Suddenly there’s a lot of talk and media coverage around the concept of so-called 15-minute cities.
The idea is that everything you need to live well in an urban setting – healthcare, education, food, employment, cultural life – should be easily reachable within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from any point in a town or city, thereby reducing car dependency.
At face value, the idea seems desirable and has much to commend it. But I can’t help smell a rat, especially following Covid lockdowns and the increasingly “nudgy” and authoritarian-lite sheen to public policies these days. I suspect the great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc would have agreed, given what he had to say about the intractable struggle between Catholicism and socialism.
“The Catholic Church, acutely conscious as she is of the abominations of the modern industrial and capitalistic system…refuses to cure it at the expense of denying a fundamental principle of morality, the principle of private ownership, which applies quite as much to the means of production as to any other class of material objects,” Belloc wrote in his 1908 essay The Church and Socialism.
Currently the “material object” most in the crosshairs that bureaucrats and activists are obsessing over – in terms of reducing your use of it or simply taking it away altogether- is your car.
“The citizenry’s cars are the biggest focus of the authorities’ current efforts,” Alex Klaushofer, a former public policy journalist – and former member of the Left, as she describes it, before being driven away in exasperation – describes in her Substack essay The Great Green Disconnect. “All around there are growing demands for people to stop doing things in the name of environmentalism.”
Klaushofer notes how discussion about and momentum for 15-minute cities has mushroomed since Covid-19 opened the eyes of governing bodies to what they could do, or indeed get away with, in the name of a “crisis”. With the pandemic over, the current crisis shibboleth is achieving Net Zero to “save” the planet. Exponents of liberal modernity appear increasingly set on substituting vibrant human agency with public safety-ism by restricting and reducing what are deemed as bad or unhealthy practises.
Despite huge protests from locals in Oxford, Klaushofer notes, the traffic cameras are already going up as the council implements £6.5 million worth of infrastructure for a trial run to reduce traffic congestion.
“In this curious conflation of local living with experimental traffic schemes, there is no attempt to improve local facilities,” says Klaushofer, questioning how many public libraries, community projects or local food-growing schemes could be funded with £6.5 million. “In fact, it thinly veils a coercive shift which does nothing more than restrict residents’ ability to move around their cities by dint of surveillance, permits and fines.”
The “fundamental thesis of Socialism”, as Belloc highlights, is “that man would be better and happier were the means of production in human society, that is, land and machinery and all transport [my italics], controlled by government rather than by private persons or corporations.”
I’ve experienced transport being excessively controlled by the Taliban, and I can assure you it sucks. Their IED campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand province was so deadly effective that the British Army lost its freedom of movement. Admittedly the use of IEDs is an extreme form of traffic fines—but the principle is the same: someone else interdicting your movement. It changes everything.
Thanks to the vagaries of freelancing, I’ve also experienced various prolonged periods of not owning a car and I can confirm that it is tedious, limiting and exhausting, as you set off, once again, peddling like a maniac to make it on time. Not having a car is even harder if you are coordinating a family (once again, public policy seems set on disincentivising the family unit, while punishing those who have children).
During Covid we had a potent taste of the sort of pod life that E.M. Forster wrote about in his 1909 dystopian novella The Machine Stops. It describes a world inhabited by people living isolated in apartments that are “hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee”. Almost all their physical, emotional and even spiritual needs are catered to inhouse through the authoritarian technocracy that is The Machine. Travel outside requires permission. It’s an incredibly prescient rendering. It even foreshadowed Amazon: Forester’s inhabitants interact from their rooms using “glowing plates” and everything you need can be delivered through a swift “pneumatic post.”
Today we seem to be sliding toward a 15-minute-sized type of pod for our apparent greater good. No thank you. Belloc acknowledges how the impassioned Socialist—like the impassioned city councilor—is often motivated by genuine concern and “comes forward with an obvious and simple remedy” to what is the “monstrous institution of industrial capitalism”.
But so often the solutions never deliver, instead sacrificing on the altar of good intentions—in addition to the millions of lives lost during 20th-century experiments in Socialist utopias—the most important principles and truths that underpin human flourishing.
“The security and sufficiency of the servile class would be the price of their servility, and the sense of freedom, with its incalculable consequences on human character, will, for the bulk of our descendants, have disappeared,” Belloc wrote. “It is a peril inconceivable to either party in the great modern quarrel, but it is close at hand.”
James Jeffrey is a freelance journalist, writer, and Camino guide who splits his time between the U.S., the U.K., the Iberian Peninsula, and further afield. Follow him on Twitter: @jrfjeffrey and at his website: www.jamesjeffreyjournalism.com. For more on the Camino go to www.santiagotrails.co.uk.
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