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15 myths about the city of 15 minutes, the last paranoia of the conspiracists

2023-03-04T15:59:45.289Z


The extreme right spreads hoaxes about an idea that is already applied in cities like Paris, Barcelona or Buenos Aires. Carlos Moreno, creator of the concept, responds: "It is a delusion to say that we are going to lock up citizens in their neighborhood"


Dozens of people pedal along one of the bike lanes in Paris, a city that applies the 15-minute city model.Samuel Boivin (Getty)

Carlos Moreno (Tunja, Colombia, 63 years old) coined the concept of the 15-minute city, a model to reorganize our cities and ensure that each citizen has nearby (on foot or by bike) all the services they need on a daily basis, from shops to medical centers, from parks to schools, from leisure to public services.

The idea gained strength with the confinement, when we reconsidered how to inhabit the urban space, and was first adopted by Paris —where Moreno is an advisor to the mayor—, which builds bike lanes at the expense of cars and converts school environments into pedestrians, and then by capitals such as Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Milan or Barcelona.

The Catalan capital translates this idea into superblocks, a group of blocks inside which traffic is restricted and pedestrian space is expanded.

However, in recent weeks hoaxes have been launched against this urban model accusing Moreno of wanting to lock people up in his neighborhood, prohibit cars and try to control citizens.

These affirmations drink from the opposition to the restrictions due to the pandemic and the limitations on cars in urban centers.

They first emerged in the Anglo-Saxon world, with protests in front of the street blockade in Oxford (United Kingdom) and Edmonton (Canada), and have spread in Spanish through social networks thanks to the extreme right, some media, and even the A public official from the Community of Madrid, Juan Manuel López Zafra, has replicated.

We dismantle these myths by the hand of Moreno, who has just published

The Revolution of Proximity

(Editorial Alliance), and other experts in urban planning and mobility.

1. It is a plan to lock the population in their neighborhood

“It is a delusion to say that we are going to lock up the citizens in their neighborhood,” Moreno replies.

“These are crazy things that are spread by the extreme right, the anti-vaccines and the climate deniers.

The city of 15 minutes is the opposite, that you can move freely around your neighborhood on foot or by bike, and then throughout the city by bike or public transport, which is the means to connect the neighborhoods”.

There are examples around the world: Bogotá applies it with its "vital neighborhoods", which take up space for cars to create new public space, Milan is committed to bicycles and pedestrianization, and Buenos Aires tries to ensure that each neighborhood has markets, green spaces and health services.

In Spain, Pontevedra and its pedestrian center are perfectly suited to this idea.

“People can visit any of these cities to see what they are doing,

2. It is an attempt to divide cities into identity ghettos

Moreno, director of the Entrepreneurship-Territory-Innovation chair at the Sorbonne, explains: “On the contrary, it is about regenerating the city and rebalancing its social categories.

When we have more green areas with leisure and sports activities instead of cars, the social fabric is regenerated and people from different strata are on the streets and have more social awareness”.

Sara Ladra, editor of the book

Madrid, ciudad de los 15 minutos

, points out that in Paris "the City Council is buying buildings and mixing their uses, so that there can be offices, homes and commercial use in the same property."

Ladra is also an adviser to Más Madrid, a party that proposes to put these ideas into motion in the Spanish capital.

3.

It is about dividing the city into villages with urban gardens

Nerea Morán, professor of Urban Planning at the Madrid Polytechnic School of Architecture and a researcher on agroecology, points out that the idea has nothing to do with depending on urban gardens.

“However, food is one of the most cross-cutting elements and one that has the greatest capacity for transformation: food networks are globalized and vulnerable, we depend on distant production and a distribution network of thousands of kilometers”, she says.

“We need to relocate production to increase our autonomy, adapt to seasonal products, bet on local markets and reconnect with food culture”, she continues.

Although food production will continue to be outside the cities.

4. Closing streets to traffic takes away freedom of movement

Citizens are guaranteed freedom of movement, but that does not mean that it has to be by car.

“Freedom is not getting stuck in a traffic jam for an hour in a car that weighs a ton and occupies 12 or 15 square meters with a single person,” says Moreno.

