Holly Rae Research

Written March 29-April 1 2023

Controversy about 15 minute cities has been flooding the internet in the past few months. Some say the implementation of these city policies is harmful, and others are in full support and are labeling those hesitant to embrace the city planning as “freak” conspiracy theorists. While some are claiming that the 15 minute city will bring a climate friendly utopia, while others think it will bring on authoritarian dystopia. The reality of what the 15 minute city is and what it means for regular people has more nuance than these two extremes. Recently in Oxford, UK, citizens have been protesting the new traffic rules that have been implemented by their city council. These rules are said by some to section off the city into 15 minute zones that citizens now need a permit to travel through and can be fined for leaving more than 100 days of the year. Oddly enough, this restriction of travel is contrary to the general purpose of the 15 minute city urban planning concept, which seeks to help people get to their regular destinations more easily. Which leads one to find that the traffic ordinances in Oxford are not about creating walkable 15 minute cities, but something else. The popular media, in typical fashion, has rushed to assure everyone that the 15 minute cities in Oxford are good and will help people and that everyone that opposes such State interference is a crazy conspiracy theorist. This article will cover this controversy and attempt to find some common ground to better our understandings of how the term “15 minute city” has become such a controversial term and what we can do to more accurately express our concerns and opposition.

Before we begin disentangling the controversy, “conspiracy theories,” and misunderstandings about the 15 minute city, its implementation, and where the idea is headed, we need to agree on what a 15 minute city is and what it isn’t. Also, we need to be specific about who is implementing these cities where, because not all implementations of these ideas are the same. In recent years, I have seen many fearmongering videos and articles about how the 15 minute city and smart cities is a World Economic Forum (hereby referred to as WEF) Great Reset plot that is designed as a draconian measure to control people. But these arguments and alarms, even though containing valid warnings about how this concept can be used for oppressive purposes, usually lack credibility in that they conflate the concept of the 15 minute city as an innocuous human centered urban planning tool with the State’s idea of implanting 15 minute cities that section citizens off into dedicated zones that they need permission to leave as they please.

I cannot overstate how important it is to pay attention to who is demanding and developing 15 minute cities and traffic ordinances. I also cannot overstate how important it is so distinguish between:

• A 15 minute city or walkable city in concept enacted by citizens and free enterprise
• C40, WEF, and UN backed city planning that restrict movement and implement rules in regards to travel from one sector to another. For the sake of clarity, I will refer to these as Government mandated 15 minute cities.  

The 15 Minute City in Concept

As I will explain below, the 15 minute city planning concept when enacted by citizens on their own free will using private enterprise can be a positive change. But the same term-15 minute city—is also being used to describe rules and regulations that limit travel, as a Trojan horse to introduce these authoritarian climate change policies under a thin veil of cover. Those of us who are against government mandated 15 minute cities tend to appear to be criticizing the 15 minute concept in general. When we make these mistakes in clarification, we give mainstream journalists and other proponents of State mandated city planning room to dismiss all of our concerns as “conspiracy theory” and assume that we are incompetent for not wanting walkable cities. So let’s clarify what’s going on and why government mandated cities are not the same thing as 15 minute city planning and why citizens in Oxford have protested their council’s introduction of traffic control rules

While the 15 minute city, car-less neighborhoods, and other human-centered urban spaces are favored and implemented by World Economic Forum programs and C40, the concept was not invented recently. The 15 minute planning concept is favored by city planners and regular activists all around the world, with many proponents having what, in my judgment, are innocuous or even helpful intentions. For example, in California Dan Luscher is a people-centered and planned city where citizens can meet all of their basic needs such as healthcare and sustenance within a 15 minute walk or bike ride. In many urban spaces in the United States, vehicle ownership is required to travel where one needs to go, but traffic gridlock and lack of access to goods and services can make it difficult for one to run for groceries, healthcare, and recreation without long car drives. Luscher states his philosophy as the following:

“Walkable and bikeable neighborhoods need to be the norm, not the exception. They need to be accessible financially, not just physically. To make these places vastly more common, the simple yet powerful 15-minute city concept needs to occupy a central role in our urban discussions. It is the urban planning equivalent of human centered design: start by looking at where an individual lives and where they need to get to, and figure out how to retool our neighborhoods and cities to get the kind of “hyperproximity” and ease of access that makes urban living great.”

