute city idea and are spreading false claims that the idea means that people will be confined to a 15-minute radius of their house, unable to travel to another part of their city, or out of their city.

They are claiming that the idea is being pushed to keep people confined to their homes, only allowed to leave their area a limited number of times a year, as long as they have a permit.

The people who believe the theory have appeared to conflate the idea of a 15-minute city with traffic restrictions.

Jordan Peterson said on Twitter: “The idea that neighbourhoods should be walkable is lovely.

“The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea--and, make no mistake, it’s part of a well-documented plan.”

Katie Hopkins is among those falsely claiming that licence-plate recognition and electronic gates will force people to remain in their neighbourhoods.

What’s happening in Oxford?

In July 2022, after consulting with the public, Oxford’s council decided to make a few LTNs permanent.

LTNs reduce the number of cars passing through residential streets and have been around since the 1960s.

Traffic filters will be installed in certain areas, which means private cars will need to apply for permits to pass through. The traffic filters will remain accessible to pedestrians, cyclists, public transport, and emergency vehicles.

Oxford City Council explained its decision in a statement and said: “Our aim is to reduce traffic levels and congestion, make the buses faster and more reliable, and make cycling and walking safer and more pleasant.

“Oxford needs a more sustainable, reliable, and inclusive transport system for everyone, particularly for the 30 per cent of our households who do not own a car.”

Five people were arrested when thousands of Oxford residents who oppose LTNs protested in February.

Not everyone protesting the LTNs in Oxford believes in the conspiracy theory, though. The LTNs have generally been controversial in their own right, as some people claim they harm businesses and restrict motorists’ freedom.

Separately from the LTN scheme, Oxford adopted the 15-minute city concept into its Local Plan 2040, a report published in September 2022.

As a result, some conspiracy theorists have conflated the LTN controversy with the idea of the 15-minute city.
So what’s the truth about 15-minute cities?

It’s true that Oxford’s LTNs will restrict motorists from driving on certain routes at certain times of day without a permit.

But residents will still be able to access any area of the city they choose via any other method of transportation.

The idea of a 15-minute city means that people will have everything they need within a short walk or cycle, without the need to drive.

No part of the 15-minute city idea suggests that residents will be restricted to their neighbourhood, subjected to surverillance, nor that cars will be banned.

Simon Mason <swldxer1958@gmail.com> wrote:

> Birth of a conspiracy theory

> So, how did this fairly mundane strategy become a flashpoint for a
> spiraling climate-related conspiracy theory?

> For years, certain actors within the fossil fuel industry have been
> trying to whip up anger about climate action by rebranding it as “climate
> tyranny,” said Jennie King, head of Climate Research and Policy at the
> Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on disinformation and extremism.

> But this successful spinning of a huge conspiracy theory, by miscasting
> the intentions of 15-minute cities, has worrying long term implications
> for climate action, King said.

> Governments, both local and national, may find it very hard to implement
> any policies that even touch on the climate crisis, she warned. “They are
> the most vulnerable at the moment to this enormous surge of hostility and
> public mobilization.”

So there you are: 15-minute slums are really about controlling people
because of a climate-change agenda.

Thanks for clearing that up.

--
Spike

Imagine a city in which you could walk or cycle to almost anywhere you needed to go in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. Shops, medical facilities and artistic sites would be spread throughout neighbourhoods. Remote and home working would be embraced.

Children could easily and safely cycle to school, breathing cleaner air. With less need for commuting, quieter streets could even be turned over to parks. Known as the “15-minute city” after the time it takes to get around, it’s a model that promises a return to local living – and a greener, healthier, more sustainable way of life.

Sound idyllic? Not if you’re Rishi Sunak. The prime minister used an interview before this week’s party conference to “hit out” at the 15-minute city concept, saying there was a “relentless attack” on motorists who “depend on their cars to get to work, take their kids to school, do their shopping, see the doctor” – ignoring that this dependence is exactly what the model aims to reduce.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, went further, telling delegates the 15-minute cities concept was “a Labour-backed movement … to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want.

