Brownstone Institute
Are 15-Minute Cities Smart?
From the Brownstone Institute
The 15-minute city (FMC) – a neat idea, a new way to control the populace, a trendy blip in the public planning industry, a long-term insidious scheme – all, some, or none of these?
If you have questions about the concept, here is what you are already being called.
As with the gas stove “debate,” any questioning of the latest coolest way to reorganize society is a sign of madness. This haughty reality-shifting attitude somehow pervades the elites despite the deserved devastation of the public’s trust in its institutions in the wake of the pandemic, the response to which involved lies, half-truths, spin, lies, mistakes, lies, the threat of force, lies, the threat of unemployment, the ordered home confinement, the mass destruction of small businesses, and lies.
All of that should be a bit of a tip-off as to the true intentions of the supporters of the idea, but, that being said, let’s discuss the basics.
The idea essentially is to reinvent the neighborhood idea by trying to ensure that pretty much all of the goods and services a person could ever want are readily available nearby. Jobs, schools, doctors, and cultural activities are also meant to be easily accessible. To get to the “15-minute” part, the area would be (based on typical walking speeds) about a square mile or so.
At its heart, the idea harkens back to the village of yore – a place of belonging, simplicity, of knowing your neighbors, of creating a community you can count on in a pinch.
While this may be a key selling point, it cannot be forgotten that for literally hundreds of years people have been purposefully leaving villages to try their hand in the city with its chaos and opportunity, its risks and rewards, and, most importantly, its broadening experiences.
Cities of course already have neighborhoods that are somewhat similar to FMCs, but they tend to be organized around an activity – a meat-packing district, the financial hub, etc. – an ethnicity – Little Italy, Chinatown (sorry, Seattle, I mean the International District,) a socio-economic cluster – the westside of Los Angeles versus the eastside of Los Angeles, or even an entertainment activity – Broadway in New York or edgy, anything goes red-light districts like the Tenderloin in San Francisco (NOTE – defining what is happening in the Tenderloin now as entertaining is admittedly a stretch, but before the current stumbling nightmare it was for decades a “rough trade” pleasure zone and one supposes that’s a form of entertainment.)
The idea of the FMC, however, is to eventually smooth these differences and create zone after zone of similarly homogeneous neighborhoods throughout a city. As equity is one of the hallmarks of the concept, it might not be terribly fair to have one FMC be notably richer than another, notably different from any of the others.
How to implement an FMC – short of the bulldozer, anyway – is rather complicated because people tend to already be in places targeted for such modification. Zoning, government incentives, planning regulations, public enticements, or simple declarations by fiat have all been proposed to mold existing neighborhoods into FMCs.
In other words, even proponents know that they will not occur organically and need significant government intervention to even get off the ground (another tip-off as to the true intent behind the push.)
One of the most important aspects is the elimination of the necessity of a personal vehicle. If practically everything a person needs is so close – literally within walking distance – and if everything else that doesn’t fit – stadium, airport, university, massive hospital and/or museum, etc. – can be easily traveled to by public transit, then do you need an evil, polluting, selfish mobility device? When FMC ideas are rolled out, they do tend to have rather limited parking options – on purpose – as another “benefit” of them is that they are supposed to be better for the environment, more sustainable, more equitable, more whatever woke/equitarian buzzword of the moment you want to use.
Now on to smart cities.
This is a bit simpler because pretty much everything about FMCs applies except with the added bonus that your neighborhood is watching you at all times. Using cell phone tracking, defined shopping habits, health information from your smartwatch, your social media presence, your credit report, you familial status, your hobbies, your habits, and your opinions, a smart city will figure out everything you need even before you know you need it and encourage you to be an overall better person as it defines better people.
In other words, the definition of a needs-taken-care-of, stay-in-your-house-and-shut-up-or-we-will-take-that-away-from-you Nerfified mere existence. You know, hell with ice water.
Not every FMC is a smart city, but most smart cities must be (or at least start out as) an FMC.
Smart cities are currently so controversial that even Toronto – central driver of the Great Woke North – abandoned the idea .
But the smart city has its supporters and projects are underway building them from the ground up, bypassing the need to shoehorn the debilitatingly intrusive, soul-crushing tech into places that already exist. Here’s a somewhat jaundiced look at the giant mirrored line city Neom – – a bit more, um, hopeful look at other smart city projects underway. (NOTE – I chose videos for those links because they really have to be seen to be believed.)
And one of the advantages – or hallucinatory disturbing problem – of the FMC is that it is extremely convertible – once established – into a smart city.