Notice that this statement does not focus on taking mobility away and fining people for travelling to far, but improving the proximity between people and what they need in a city—where unwalkable overpasses and highways are the norm. Many cities have food desert neighborhoods or villages nested in between industrial areas with little access to goods on foot. So focusing on how to plan cities around humans and not just vehicles is a justifiable mission. This is about adding to city life as opposed to controlling it or trying to take mobility away.

In “The 15 Minute City As A Marketing Slogan,” Luscher explains his idea of the 15 minute city further:

“Because ultimately, the 15-minute city is not an updated instruction manual for top-down centralized planning, but rather a vision for creating an environment that empowers many thousands of city dwellers to remake their cities.”

In other words, proponents of the 15 minute city outside of authoritarian structures—in other words, regular people wanting to see their cities become more equitable—are not concerned with telling people what they can and cannot do or implementing restrictions about travel, but inciting citizens and private infrastructure companies to be more mindful about making sure cities contain more equitable access to the things the people decide they want access to. For this to work, citizens themselves need to be driving the changes in their cities, not (ever!) government bodies coming in and deciding on a list of rules and ordinances that people must follow. For some, changing the city in ways they want may include asking the State to help in these initiatives, but this is where we run into trouble, as I will explain below. But for Luscher and many other well-intended citizens, the 15 minute city is a project of the people. It is a matter of deciding to improve their cities where they see fit and not centralized, mandated, and controlled city planning that aims to reduce the amount of choices people can make, but to give them more options by focusing on ease of access and reducing in travel time and expenses for citizens.

To put it more simply, there is a huge difference between a vision for a better city and governments forcing actual policies and rules onto their citizens that limit their mobility.

If you think about the concept of the 15 minute city, it may occur to you that nearly every city before the industrial revolution and the mass production of motor vehicles generally fit this description. Before personal vehicles became the norm in the Unites States, for example, settler cities consisted of rows of buildings, often connected to each other, which would have within short walking distance the sheriff’s station, bars, hotels, restaurants, food stores, hardware stores, the bank, the school, and some homes and apartments. This is the classic Western town, and most of these city centers still exist with narrow retrofitted roads for cars to travel through these spaces. But these spaces were once populated with pedestrians, horse and buggy, and bikes. You may still be able to spot places in “old town” areas of your city where there are only pedestrian and bike paths where roads were not squeezed in. People who lived in the country have depended on horses, bikes, cars, and their own two feet for travel to their city, but for most urban dwellers throughout history, all you need for your day-to-day just a few blocks away. 

The premise of the 15 minute walkable city relies on defining what people need and should have access to. If taken at face value, the proposal for walkable urban spaces that do not require transportation via motor vehicles to meet one’s basic needs is an obviously good idea to most people. Being able to walk to grocery stores, medical centers, get more exercise, and to not have to rely on expensive car ownership (which is easier to tax and regulate) can be good things for many people, and can have decentralizing qualities. This is the idea that is being championed by governments and is being defended by people who agree that these cities should be more commonplace.

But, what I have described above is NOT what has been implemented in Oxford and not the same thing as local governments and global policy-making bodies attempting to cut off traffic through certain areas and moving toward what some call “climate lockdown.”  

The devil is in the details and the distinctions. The word “15 minute city” has become so loaded that most don’t recognize that the State and Palpatine wannabees of the world are using that term to normalize far less appealing and borderline dangerous policies. Some walkable 15 minute cities already exist on blueprints of ancient and historic cities, and some have been implemented by local governments and grassroots movements via retrofit, but these did not cause global uproar because there was not a component of the 15 minute city that restricted the movement of people.

The difference between the 15 minute cities and government mandated 15 minute cities:

What is causing uproar in conflict is what always causes conflict and “conspiracy theories:” when an innocuous idea gets picked up by governments and global policymakers and turned into a means to regulate the movement and choices of citizens.

