Life in a prison without walls

Will you go quietly?

The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Imagine having everything you need, any facility, any business, and service to which you need access, all within a short walking or biking distance. Imagine no longer enduring the blood-pressure raising stress of rush hour, worrying about getting to work on time, or getting stuck in traffic jams. Imagine living in close proximity to tens of thousands of others like yourself, never worrying about safety, and never leaving this shared utopia of convenience. Welcome to the 15-minute prison…errrm…city.

15-minute cities have become a very prominent talking point over the past couple of years. The idea, according to The 15-Minute City Project is as follows:

Everyone living in a city should have ready access to essential urban services. Access — to opportunity, to urban amenities, to variety, and to other people — is why people choose to live in cities. The easiest way to travel within an urban neighborhood is to walk or bike — no parking issues, no waiting for an Uber or Lyft, or a bus or train. We should all be able to access most of the places we need to go within a 15-minute walk or bike.*

Some might think this sounds akin to master-planned communities (MPC) which are essentially residential communities that are self-contained. Stores, schools, businesses, employers, and recreational amenities all exist inside the MPC so that, if a resident so desired, he or she need never travel beyond the bounds of the MPC. MPCs, however, come at a cost. There are usually Home Owners’ Associations who make and enforce rules to help maintain property values. Master-planned communities can be quite sprawling in size and a vehicle other than a bicycle may be needed or preferred for travel to more distant areas within the MPC. Further, some desired amenities, retailers, or other specialty boutiques may not exist within the MPC requiring that a resident travel further to avail themselves of such services, also necessitating a vehicle. But the MPC cost most abhorrent to the architects of the 15-minute city concept is…the cost. Not everyone can afford to live in a master-planned community. Since MPCs tend to be nicer communities, and with so many indulgences readily available, homes tend to be more expensive than areas where these same luxuries may require further travel. The 15-minute city, therefore, is conceived to be the DEI version of the MPC:

Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods need to be the norm, not the exception. They need to be accessible financially, not just physically. To make these places vastly more common, the simple yet powerful 15-minute city concept needs to occupy a central role in our urban discussions. It is the urban planning equivalent of human-centered design: start by looking at where an individual lives and where they need to get to, and figure out how to retool our neighborhoods and cities to get the kind of “hyperproximity” and ease of access that makes urban living great.

Ah, we need to retool in order to make these places “vastly more common” and “accessible financially.” Who is “we”? Who is to fund these projects? But, it must be done for equity.

So, unlike an MPC, the 15-minute city is envisioned as a place where anyone can afford to live, and everyone has access to all the same services, amenities, etc. According to the 15-Minute City Project:

Everyone living in a city should have access to essential urban services within a 15 minute walk or bike. The 15-Minute City Project is designed to help access-focused urban transformations be what we need them to be: ambitious, inclusive, measurable and effectively implemented. (emphasis in original)

The desire is to move everyone into an urban area a la the 15-minute city cogitation:

It is the urban planning equivalent of human-centered design: start by looking at where an individual lives and where they need to get to, and figure out how to retool our neighborhoods and cities to get the kind of “hyperproximity” and ease of access that makes urban living great.

It sounds so idealistic, doesn’t it? So fair, so equitable, so altruistic! Who could deny the beneficence of the four key characteristics:

• Proximity: Things must be close.

• Diversity: Land uses must be mixed to provide a wide variety of urban amenities nearby.

• Density: There must be enough people to support a diversity of businesses in a compact land area. Note that Manhattan-level density is not needed, as many low-rise neighborhoods in San Francisco and other U.S. cities prove.

• Ubiquity: These neighborhoods must be so common that they are available and affordable to anyone who wants to live in one.

Oh yeah, we have all three points of DEI covered! The people will benefit, right? Well, some people definitely will:

Developers are almost universally hyping their adoption of 15-minute city principles in their promotional material. The proposed US$40 billion desert city of Telosa, announced with great fanfare and accompanied by fancy drawings from starchitect firm Bjarke Ingels Group, will use “a new 15-minute city design” and will create “a collective and active transportation system that is more enjoyable, greener and universally accessible.”

Imagine, a $40 billion city. Where does that money come from? Who will reap the return on investment? Oh wait, the transportation is going to be greener! Don’t look behind the curtain - we’re going green, and it will be so diverse, inclusive, and equitable!

I guess they’ll have these cities powered only by solar and wind? I won’t get into the details of why solar and wind are not at all “green” (since I’ve written about it here). I suppose that also means only EVs (more rightly termed BOVs - Battery-Operated Vehicles) will be permitted? But wait…BOVs are expensive - how will everyone afford them? I guess you won’t need to have one in the 15-minute city. Everything is within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.

