Carlos Moreno: ‘I received violent death threats for inventing the 15-minute city’

I am late to meet Carlos Moreno. The traffic was dire – gridlock all through central Paris. Clearly I should have taken the Metro, as Moreno and his assistant had suggested in the first place. When I eventually reach his apartment overlooking the Seine, he grins widely and waves my apologies away.

As the creator of the ‘15-minute city’ plan, Moreno is someone who understands better than most, and is always open to chatting about traffic. But as we settle on velvet sofas in his lounge, he also asks me to give away no specifics about his address. Nor even the name of his wife, who pops in and out. “Because I’ve received a lot of attacks, so it’s better,” he explains.

Until earlier this year, this genial 64-year-old was a relatively obscure urbanist and university professor who lived a quiet life, researching, writing, lecturing and attending conferences. And over the four decades he’s spent working in a specific and generally mundane area of academia, that of town planning and urban models, he’d received precisely as many death threats as you’d expect: none, obviously. 

“All this changed in February,” he says, with a slight laugh. “It has been crazy…”

His concept of the ‘15-minute city’ – a ideal model for urban life that, simply put, suggests it would be good if everybody in cities could live within a quarter of an hour’s walk or cycle of a potential workplace, shops, access to a GP surgery or medical centre, schools and cultural venues, and a public green space. 

This would give people more free time, make them fitter, clean the air and improve local economies, he argued. He had worked on the idea since 2010, then published it in more detail in 2016, earning interest from municipal leaders both in Paris and internationally. 

There were always critics, but earlier this year an odd thing happened, beginning in Oxford, one of the cities inspired by Moreno’s vision. Oxford City Council’s Local Plan 2040 has set out proposals for 15-minute neighbourhoods. But in January and February, when the still-raging row over low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) in Oxford gathered strength, online conspiracy theorists leapt on the 15-minute city concept as a chilling tool of oppression. By suggesting people need more things in their local area, they decided, with impressive illogic, the freedom to be inconvenienced was being removed. This was deemed terrifying.

“The conspiracy-mongers, the alt-right – they mixed with climate change denialists, Covid sceptics, anti-vaxxers… To form a new narrative,” says Moreno. Aspects of the Oxford LTN scheme, such as number plate-reading cameras monitoring traffic, were grasped as proof of nefarious intentions. 

“Creepy local authority bureaucrats would like to see your entire existence boiled down to the duration of a quarter of an hour,” presenter Mark Dolan said on GB News, TikTokkers joined in, leaping around their bedrooms in fear. 

And Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and writer, took on the topic in a viral Twitter thread. “The idea that neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely. The idea that idiot tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fiat??? IS THIS RIGHT?  where you’re ‘allowed’ to drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea,” Peterson, who has lived and worked in Toronto, where the 15-minute city idea was also endorsed, wrote. 

He then insisted that “for those of you willfully blind enough to consider this a ‘conspiracy theory’ think again”, before linking to the website of the C40 network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities, which has collectively endorsed Moreno’s idea. “[Between] Oxford, Toronto and Peterson, there was a movement attacking me. I had this violent attack against the 15-minute city and me and my family.”

Moreno was sent abuse and death threats almost daily for three months. “I was threatened with real violence. It was very scary, but it was always online.” He is, he says, “very private and reserved”, but having grown up in Colombia until he was 20, “it wasn’t the first time being faced with a violent situation”. His wife and two daughters, both in their 20s, however, had not. “The most significant problem was not for me but for them,” he says.

“When I went to Argentina for a conference, I received a lot of very violent death threats, and the local government decided to employ two policemen. [I had] two huge guys with me the whole time. It was very, very hard, psychologically.”

When the threats started, he discussed it with his university colleagues where there wasn’t a clear consensus about the best response. “I am a scientist, not a politician. I didn’t receive training for responding to attacks,” Moreno says. 

“The conspiracists didn’t have arguments, they had profanities and threats. So I talked to the president of the university, and we decided… [that we would do] nothing. I said to my colleagues: ‘If my research work is solid, and has real scientific argument, it isn’t necessary to discuss with conspiracists, because it’s impossible to establish a dialogue’.” 

Since the pandemic, scientists have had to get used to their work being treated with scepticism. “Look at the vaccine, which illustrated the difficulties of positive science in a quick period,” Moreno says. “For many people it wasn’t clear how we could develop a new vaccine in just a few months. This generated suspicion that scientists were trying to control people.

“At the same time, scientists are talking about the climate emergency and measures needed. Conspiracy theorists take these elements – lockdown, global warming, how vaccines could cheaply give everyone a 5G implant […] and think the climate emergency is just a way of controlling people.” The 15-minute city, Moreno thinks, was just next on the list. 

Lockdowns were, in fact, what made his theory so attractive to mayors around the world, a decade after he’d first developed it. “Suddenly proximity became the main point: a lot of people discovered their neighbourhood, discovered how close they are to medical services, commerce, and so on. Covid was the starting point for giving this more visibility.”

Moreno has now discussed his work all over the world – starting with Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris. Other cities with 15-minute city-style visions, plans and programmes include Portland, Barcelona, Madrid, Houston, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Melbourne, Ottawa, Milan, Edinburgh and Seattle.

Yet Moreno’s work is misinterpreted by the wider public and some politicians as being more sinister than simply a new version of an idea mooted in different forms by urbanists for a century: to lower our reliance on individual car journeys by investing in local services.

Rishi Sunak was one such politician. “There is just this relentless attack on motorists and a common misunderstanding from politicians in Westminster about the fact that most people around the country depend on their cars,” Sunak said earlier this month. “They depend on their cars to get to work, take their kids to school, do their shopping, see the doctor.” 

But this is Moreno’s point: they shouldn’t have to depend on cars for those things. “We have lived for a long time – 50 years – with a strong car dependency. More than 50 per cent of individual car journeys in cities are less than 6km. This is totally crazy.”

Moreno has not owned a car for 34 years. “I live in Paris – why would I need a car? I have five different metro stations around me; I have the buses, I have the public bikes.” Other people don’t live in capital cities, of course. Or cities at all. Or even towns. 

But Moreno knows this, and if anything, his point is merely about investment and creativity. Just as he concedes that we will always “need the car, of course, but for a particular moment, a particular activity, not for buying milk”, he is not in favour of blanket LTNs, either. “The question is not to close or not close roads – it’s about where we can find the services to satisfy quality of life.”

For the record, he says, “people have an obsession with the number 15, but we don’t care about 15 or 10 or 18.” He has a secondary concept called the “30-minute territory”, for longer journeys that cannot be taken by foot or bike but rather electric vehicles and public transport. “This is more the concept for towns in the UK. But the number isn’t important; it’s about proximity to the things you need.” 

What Moreno could do with right now is more than another quarter of an hour. A Spanish news team has arrived at his apartment for an interview, before he flies to meetings in Spain, then Colombia but he’s hopeful: at least his ideas are gaining traction. “I am very optimistic for the next 50 years. The 21st century should be the century of humanising cities.” And he won’t be quiet about it. He smiles. “No, no, I will not.”