C40, WEF, and the UN are all groups that have begun entertaining the “15 minute city,” in their terms, as a means to control the climate by limiting vehicle emissions by private citizens going about their business.

A Short Note on the WEF and UN

At this point, to be more thorough, I would like to explain, for those unfamiliar or have never been provided solid reasons why the WEF, the UN are organizations that, while maintaining the appearance of a benevolent global governing body stepping in to do the work that federal governments won’t or can’t, tell their true intentions through their plans. For the sake of brevity, since this article is already twice as long as I originally intended, I will summarize my thoughts on the WEF and their intentions here.

 The WEF tends to focus heavily on taxes, restrictions, implanting rules, and selling these rules as solutions to climate change poverty, or global health issues. But these are their solutions to problems as they see them, and the individuals that comprise the WEF and UN are not regular citizens who would actually be impacted by the types of rules they are currently looking to implement and have already implemented. The best example of the WEF demonstrating how they see world populations as things to be managed and ruled can be found in COVID-19, The Great Reset. Without a critical eye for the intentions of the authors, one may read this and see that the WEF wants to improve global health and restructure the economy, using the turmoil of the pandemic as a jump start to change things for the better. But the WEF usage of vague terms such as “global health,” “solving world poverty” and the like makes it easy to latch on to these beneficial sounding ideas without looking to how they define these issues and what their proposed solutions are. Most often, their solutions come in the form of technologies and city grids that make it easier to keep track of people, eliminating private car ownership, increased global governance, and other policies and rules that critical readers argue are not for the benefit of the people and their individual needs, but for the benefit of those who want control and power over the behavior of populations. If this sounds farfetched, you can look into what the WEF themselves say about what they want the world to look like by 2040 (with the help of C40 cities!) This includes buzzwords you may have heard before such as the social credit system and carbon tax. The WEF’s approach to global governance is to shame and fine people out of using cars and travelling freely, to the “conspiracy theorists,” seems like just a piece of the puzzle that the WEF is trying to put together to manage populations. We may call it “controlling people,” but their phrasing usually moseys around with terms like “global policy,” “global governance,” and “managing populations.”

The WEF and UN both have backed the authoritarian version of the “15 minute city” that is sold as a means to make the world more green and reduce emissions from private vehicles. This has birthed the C40 initiative, which wants to see all of the world’s cities turned into their iteration of the 15 minute city in 20 years.

This influence has made its way to Oxford, UK, and the city council decided, despite massive uproar from their citizens, to follow through with new city ordinances which, despite “fact-checkers” saying this is not true—placing barriers around travel on certain roads, with each private citizen being granted 100 days to travel on those roads without getting fined. Downtown Oxford has a serious traffic gridlock problem and many citizens don’t want to drive these and would be prefer to be able to walk, so many have welcomed the banning of driving on certain roads at certain times or too often. But the focus, again, is on taking away as opposed to adding. There is plenty of “out with the old, in with the new” rhetoric without explaining, in depth, how these initiatives will actually help the citizens impacted. The WEF, UN, and C40 city initiatives focus more on controlling the usage of vehicles and the movement of people more than retrofitting cities to be more walkable and to have fresh groceries available on every block. Yet governments, including the Oxford city council, will conjure the term “15 minute city,” explain all of the benefits of the concept, and then, in reality, roll out traffic rules without following through on the actual benefits of 15 minute city planning. They get away with this because of the rhetorical trick: they call it a 15 minute city and describe it innocuously, and then implement rules their citizens hate and attempt to gaslight them into believing that the council has their best interest in mind.

The 15 minute city policy rollout is a part of Oxford City Council’s “Plan 2040” which explains all of their goals for their city in the next 20 years. For the sake of brevity, since, again, this article is getting long already, I will summarize how the council describes this city plan from their own Plan 2040 document.

