Conspiracy theories about the '15-minute city' - a trendy but bland urban planning concept - have snowballed in recent weeks, including in Ireland. It has become an unlikely flashpoint in a global culture war.
ALMOST TWO MONTHS before bemused observations accompanied dire warnings about the ’15-minute city’ on social media, Gemma O’Doherty was among the few people in Ireland who openly railed against the concept.
But despite claims by these groups to the contrary, the ’15-minute city’ concept is neither Marxist in origin nor a form of totalitarian control. “This is really about enhancing people’s quality of life,” explains Niamh Moore-Cherry, a Professor of Urban Governance and Development at the School of Geography in UCD.
Covid pandemic The concept of the 15-minute city is attributed to the Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno, who is said to have developed the idea in 2015 and then coined the term ’15-minute city’ the following year. “It means that if you don’t want to have long commutes away from your family or where you live to do things you need, you can do it in your local area,” Green Party councillor Michael Pidgeon says.
Believers in that conspiracy claim that governments will use climate change as a front to prohibit people from using cars, eating meat, or traveling a certain distance outside their area. “The people of Ireland, especially Dublin, need to get onto the streets and protest against the 15 minute city farce, they want to restrict freedom of movement,” another Twitter user wrote.
Last month, a critical leaflet campaign by a group called Not Our Future claimed that people in the city were “guinea pigs” and that councillors had been “duped” into bringing in the proposal. One Telegram channel this week claimed that Ireland is “getting ready to launch 15-minute zones’, while several channels shared videos of protests in Oxford last week celebrating demonstrators for rallying against ‘restrictions’ on freedom of movement.
Conspiracy theories about this concept claim, among other things, that world governments have linked up with Big Tech firms including Google and Microsoft to introduce mass surveillance via facial recognition and microchips in Covid-19 vaccines. Misinformation reached such levels before Christmas that Oxfordshire County Council and Oxford City Council were forced to issue a joint statement denying that residents would be confined to their own 15-minute areas.
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