No, Oxford Isn’t Building “Stalinist” 15-Minute Cities
15-minute cities do not imprison residents - but the misinformation around them has led to actual death threats.
As you can see imagine, when I saw this headline I had no choice but to get stuck in!
We’ll return to the reporting in a bit, but let’s start with an explainer.
What is a 15-minute City?
The phrase was coined by the urban planner Carlos Moreno, a professor at Sorbonne University, in 2016. But the idea is as old as civilisation itself. It essentially means that everyone lives within a 15-minute walk, bike, or public transportation ride from all the essential services they need, such as schools, healthcare, shops, entertainment and places of worship. It’s how towns and cities were created before the invention of the car.
Cars meant we moved away from the idea of living, working, and enjoying yourself within a local area, towards splitting places up so people lived in one area, worked somewhere else, and visited out-of-town shopping centres and entertainment hubs elsewhere. The assumption was that everyone had cars and wanted to use them for most journeys.
In his Ted Talk, Moreno explained:
The 15-minute city is an attempt to reconcile the city with the humans that live in it.
The 15-minute city should have three key features:
First, the rhythm of the city should follow humans, not cars.
Second, each square meter should serve many different purposes.
Finally, neighbourhoods should be designed so that we can live, work and thrive in them without having to constantly commute elsewhere.
Paris has pioneered this concept under Mayor Anne Hidalgo, decentralising services, reducing car lanes in favour of bike lanes, and even turning schools into neighbourhood centres in the evenings. Other cities globally, from Edmonton and Shanghai to Barcelona and Utrecht, have also embraced these initiatives to build climate resilience and reduce the need for hour-long commutes.
And in the UK, our very own Milton Keynes was built in the 1960s on these same principles (of each local area being a self-contained community), as covered by the Times in 2023:
They would move to smaller, carefully designed neighbourhoods, each a short walk from a pub, a school, a church and shops. These days, some fret about the imposition of 15-minute cities. This was to be a five-minute city.
So, what’s all the fuss about?
It all centres around the city of Oxford, where two different initiatives have become conflated, first online and then in the mainstream media.
Traffic Filters
In 2015, an idea was introduced to try to tackle the congestion found in central Oxford. They proposed that traffic could be limited on several key roads at certain times of day, freeing those roads up for essential users, public transport and cyclists. All other roads are still drivable, and everywhere is still accessible by car, but sometimes a different route would be required.
In 2022, Oxfordshire County Council approved a trial of these six “traffic filters” to be enforced by number plate recognition cameras. That means six roads will be restricted to most personal cars at certain times of day or days of the week, as shown on this map:
During restricted times, only certain vehicles will be allowed on those roads:
Buses, coaches and minibuses
Vans, light commercial vehicles and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs)
Mopeds and motorbikes
Emergency vehicles
Blue badge holders and disability benefit recipients
Parents taking a child with Special Educational Needs to school
Care workers, including unpaid carers who are looking after someone regularly
Frequent hospital visitors
Registered car share scheme vehicles
And a few more exceptions, which you can look up here if needed
Residents of Oxford will get 100 passes per year (For up to 3 cars registered to 3 different people per household), meaning they can use all of the roads as many times as they want on the day they use their pass. Oxfordshire residents in the surrounding area will get 25 passes.
As you can see from the map, there are many other roads available, and everywhere is still accessible by car.
So yes, it may well be a bit inconvenient for some people, and they may need to take different routes to where they want to go, but if you’ve ever sat in Oxford City centre traffic going nowhere, then you can appreciate why something needs to change.
15-minute neighbourhoods
At a similar time to Oxfordshire County Council announcing these six traffic filters, Oxford City Council proposed 15-minute neighbourhoods as part of its Local Plan 2040 to ensure residents could access essential services within a short walk of their homes.
And boom! You have the perfect setup for conspiracy theorists to falsely link the traffic filter trial to the 15-minute city concept, claiming the filters were part of a “sinister plot” to confine people to their local areas.
Both Councils put out a joint statement debunking the claims in 2022.
The conspiracy theory
This became the “climate lockdown” theory, which baselessly suggested that residents would be “imprisoned” in their neighbourhoods or required to stay home to protect the environment. This was fueled by anti-lockdown activism during the COVID-19 pandemic and involved many of the same people.