Ok, I’ve said a lot, but what about this “prison without walls”? Well, let’s see how this fantasy fares with regard to the concept as it is being promoted when it collides with the brick wall of reality. First, can everything you want or need really be provided within a 15-minute walk or bike ride? Average adult walking speed is approximately 3-4 mph, so in 15 minutes on foot, the average adult traverses a mile. Assuming a relatively healthy adult could sustain a speed of approximately 12-15 mph on a bicycle, perhaps 3 to 4 miles could be traversed in the same span. This means, assuming an adult starts in the center of the city, a diameter of no more than 6 to 8 miles. It seems doubtful that most people will be content only with what can be contained within a 15-minute radius. Even if every conceivable comfort was attainable in that walking radius, how can residents be guaranteed access to all of them? Is there a pledged minimum income for all who reside in these mini metropolises that would assure anyone admittance to any accoutrement available?

What about people who can’t walk or ride a bike? Are they restricted to the allegedly green and “universally accessible” public transportation? Perhaps they’ll be allowed to buy BOVs? Speaking of BOVs, even now, many cities suffer rolling blackouts during times of high electric usage. Some people learned not long ago, much to their dismay, that their thermostats could be adjusted remotely by the power company. What happens when you add all those vehicles to the grid? Will they ration electricity to ensure everyone gets their fair share? Perhaps the cities will have access to the onboard computers to make sure they only get their allotted charge? After all, messages can already be sent through the electronics in BOVs, as one California man begrudgingly learned when he got into his Tesla in 2022. If they can already send messages warning users about charging, could they not also control the ability to charge? I’d bet on it. And if they control the charge, they control how far you travel. Want to visit family in another city? How are you going to get there? Are you beginning to get the picture?

Here’s the kicker on vehicle use - 15-minute cities have another aspiration called “Vision Zero.” Vision Zero “is a commitment and an approach to eliminating traffic deaths and severe injuries.” I can tell you one way to eliminate traffic deaths and severe injuries, one they probably have on their radar already - eliminate traffic. How do you eliminate traffic? Eliminate private transportation. Thus, a prison without walls. No way to travel beyond the bounds of the city, at least, not efficiently, and not easily for any great distance. Do you see where this is going (or, perhaps more accurately, not going)?

Since these cities are fully self-contained, where do agricultural products come from? Meat? Dairy? Grain? Fruits and vegetables? Will all the meat and “dairy” (or non-dairy) be lab-created substitutes? Beyond beef and bug burgers have both seen such stellar success after all. Even if so, from where would the basic components for those science experiments come? Will all of these be sourced from outside the 15-minute cities? If from outside, where will the people live who produce these consumables? Are they not worthy of living the life of 15-minute convenience? Or perhaps they will be shuttled to and from the “farms” on which they’ll (willingly?) work. For that matter, what about manufacturing? Where will manufactured goods be…well…manufactured? And again, will all of these items be imported from outside the convenience of the 15-minute cities? By whom will they be made? From where will they be imported? And like the farm workers, how will they arrive at their employment and return home? Do they not deserve the advantage of the 15-minute city? What about the solar and wind farms? Where will they be installed? Who will work on them? There is only so much that can be shoehorned into 50 square miles (approximated based on a circle with a 4-mile radius**). Is this simply oversight in the objective of the overlords? Or is this by design?

I admit, much of this sounds like conspiracy theory. After all, this is a novel idea that, on its surface, has a genuinely compassionate and magnanimous aim of meeting all the goals SJWs embrace. This is DEI in action. Maybe that thrills you; it concerns me. Sorry if I’m too jaded by the rest of what I see going on in society to believe there is any actual humanitarian, rather than totalitarian, impetus behind this. These cities will be, at least at the outset, prisons without walls; walls may come once the cities are sufficiently populated. Will you let yourself be quietly corralled into these cleverly crafted cattle cars? Is it your desire to move to such a Marxist microcosm? With some other aspects of society that can help move that direction (about which I plan to write in my next article), I see 15-minute cities only as an authoritarian’s autoerotic dream.

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*Unless stated otherwise, all quotes regarding 15-minute cities come from The 15-Minute City Project website.

**Just for comparison purposes with an actual city, Manhattan (NYC) is incredibly dense with housing and business. The island occupies only 22.83 square miles, but no one is walking or biking the length of it in 15 minutes. Despite the residency, however, many, if not most, who work in Manhattan commute by train from other boroughs or cities, some enduring travel times in excess of an hour one way. This is because living in Manhattan is quite costly. It would be difficult for a server in a restaurant or any unskilled workers to afford housing in this small city. They certainly cannot afford to avail themselves of many of the services and amenities available. Most food and other products consumed in Manhattan are sourced from outside Manhattan. According the the City University of New York website, there are 24 power plants that generate “up to 9600MW of power, which is more than 80 percent of New York City's peak demand.” So, 9600MW is not 100% of the power consumed in Manhattan. It takes on average 4 acres/.006 sq. mi. (low-end estimate with ideal conditions) of solar farm to produce 1MW of power. It would take almost 50 square miles to produce 9600MW of power - that is more than twice the land area of Manhattan itself. Even if the density of Manhattan was reduced by half, and the power requirements, 4800MW of power would still require a solar farm that would cover the entire island.