“What is sinister, and what we shouldn’t tolerate, is the idea that local councils can decide how often you go to the shops, and that they can ration who uses the roads and when, and that they police it all with CCTV.” The government would look into ways to stop “overzealous” councils restricting road use “if they don’t follow the rules”, he said.

All of which may sound like a lot of airtime for an arcane local planning policy, but to a small number in his audience, 15-minute cities represent a lot more than that. Since it was first outlined in 2016 by Carlos Moreno, a Colombian professor in urban planning at the Pantheon-Sorbonne university in Paris, the model has been embraced by city authorities in Paris, Seattle, Bogotá, Melbourne, Shanghai and beyond. In the UK, cities including Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham and Canterbury have proposed versions of the scheme.

But for a vocal few, the concept has become bound up in conspiracy theories about a “great reset” that will see people confined to highly restricted zones by a cabal of climate-obsessed authorities. The climate crisis, they believe, is a contrivance to allow sinister powers to restrict individual freedoms – and this is one of their tools to do so.

“This is totally insane,” Moreno said. “If we wanted to examine their arguments in reality, they don’t have arguments, they have only fake information. Never, never, never have I proposed limiting people travelling for commuting, for escaping.”

His model, he says, is “an urban policy for living with more healthy proximity to local jobs, local commerce, green areas, sports activities, cultural activities. This is a way to liberate our economy, liberating our ecology with more bikeability, more walkability. It is not, not, not a traffic plan.

“I have not proposed a new traffic plan for cities. I am not in a war against cars.”

The Tories may be reaching to the right amid desperate polling numbers, but their explicit evocation of a known conspiracy theory is new territory. In an interview with the BBC, energy minister Andrew Bowie said local authorities were “dictating to people that they must choose to access services within 15 minutes of their house”. Challenged that this was a “pretend argument”, Bowie said the issue was “coming up in discussions on forums online”.

“I can’t really think of another example where we’ve had the government in this country lean into a conspiracy,” said Daniel Jolley, an assistant professor in social psychology at the university of Nottingham, who researches conspiracy theories and their social impact.. “The government hasn’t generally played into conspiratorial narrative – on Covid for instance, or climate change – so this seems to be a unique spin.”

It’s also a clear pivot. As recently as March, the government was explicitly debunking fears, stating: “15-minute cities aim to provide people with more choice about how and where they travel, not to restrict movement.”

Moreno began developing his model in 2010. The idea came to particular prominence after Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, adopted the policy in 2019.

After Covid hit, some city authorities, such as in Milan, turned to 15-minute cities as a way of rebuilding better communities, said Moreno, but to conspiracists the model was swept up in broader fears of state control.

Moreno points to the controversy over proposed measures in Oxford as being pivotal in the debate – and it may be a confusion of two separate schemes which have poured fuel on the conspiracists’ fire. One is a plan by the city council that included developing 15-minute neighbourhoods, the other a proposed traffic filter system devised by Oxfordshire county council to deal with the city’s famously terrible traffic that would restrict access to certain roads at certain times without a permit.

Noisy protests have been held, including by far-right activists from outside the city and local councillors have had death threats. The controversial Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, pitched in, tweeting about “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” accompanied by maps of the Oxford ring road.

Traffic management schemes such as low traffic neighbourhoods have been controversial in many towns and boroughs, and you don’t need to be a conspiracist to have concerns, said Jolley. “There are some questions to ask about 15-minute cities, but unfortunately, the conspiratorial rhetoric [dominates], so that questions or concerns that people may have are ignored because of some people’s overarching suspicion.”

Harper’s language is “startling” in its similarity to conspiracy rhetoric, according to Rod Dacombe, the director of the centre for British politics and government at King’s College London, “because previously [the Tories] have not embraced conspiracies really in any kind of substantive way at all”.

