"The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker"
The 15-minute city as nostalgic fantasy of the medieval town
There has been an increasing concern, here in the UK at least, about plans being promoted by various local authorities for something called the concept of "the 15-minute city". We allegedly all have the capability to live in a 15-minute neighbourhood. Not just in the UK, but even in places as not normally considered as thoroughly urbanised as Canada, as this gushing piece promoting the idea commences with: "The 15-Minute City is an urban design concept where most of your daily activities can be accomplished within a 15 min human-powered journey from your home. This concept has been around for some time but in recent years it has received more attention after the mayor of Paris [Anne Hidalgo in 2020] moved the 15 min approach to the forefront in that city’s urban plan". As Politico noted in 2022, Hidalgo’s "pitch to turn the French capital into a 'city of proximity' – where children walk to school and residents know their local baker" - is a benign-sounding, benevolent and reassuring version of such plans.
These sorts of articles makes it sound so cosy, almost twee, and fun to have everything you (are deemed to) need within a 15-minute walking range, and just in case those unfortunate folk who cannot walk for 15 minutes are forgotten, let's remind everyone of the current solution to everything: an electrically-powered vehicle. So no matter how disabled you are and with what specific personal needs, get on that eBike and off you go, since obviously one size fits all when we are all in this together and saving the planet by doing our bit.
In the UK again, both the Guardian and the BBC waxed hysterical at the prospect of yet another well-intentioned scheme being hijacked by those dastardly conspiracy theorists. The Beeb screamed that "False claims that a lockdown to help fight climate change could soon be enforced in Oxford have spread on social media." The poor residents of Oxford apparently were left "confused" by this, since obviously the average citizen is deemed too stupid to read a planning proposal and work out the implications for themselves (unless of course filtered through the medium of official news first). The Guardian op-ed was nicely debunked by Iain Davis here on Substack
who pointed out that the official stance from the local authority in question, Oxford County Council's own published plan, which the Guardian linked to, made the intentions very clear. The opening statement of Oxford's plans on their website decrees: "When they are operating, private cars will not be allowed through the traffic filters without a permit. All other vehicles including buses, coaches, taxis, vans, mopeds, motorbikes and HGVs will be allowed at all times."
As Iain Davis rightly interpreted this: "Quite clearly it reveals that Oxford County Council has ordered, by fiat, where the citizens of Oxford are to be "allowed" to drive around their own city. [...] There is no doubt that Oxford County Council's plan is part of the "15 minute city" agenda. The stated objective is to split the city into "15 minute neighbourhoods." Oxford County Council's cabinet member for travel and development strategy, Duncan Enright, said:" It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs, the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood." The butchers, and bakers, and candlestick makers ...
Detractors of the dangers of 15-minute concept have continued to argue that it is purely about providing most things locally within a 15 minute walking distance, whatever exactly is meant by 'most things'. The planned legislation, as it stands, does not expressly forbid people from driving, or even from coming into one local area from another. It is mainly aimed at reducing the need for private car use, which is all well and good if you have easy, local access to the things you need (more on that below). "On the surface, these 15-minute neighbourhoods might sound pleasant and convenient. But there is a coercive edge. The council plans to cut car use and traffic congestion by placing strict rules on car journeys. Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70."
As Heather Buchanan, a resident of Bristol, England, put it in her reply to a comment on a Facebook group:
whilst people will have the option to move around using other modes of transport, you're forgetting/unaware that for some people this isn't an option. A single parent who has 2 jobs to make ends meet and needs her car to get between jobs and to pick up and drop off her kids. A tradesman who needs his van to transport all his equipment. Someone who supports an elderly parent. Someone who has to take a disabled relative to college/appointments. There's also the additional fuel cost because of the detour to avoid being fined. Many folk will not be able to afford the fuel. People will be restricted by stealth. I live in Bristol and we have a 20mph speed limit, RPZs [residents' parking zones], a CAZ [Clean Air Zone] that costs £9/£100 per day for non-exempt cars/buses respectively, a G40 mayor (who is thankfully f***king off in 2024 but not before he has pushed through his net-zero goals) who flew to Canada to speak for less than 30 minutes about climate change while hypocritically telling the rest of us to walk and cycle, and a forthcoming 15-minute city..I'm fortunate that I will not be overly affected but the examples I gave relate to 4 of my neighbours. 4 neighbours with mortgages and bills to pay. 4 households who will be severely affected when the 15-minute city is underway.