A blurb on page 1 states:

“Oxford City Council is producing a new Local Plan which will shape how the city develops. The Local Plan 2040 places a strong emphasis upon the concept of the 15 -minute city whereby our city is planned in such a way as to optimise the opportunity for people to be able to reach a wide range of facilities that they need to live well and healthily within a 15 -minute walk of their home. This provides the opportunity to build strong local communities that enable residents to thrive. The Plan seeks to accelerate the move to net zero buildings and introduces measures such as an Urban Greening Factor to ensure the city is ready to adapt to the impacts of climate change. The delivery of new homes continues to be a priority for this plan, whilst ensuring that we deliver and support mixed and inclusive economic development across the city. The Local Plan 2040, once adopted, will be used in determining planning applications for a wide range of development. We want to ensure that Oxford continues to be a successful attractive city where people enjoy living, working and visiting.”

On page 17, the council vaguely explains plans to strengthen their community, make it easier for citizens to access facilities and improve their transportation network. Just as I described with the WEF plans and procedures, they use vague benevolent terms to describe their plans but do not give the public and in-depth description of what this actually entails. As you can see with the excerpt above, the image of the 15 minute city as described above is used to sell the idea.

So if this is what Oxford described as their mission, what kind of changes have they made in the past couple years? On November 2022, the city rolled out new traffic rules in the name of lowering jams and inciting citizens to walk their cities. According to Miranda Norris of the Oxford Mail, “People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week.” She also relays the story of a business owner whose foot traffic to his store has diminished since the rules have been put in place, citing the city’s road management as the cause. According to James Woudhuysen of Spiked, “Under the new proposals, if any of Oxford’s 150,000 residents drives outside of their designated district more than 100 days a year, he or she could be fined £70 [or 86 US dollars]…“Foremost in its ‘vision and strategy’ is not residents, but the environment.” Some streets now have physical blockades to prevent motorists from passing through certain sections of the city. Oxford city council said that its aim for 2040 was to make public transit stronger and to help people get where they need to go while mitigating traffic, but there rules without implementing beneficial infrastructure seems dishonest on its face. Thousands in the UK, Oxford, and beyond have protested these new mandates in the streets, and even Oxford council members have voiced their disagreement with the traffic rules, according to an interview done by Bridget Ryder of The European Conservative.  While citizens can still drive alone ring roads to get to their destination without using up one of their 100 days of travel on certain roads, many have explained how these rules make what used to be 15 minute car trips take 45 minutes or longer. Many have wondered why the council have not instead elected to retrofit current roads to be more walkable and retrofit current popular pathways to accommodate more pedestrians as opposed to making more regulations around cars. The agenda seems to be more about phasing out the free travel of cars and less about the goals stated in the document I cited.

Niamh Harris of News Punch cites an interview moment with a protester, who said:

“We’re obviously in opposition to this rollout of 15-minute cities and the implications of what that means when you are effectively locking people into zones in their own hometowns. It’s made to sound like this wonderful idea because it would be fantastic if we have all these nice little community hubs with amenities within close reach, but the actual reality of what this means is that you are being tracked and traced within your own town. You’re looking at having to have permits to leave the zone that you find yourself in.”

At best, the city council’s new traffic laws in an effort to get closer to a 15 minute city as per their 2040 plan are dishonest. At worst, these new ordinances are a deliberate attempt at moving closer to the global policy the WEF and the UN are looking to implement: easier tracking of individuals and creating more legitimized cause to check identification, track and tax carbon emissions, and check for “public health” cooperation. I would be worried that I am making a slippery slope assumption by saying these things, but we have already seen with our own eyes how quickly vaccine checkpoints and mask mandates became mainstream in most of the developed world. Putting up city checkpoints that you cannot travel by vehicle open a precedent and get citizens accommodated to having more rules regarding their vehicle travel. While I am not assuming that stricter and stricter rules for travel are coming to Oxford, there has been a precedent set up by the Coronavirus crisis in terms of how many rules governing bodies should be able to make about personal decisions. The precedent has already been set for being denied entrance to a building during the pandemic under alarmist rules about travel, so it is not farfetched that wannabe tyrants in world government organizations may want to use the premise of the 15 minute city to roll out traffic rules and punitive means of controlling motor vehicle movement to keep tabs on the public and to make sure that people fall in line with their notions of carbon zero, public health, and so on.

