Help! I'm trapped in a 15-minute city with Jordan Peterson!
Revised and toned down: Well actually he is in the next one over, and it's even better than mine.
This post has been revised and edited to be less provocative.
Professor Carlos Moreno of the Sorbonne developed the concept of “la ville du quart d’heure” where daily urban necessities are within a 15-minute reach by foot or bike. Work, home, shops, education, and healthcare should all be available without getting in a car. It all sounds so benign and sensible; who could possibly object? Apparently, a certain Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson.
According to transport journalist Carlton Reid, many people “claim that Moreno’s 15-minute-city concept is a Stalinist climate lockdown plot to confine people to ghettos and thus easier for global cabals to control.”
Peterson tweets “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--and, make no mistake, it's part of a well-documented plan.” Reid writes that the idea of the 15-minute city “is now regularly decried by conspiracy theorists, with wild claims that elites are about to mandate the everyday use of bicycles for all.”
The problem with this is that 15-minute cities already exist all over Canada. I live in one. Jordan Peterson lives in one. We’re 15 minutes apart.
My 15-minute city was built on farmland at the top of the former shore of Lake Iroquois, filled after the last ice age, and now a steep escarpment parallel to Davenport Road that made access to the north difficult.
In 1913 they filled part of a ravine with garbage and coal ash and built a streetcar line, opening the area for development.
Within ten years, it was a complete streetcar suburb, where everyone was within a 15-minute walk of the main street, St. Clair Avenue, with its greengrocers and butchers and shoe stores and everything you needed. They built public schools and a big high school, and nobody needed a car.
You still don’t. Many of the little shops are gone, but there are four big grocery stores within walking distance. There’s a new co-working facility, and they even a family health branch of the hospital network, so I have my doctor within five minutes.
My running physiotherapist is upstairs, and my bike shop is a few doors west. Alas, the neighbourhood movie theatres are gone, and the nearest university is a half-hour walk.
But Jordan Peterson! He lives just south of the escarpment, smack in the middle of a wonderful 15-minute city, exactly that distance from the University of Toronto, where he used to teach. He’s five minutes from the best grocery store and a few blocks from wonderful shopping. He’s got libraries, a major hospital, movie theatres, restaurants galore, and parks. He even has a castle. If I knew how to draw a circle on Google Maps, it would include everything one needs in a city. He even has a subway and one transfer to a train that takes him straight to the airport for his next speaking tour.
And for all his complaints about traffic controls and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, (LTNs) you should try and drive in his. It’s the most traffic-controlled neighbourhood in the city, with streets changing direction, sleeping policemen, bollards and bump-outs everywhere, and so many four-way stops that drivers who used to speed through now avoid it. It is, most definitely, Toronto’s original low-traffic neighbourhood.
Jordan Peterson would deny others what he has, living in a bucolic LTN in a 15-minute C40 city. He enjoys the same kind of 15-minute city that I do. We share that dirty little secret.
It's funny that most people refuse this concept just because they're creating a weird internal story in which they are a victim.
The objection is to central planning, not to having things close by. Make this article macro, and who could possibly object to the state planning an idealistic communal society where everyone has all they need and there is no longer any exploitation of the masses? Sounds wonderful, yeah?