It should be noted that Vehicle Miles Traveled taxes, low-emission zones, and other anti-individual freedom measures can also be used to set the stage for an incremental move to FMC and/or smart cities. That could be why protests broke out – and why foundations and governments and much of the media is calling the protesters right-wing conspiracy theorists and just plain wrong and that such schemes are not at all part of any attempt to modify personal behavior though oppressive regulation (another tip-off.)
In Oxford, England, protestors were told neighborhood travel cordons had nothing to do with the completely separate, no way at all tied together, FMC studies proposed at the same time; especially post-pandemic, with the lies and cudgels and censorship and confinements and lies – people are rightfully calling “bullshit” on such facile pronouncements, hence the tension.
But how would a big, diverse in the true sense of the word, city like Los Angeles, for example, be FMCed?
Going a step further than Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) – an existing government-funded trend to get people to live near bus lines and train stations – LA activists are pushing things like the VMT pilot program, dropping parking requirements, and incentivizing smaller, presumably rental (you will own nothing and like it) dwelling units to shoehorn the idea into existing neighborhoods.
Here are just a few of the benefits of FMC (lite?) being touted by the Livable Communities Initiative, a near-parody of an LA do-goodery factory:
- Benefit nearby homeowners and residents with a beautiful walkable street, shops and cafes, and access to transit and bike lanes
- Give every Angeleno the option of an affordable home without the $8,000/year cost and burden of a car
- Create attainable homeownership opportunities that can help close the racial wealth gap
- Reverse-engineer displacement by building in high-opportunity neighborhoods that have not built enough housing
- Address climate change by building car-light infill homes, 48 miles of transit-connected bike lanes, new bus lanes, and 48 miles of new tree canopy
“Building equitably and building near job centers reduces traffic,” LCI chief Jenny Hontz told the LAist. “So it makes life better for everyone and it helps the climate, too.” (Here’s the entire story; the comparison pics are worth the click )
In case you were wondering, the LCI partners with a bevy of the progressive foundational/movement suspects, from Extinction Rebellion to 15 Minute City to Young Entertainment Activists (again, another tip-off.)
Neighborhood and even city-specific plans are going to be rolled out by the LCI soon, though they already have “standard plans” that include such statements as “…human-scale, beautiful architecture above neighborhood serving retail. Imagine any of our historic main streets and villages – Westwood Village, Main Street and Abbot Kinney, Market St in Inglewood, NoHo Arts District, San Fernando Blvd in Burbank – with housing above the stores – creating small, affordable apartments for seniors, Gen Zers, people who don’t drive, and workers who are forced to spend 30% of their income on a car.”
LCI – as do basic FMC and smart city ideas – emphasize an imposed aesthetic as well – “But what if instead we could create streets with beautiful architecture – nourishing to the residents and the surrounding area? What if we intentionally designed our city? Cities all over the world pre-determine their architecture – it makes cities beautiful (Paris, Boston, Santa Barbara)”
LCI concepts, smart cities, and FMCs are oppressively top-down systems that shift power of one’s community to the bureaucrat class and intentionally and egregiously ignore same basic facts about how humans act and how a beautiful city like Boston – very very very much not by design – got to be that way.
The FMC movement goes beyond mere planning and architectural niceties. Even if they are not morphed into “smart cities,” certain other governmental agencies and societal elites have multiple reasons. FMCs would make it easier to establish specific community norms, norms that could be at odds with American notions like freedom of movement and speech.
FMCs could also play right into the hands of the forces that brought the world to its knees with their pandemic response. FMCs are not just looked at as making protocols like lockdowns and isolation far easier, they could even be sold as ways to “prevent” future pandemics.
In a 2020 Cell magazine article, Dr. Anthony Fauci – you remember him – cast at least partial blame for the most recent and past pandemics on how we as humans choose to live.
“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues,” Fauci and co-author David Mores wrote. “Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction?”
Another anathema of both smart cities and FMCs is that they need the resident to be the resource that drives them, that their consumer habits be mined and processed in order to make their existence feasible. They do not account for variety of thought or even the possibility of taking advantage of a unique local geographical or industrial or cultural benefit – they are mere consumption machines in which the human is the cog.
While natural neighborhoods can be wonderful supportive safe places, unnatural neighborhoods will exacerbate the problems that do occur in more tightly knit communities. Self-surveillance (if not actual real surveillance) and a sense of trepidation about leaving the comfortable confines can lead to a feeling of isolation from the larger world. In an FMC, that isolation could be seen as being not organic but ordered from on high, creating a mental box that can dwarf intellectual and emotional growth – in other words, a captive personality.
As we have seen from the Twitter Files and so many other recent (and not so recent) revelations about the Censorship-Industrial complex, the real danger of smart cities and FMCs is the potential for the elimination of freedoms, of options, of differences.
That’s not just censorship of thought, it’s censorship of life.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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