But that’s all just crazy right wing conspiracy, right? Of course, mainstream journalism and regular people will always appear right on schedule to belittle every person who questions the true intentions of government mandated “green cities,” “15 minute cities,” or whatever spin they have put on their dream of cities where everyone is tracked more and more as with biometric ID in India and Coronavirus status in China. At this point in zeitgeist of the Western developed world, any questions or opposition to government interference is labelled as “far right tiny brain tinfoil hat wearing nonsense” while making no efforts to engage with the actual concerns of protesters and dissenters. 

Here’s just one example of how mainstream journalism treats the controversy around this topic. This example is written in a particularly juvenile tone, which can be expected from writers as soon as they get a hold of anything controversial:   

Bloomberg’s article “CityLab Daily: Inside Oxford’s 15-Minute City Conspiracy” by Sri Taylor mocks Oxford citizens and those concerned about them by labeling dissenters as conspiracy theorists and labeling a warranted protest as a “freakout.” She writes that “In the UK city of Oxford, a plan to limit driving at peak hours in residential areas — and use automatic license plate readers to fine violators — has spurred a bizarre conspiracy theory among the far-right.” This statement 1) leaves out several important factors of the traffic control in Oxford and 2) incorrectly labels any dissenters as “far-right.” What she leaves out are the actual implementations of the so-called “15 minute cities” in Oxford, which does create road barriers that motorists have limited travel between. So there is a bit of sectioning off of the city, as it were. These are the verifiable things that are happening, whether Oxford residents enjoy it or not. Which is why it is insulting that Sri Taylor, in a flippant dismissal of the criticisms, writes “Many Oxford protesters fixate on the notion that authorities intend to break cities up into small, fenced-off zones within which citizens will be confined by physical barriers, facial recognition tech, or other means. These grimly totalitarian scenarios do indeed sound alarming, but they have nothing to do with the reality of 15-minute-city-style urban thinking.”

In the meantime, the city is being pushed in that direction. There are physical barriers that require permit to entry, which does not involve facial recognition technology, but who is to say that may not be added to help enforce compliance with the rules? License plate scanners are not much different in terms of identifying people who may be noncompliant to the city’s wishes. Such scanners are already commonplace in many urban cities, so why is it so farfetched that facial recognition may also be used to implement the rules in Oxford? In the actual plan that Oxford has rolled out, there are clear monetary punishments for travelling on certain roads too often, confining some to their neighborhoods unless getting permission to leave for their 100 days. So, yes, there is an attempt to confine being in a physical space. Either Taylor is lying, hasn’t looked into the issue at all and was just tasked with slapping “conspiracy theory” on the story, or is taking advantage of the fact that everyone seems to be confused about what is actually happening in Oxford.  Even just a mind-numbing adventure into Reddit will show you that even the citizens who live there disagree about what the rules mean and how they impact them.

Taylor goes on to say that “The term [15 minute city] doesn’t describe a discrete area with barriers — it’s a planning approach that tries to ensure that schools, health-care facilities, parks and other amenities are spread equitably across neighborhoods, limiting the need for lengthy commutes and expanding job access.”

Right. Exactly.

No one is really saying, even if they are conflating terms, that making cities more well-planned around humans is a totalitarian nightmare. What is a totalitarian nightmare with serious implications for the future freedoms of people living in cities such as Oxford are being told that you should not be commuting as you see fit and being punished for travelling certain routes more than two days per week. What is happening here is the city council’s idea of city management, not the grassroots benevolent city planning that helps more people have more access to goods and services. This is, on its face, a means of telling citizens what they can and cannot do and influencing what they think they should or should not do. The concept of the 15 minute city is supposed to be for the people, by the people. But the people have protested vehemently against this and been called “freak” conspiracy theories by journalists across the globe for not accepting decisions their government has made for them. I would like to see journalists such as Sri Taylor, on her high horse, engage with what “conspiracy theorists” are actually saying. But you would be hard pressed to find a mainstream journalist who is willing to pay genuine credence to dissenting opinions. It also may surprise no one that Michael Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg press, hosted the second C20 summit to implement global climate policies according to James Woudhuysen. So publications belittling people who are against global governance in the name of climate would be consistent with the affiliations of the owner and help influence regular people to support these policies. Articles that use language like “freakout” and “conspiracy theory” and “tinfoil-hat-ism” also make many too timid to express their true thoughts, opinions, or questions in fear of being belittled by the cultural hegemony that popular journalism creates.