“In a compact area you can go on foot, by bike, by metro, by tram, by bus.

Continuing betting on the car is not freedom of movement, it is not wanting to change a world that is ending.

Cars pollute the air, their brakes emit unhealthy particles, and gasoline drives climate change.

We have to change the way we move ”, he continues.

Furious and exaggerated criticism of car restrictions has been a constant: in 2018, the current Madrid Transport Minister, David Pérez, compared Central Madrid with the Berlin Wall.

Carlos Moreno, urban planner and creator of the concept of the 15-minute city, in an undated image.

Armonica Film (WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities)

5. They will ban cars

No European city has proposed banning cars, but many are setting up low-emission zones to restrict the passage of the most polluting.

David Lois, professor of Social Psychology at UNED and an expert in mobility, considers that these hoaxes are "a minority reaction of a reactionary nature" that always occurs in the face of public health measures: "it happened with the ban on tobacco, with the covid, and with the rationalization of the use of the car.

And with a common thread, irrationalism, that is, an emotional reaction that is not based on facts.

It is not intended to eliminate cars, but to reduce their use in compact cities, where there are other more efficient methods, such as public transport.

6. They will force us all to walk or bike

Professor Lois points out that there is an unfair distribution of the city: cars "have between 60% and 70% of public space, when in Madrid or Barcelona only 25% of trips are by car, and 50% of they, of less than five kilometers”.

For this reason, "we must make it easier to walk and cycle, which is active mobility, which improves our health, and reduce the use of private cars, which improves the efficiency and speed of public transport."

"The vast majority of the population is in favor of these measures, but against them there is an extremist minority that wants to maintain the

status quo

, which is totalitarian for those who do not use the car," adds Lois.

Moreno is committed to changing the urban mobility pyramid, which today favors the automobile: “The priority should be walking and cycling, active mobility;

then collective public transport, then taxis, shared cars and motorcycles, and finally the private car”.

And he continues: "The bike is not an obligation, but it should be a possibility, and for that it is necessary to create the conditions with a network of protected bike lanes throughout the city."

Paris and Barcelona are already doing it.

7. They will prevent reaching shopping centers

Faced with this absurd idea, Moreno is committed to "the right to live in the city."

What does he mean?

“We have been accustomed to the fact that what is essential is accommodation and work, but it is also essential to have quality public space, parks, playgrounds, restaurants and shops nearby.

Who is going to prefer to drive two hours to go and return to the shopping center instead of having a close life and sharing it with the family?

If you have the possibility of shopping nearby and in exchange you can spend more time with your friends, with your parents, with your children, you gain in quality of life”.

Of course, those who prefer to go to shopping centers can continue to do so.

Several residents walk through the superblock in the San Antoni neighborhood, in Barcelona.

albert garcia

8. We will have to make communes with the neighbors

Izaskun Chinchilla, professor of Architectural Practice at the Bartlett School in London, denies that this urban model forces unwanted socialization: "This idea does not call into question one of the great achievements of the city, that whoever wants to be anonymous can be, and have freedom for individual enjoyment.

However, "the relocation of many activities in the neighborhood to a walkable distance can be fantastic for those who want to spend more time with children, with the elderly, or carry out activities with the neighbors in a quality public space."

This is what is already happening with the superblocks (or

superillas

) in Barcelona, ​​whose new pedestrian space is used by children to play, the elderly to rest and the young to have fun.

9. Without cars, shops will close

"It's just the opposite," Moreno counters, "if you deal constructively with your neighborhood, you make it more beautiful, you create public space for people, you make it more walkable, you have cultural facilities, a place to sit, exhibitions, people go out into the streets more and that generates a quality public space where commerce can re-establish itself”.

According to Sara Ladra, “Paris has created a municipal public company for the purchase of empty commercial premises, which degenerate the neighborhoods;

they rehabilitate them and put them up for affordable rent for small businesses.”

Moreno resumes: “The mayor of Pontevedra, Miguel Anxo Lores, opted for pedestrianization three decades ago, and when I go walking around, the merchants tell me that cars don't buy, that it's the people who buy.