So while, logically of sorts, the emphasis that this is just about encouraging people to make alternative journeys than by private car makes sense and there are no ulterior motives, especially if you believe in the benign intentions of local council. In the real world, however, when your neighbourhood looks like this,
the 15-minute sector becomes more of a prison for the socio-economically disadvantaged than a green utopia. I find it very telling that the cities in the UK first up with the 15-minute concept, namely tourist-friendly, olde-worlde, chocolate-box Oxford, Canterbury and Edinburgh share a picturesque old town centre, have a solid section of the population with nice comfortable middle class background, and the infrastructure to match. What a contrast to these views I have posted here of urban South Wales. Barbed wire on the roof of the convenience store, a take-away pizza outlet in lieu of the wholefood shop beloved of middle-class urban centres (in an area already suffering disproportionately high rates of obesity), and the little bakery store seemingly permanently shut (and if open definitely not purveyors of artisan breads). These ranks of the grey, dismal housing up the grey, damp hillside under gloomy winter skies were once the showcase housing estate of Wales, sometime before World War Two. Now the area holds various records for crime, drug abuse, underperforming schools etc etc. In a city of very little hope, termed 'the graveyard of ambition', mobility restriction to this local area would be enough to drive most people over the edge. Living in a war zone is preferable - at least you can claim refugee status elsewhere.
Yes, there is no direct imprisonment or confinement according to these proposed zones. But in practice, those folk who have the misfortune to live in poorer, infrastructure deficient zones, like the bleak areas I pictured, will have to leave their sector if they require anything beyond the basics. And since such poorer areas are often, ironically, also those areas served least well by public transport, folk living there are forced to drive. Yes, as the placators say, people will not actually be banned from driving, but they will be fined. And if you are already poor, such extra expenses as paying fines to access goods and services beyond the bare necessities turns into a defacto economic form of imprisonment. My whole point is that the 15-minute city idea will have an unequal effect on different classes, and poorer, working class people will be affected more negatively than the latte-lapping, laptop toting middle classes.
This is an analysis that the best-known proponents of the 15-minute zoning, Oxford City Council, admit themselves, buried in between the glossy planet-saving propaganda. "And as Oxford City Council concedes, while most of the city ‘has very good accessibility to a [district] centre… there are clearly a few areas outside of this 15-minute walk’. This means that residents will have to content themselves with ‘local centres’ – though these ‘have a much smaller range of facilities, and [are] often slightly less well connected by public transport’. People-centred? Hardly."
The fantasy of an old-fashioned neighbourly utopia, where enticing restaurants are cheek-by-jowl with artisan bakeries, vegan cafes, independent small retailers, and a smattering of art-house cinemas can only have been cooked up by the urban, elite few who actually live in what remains of 'thriving' town centres. If I am honest, the 15-minute city in and of itself is not a bad idea. I would love to live in an area where I can reach all the above places, plus a museum and art gallery or two, some nightclubs, a pretty park, a railway interchange, and have local doctors, schools and perhaps even a smallish emergency department - all within 15 to 20 minutes ambling distance. Funnily enough this might even apply to the central part of the three UK pioneer cities, Oxford, Canterbury and Edinburgh. But it does not work for their outlying suburbs (Oxford is not just the dreaming spires beloved of tourists, but has some pretty grim housing estates on the periphery), never mind the post-industrial wastelands like the South Wales conurbations.
What a contrast to the medieval city the modern, sprawling, conglomerate infested city is. That fantasy of the 15 minute city would actually have described the average medieval town perfectly. When the largest cities in Europe (Paris with at most around 100,000 inhabitants in the 14th century before the Black Death hit, London maybe 50,000 tops) were perforce small enough in spatial coverage, you would have easily been able to walk from one end of town to another. Perhaps not in 15 minutes for the largest cities, but certainly within the hour. Medium-sized places, like medieval Bristol (to draw a comparison with the modern resident I quoted above) were definitely walkable in 15 minutes. In that walkable space a time traveller jumping to say, the year 1340 would have found all the range of trades and retailers so beloved of today's middle-class urbanites: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker (of nursery rhyme fame) and then some, everything lovingly hand-crafted, of course, with prices and quality set and controlled by the local guild regulations.
Where the medieval city differs from the 15-minute utopia is that any zoning in the medieval town related to trades, not people (with the notable exceptions of Jews, lepers and prostitutes). So butchers tended to group together, a practice often reflected in modern day street names such as the Shambles (York), while the trade in arable products took place in the Grassmarket (Edinburgh), and so on which survive to this day. But there were no local laws preventing the people from moving between butchers' lanes and hay markets. The Jews, lepers and prostitutes had to live and/or trade in designated 'zones', the ghetto for Jews, special leper hospitals, and certain streets for prostitutes to ply their trade - funnily enough often next to the main thoroughfare of a town, as if to ensure a steady trickle of customers. But even Jews, lepers and prostitutes were free to wander around the medieval town and shop where they liked, without paying an access fine to buy bread outside of their 'designated area'. The medieval town regulated businesses, not movement within the city, in contrast to what appears to be planned for today.
So know your place, modern day lumpenproletariat excuse of a peasant, and stay in your allocated zone. So what if your local resources are pitiful, the school a crumbling pile, the food options revolving around the size rather than the quality (chips with everything), the park a mess of dog fouling and needles. Too bad, so sad. Shouldn't live in this area if you don't like it, nobody's forcing you. After all, it's a free country, isn't it. Isn't it?
Fantastic piece!