However, he added: “I don’t think this is emergence of conspiracy theories as policy, I think this is political expediency. They think this is a potential wedge issue that will work for them. Emphatically it will not – hardly anybody thinks this stuff.”

In fact, he said, polling data suggests “there’s reasonably decent support around the country for the idea of 15-minute cities”. “As a political tactic, I don’t think it will be very successful,” he says. YouGov found 62% of Britons would support the scheme’s adoption in their own area.

Moreno, who has also faced intimidation and death threats, has called on Sunak to “pull himself together”. “It is a great pity that the prime minister doesn’t consider the vital importance of tackling climate change. Our common public enemy is not 15-minute cities, or myself. Our common public enemy is climate change.”

> Birth of a conspiracy theory
>
> So, how did this fairly mundane strategy become a flashpoint for a spiraling climate-related conspiracy theory?
>
> For years, certain actors within the fossil fuel industry have been trying to whip up anger about climate action by rebranding it as “climate tyranny,” said Jennie King, head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focused on disinformation and extremism.
>
> Pre-2020, however, they struggled to get traction, she told CNN.
>
> That changed with the pandemic.
>
> Scientists slam Joe Rogan's podcast episode with Jordan Peterson as 'absurd' and 'dangerous'
>
> A series of media articles arguing we should rebuild a post-Covid world that could maintain the drops in planet-warming pollution were seized upon to turbocharge a narrative claiming governments wanted to limit freedoms in the name of climate action.
>
> The World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative, billed as an effort to tackle inequality and climate crisis post-pandemic, fanned the flames.
>
> The term “climate lockdown” started swirling around, pushed by right-wing think tanks and climate-skeptic media figures. From there it filtered down to more extreme conspiracy communities, King said, including QAnon-affiliated groups and anti-vaccine groups.
>
> Fox News took it up, along with high-profile climate deniers.
>
> Ordinary people were swept along, too. The pandemic left millions with genuine trauma and real concerns about government overreach, King said. “And that has been weaponized by a vast ecosystem of bad actors.”
>
> The idea of 15-minute cities fits neatly into the “climate lockdown” conspiracy theory, partly because it is easy to spin that way.
>
> “The conspiracy theorists are right that you can’t make a real city out of self-contained enclaves – those would just be villages,” Carlo Ratti, an architect, engineer, and Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, told CNN.
>
> But it misinterprets the idea, he said. It “gives people the freedom to live locally, but does not force them to do so.”
>
> Yet “disinformation is opportunistic,” especially when it comes to climate, King said. Anything can become a lightning rod for manufactured controversy and when an issue starts to receive attention, a host of different actors “flood into the space,” she added.
>
> In December, Canadian clinical psychologist and climate skeptic Jordan Peterson posted a tweet attacking 15-minute cities: “The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea.”
>
> In early February, UK politician Nick Fletcher raised the conspiracy in Parliament, calling 15-minute cities an “international socialist concept” and claimed they “will cost us our personal freedom.”
>
> And last weekend, online theories spilled into real life protests, as thousands of people, many from outside the area, took to the streets of Oxford to protest the traffic filtering and 15-minute city proposals.
>
> There are, of course, plenty of criticisms of 15-minute cities, including their potential to fracture cities, furthering existing inequalities between richer and poorer areas.
>
> And Enright, in Oxfordshire, acknowledged local people have legitimate concerns about the traffic filtering plan. They will continue to consult, he said.
>
> But this successful spinning of a huge conspiracy theory, by miscasting the intentions of 15-minute cities, has worrying long term implications for climate action, King said.
>
> Governments, both local and national, may find it very hard to implement any policies that even touch on the climate crisis, she warned. “They are the most vulnerable at the moment to this enormous surge of hostility and public mobilization.”

Top down disinformation PR may be much more sophisticated than many think.

Think of that insect parasitezoid that takes over another insect's body and brain and eventually gets it to kill itself.