And the more you walk quietly,

A child plays in a pedestrian zone in the center of Pontevedra.OSCAR CORRAL

10. They will turn the asphalt into a playground

Chinchilla, author of

The City of Care

(Catarata), criticizes that the children's play areas are separated by a fence, segregated by age and schooled, that is, with functions of what the children should do (go up here, go through this side, put this there).

“The game is an engine for cognitive development from the relationship with the environment.

And that relationship has to be based on surprise.

For this reason, the city must accompany the game throughout the urban environment, with flower beds, water areas, vegetation... Games could be put up at bus stops, for example”.

And natural playgrounds should be promoted, with trees, small waterfalls... "This generates intergenerational activities, where grandparents, mothers, 12-year-olds and three-year-olds can have a cooperative relationship."

The asphalt, yes, will continue to be there where many cars have to pass.

11. It will create gentrification

It is one of the issues that worries Carlos Moreno the most.

“If you leave a neighborhood with a high quality of life in the hands of the private sector, it could gentrify it.

The key is that there be a public policy from the Mayor's Office to preserve the common good, mix social categories, mix uses and services, make the buildings serve multiple activities.

If public investments are made to promote the mix, that will not happen”.

In his opinion, “those who spread these hoaxes are used to living in upper-class white neighborhoods, and when they see people of a different color arrive, they say that the neighborhood is deteriorating.

Segregation is often the product of wanting to preserve a high social status that does not support poor people”.

According to the Barcelona City Council,

12. It has already been applied in horrible cities like Brasília

"Brasilia, the capital created by Oscar Niemeyer, was never the city of 15 minutes," says Moreno.

“It is an administrative city with differentiated uses, in one place there is the palace of the president, Congress and the judiciary, and there is a huge esplanade where you can walk for a long time and there is absolutely nothing, not a store, not a cinema, not a a doctor.

It's the opposite."

The esplanade of the Ministries of Brasilia.

Shaun Botterill (Getty)

13. It is a hidden plan of the 2030 Agenda to control us

The social psychologist Lois considers that these "conspiracy movements" are the same ones opposed to covid restrictions, vaccines and the existence of climate change.

“It is a dangerous drift, if you believe that there is a shadow government that tries to impose totalitarian social control over the population through the 2030 Agenda —one of whose objectives is to have more humane and sustainable cities—, then you think that it is a devil's tool."

She warns that this anti-scientific thinking can lead to insults and even violence: in the United Kingdom, conspiracy theorists have attacked street furniture, bollards and access control cameras and have even threatened politicians.

Moreno confirms that in recent weeks he has been receiving "death threats" for his urban model.

For Lois,

14. Governments will use it to monitor your carbon footprint

Governments want to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

In fact, the EU has agreed to reduce emissions by 55% by 2030. A fundamental leg is urban transport.

“The 15-minute city can be used to advance decarbonization,” says Chinchilla, “first because it would greatly reduce daily trips, especially the small pendulum movements that are made daily, and then because it favors non-polluting means of transport, such as walking, cycling and public transport”.

In any case, the idea does not contemplate measuring the carbon footprint of each citizen.

Moreno tercia: "Before, executives negotiated company cars, but now that we are asking for decarbonization, it is no longer a shame for an executive to go by bike."

15. It is an absurd idea that does not make sense

The city of 15 minutes does not appear out of nowhere: it is an investigation by Carlos Moreno and his team of researchers at the Sorbonne that collects and completes the work of many previous thinkers and urban planners, from Jane Jacobs —author of Death and Life of

the big cities

— and Jan Gehl, to the new Anglo-Saxon urbanism, the pedestrianism of the 80s, the French chronourbanism, the Swedish time geography… “What hurts the conspiracists is that since the pandemic the idea has been spreading, first to Paris and then to the network of C40 cities and other cities”, says Moreno.

Rolf Rosenkranz, spokesman for C40, notes that this model “creates more opportunities for social interaction through safe and pleasant streets, parks and other public spaces that also support the local economy.

And it guarantees that each neighborhood is connected to the rest of the city”.

The architect Morán completes: “Compact, complex cities, with a diversity of economic activity, which develop with their environment and take care of their resources, are a constant in urban planning.

They are cities like the Mediterranean ones, where we live”.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-04

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