The car as cultural flashpoint

Welcome to another between-season bonus episode of Origin Story. This week Ian tells the story of 15-minute cities: the notion that every urban resident should live a 15-minute walk or bike ride away from all essential amenities. How did such a sensible and benign approach to urban planning give birth to a wild conspiracy theory about authoritarianism?

We meet Clarence Arthur Perry, the first urban planner to protect city life from the rise of the automobile; Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist who championed mixed-use neighbourhoods in 1960s New York and prevented Robert Moses’ expressway from slicing through downtown Manhattan; and Carlos Moreno, the French-Colombian scientist who invented the 15-minute city in 2015.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo made the policy a cornerstone of her mayoralty and a model for cities around the world. But as the pandemic melted people’s brains, Moreno’s innovation became demonised as a “war on motorists” and, worse, a “Stalinist” plot to confine citizens to their neighbourhoods — permanent lockdown. By the end of 2023, Rishi Sunak’s government was fluently speaking the language of online conspiracy theorists.

What constitutes the ideal urban environment? How can planning make residents happier, healthier and safer? Why is the psychology of driving so weird? How did paranoia about 15-minute cities fuse with lockdown hysteria, anti-vax thinking, climate change denial and far-right fantasies to turn Moreno into “public enemy number one”? And will the 15-minute city prevail anyway?

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Reading list

• Anonymous – ‘City of “cells” seen created by auto era’, New York Times (4 August 2029)

• Anonymous – ‘A guide to 15-minute cities: why are they so controversial?’, University of the Built Environment (2 December 2024)

• Joseph Giovanni – ‘Apartment builders return to prewar design’, New York Times (13 October 1986)

• Tiffany Hsu – ‘He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s “Public Enemy No. 1.”’, New York Times (28 March 2023)

• Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

• The Life Well Lived, Episode 32, podcast (19 August 2020)

• Douglas Martin – ‘Jane Jacobs, Urban Activist, Is Dead at 89’, New York Times (25 April 2006)

• Georgia Pozoukidou and Zoi Chatziyiannaki – ‘15-Minute City: Decomposing the New Urban Planning Eutopia’, MDPI (17 January 2021)

• Georgia Pozoukidou and Margarita Andelidou – ‘Urban Planning in the 15-Minute City: Revisited under Sustainable and Smart City Developments until 2030’, MDPI (12 October 2022)

• Pallavi Sethi – ‘The Telegraph misrepresents 15-minute cities’, LSE (2 February 2026)

• Camilla Turner – ‘Labour opens door to “Stalinist” 15- minute cities across Britain’, Telegraph (24 January 2026)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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