As I said earlier, people are against the actual physical and monetary barriers that are being constructed in the name of the “15 minute city,” which is really something else being called a “15 minute city.” She “wins” her argument with an appeal to definition. Her definition of a 15 minute city is the benign city planning ideology that revolves around humans as opposed to motor vehicles. So that must mean that everyone who has a problem with the State closing down roads and forcing you to ask permission to use them without getting fined is okay, right? This is why the appeal to definition fallacy can become a straw man—she only needs to “win” the “fact-check” by clarifying that what is happening in Oxford is not consistent with a 15 minute city. But the critics of the city’s decisions are talking about the distinct issue I described above.  What the author ends up defending is something else entirely—something much more controlling disguised as a benign city plan to help reduce traffic. And in the process she insults the intelligence of every person who has the sense to see something wrong with limiting the autonomy and mobility of people by fining them for travelling too far from their homes and tracking how often they leave. But such articles are common and popular, all banking on the fact that us critics are not being specific in enough in our definition of what is really happening here. Nowhere in the original 15 minute walkable city blueprint was there control and boundaries as to where you should or should not drive. But mainstream journalism and their friends in the State have mastered the manipulative word salad rhetorical shtick that is nauseating to even read.

The flippant dismissal of any criticisms of the “green cities” and C40 cities implemented by government as a “far right conspiracy theory” is a lazy way for mainstream journalists and “fact checkers” to shut down valid criticisms without actually having to engage with the real argument people are making and what the “conspiracy theory” actually is.

But more people will read this Bloomberg article than anything nuanced and thorough thing I will ever write. And for people just perusing the internet, seeing something branded as a “far right conspiracy” simplifies the matter into something you want to stay away from if you are on the left or someone who doesn’t like being mocked for questioning things governments do.

In a world where the WEF and the UN want to initiate a carbon emission tax on private citizens (click here too) and give everyone a social credit score, these kinds of moves by the State need to be scrutinized carefully and not dismissed. And in a world where one’s willingness to adhere to what the State deems “good behavior” is equated to one’s perceived worth to society, watching governments give citizens more and more punitive rules to adhere to creates social conflict and tension.

All that “fact checkers” and the “official” sources need to do to dismiss real concerns about real people being forced into living conditions they didn’t consent to and what that can mean for the future of global cities as a wild conspiracy theory is to use appeal to definition or a straw man fallacy and say “that’s not what 15 minute cites are about.” And they would be right. In other words, if mainstream news sources can distort the claims of dissenters, then attack the distorted claim, they can create the illusion that they have actually engaged with and “defeated” the original claim. The concept of a 15 minute walkable city does not inherently involve the State coming in and making physical boundaries that people are incentivized not to leave or punished for leaving too often. The concept of a 15 minute walkable city does not involve the State going over the heads of their citizens to deciding for them what they need and where they should get it and where they are allowed to go. That is the C40 city being endorsed by the WEF and other climate control policymakers and politicians getting a free pass as benevolent heroes by the vast majority of the public in a rhetorical game of definitions.

So…

Whether or not the 15 minute city is a good thing or a bad thing comes down to who is planning it and who is implementing the changes. Distinguishing between genuine efforts by regular citizens trying to better their urban lives and government mandated 15 minute cities is crucial. It is inherent to the ideas that there should be no force applied to citizens to stay confined to just a 15 minute space or to ban cars or discourage car usage per say. The stated goal of Lucher and other progressive individuals is not to force citizens to do things or to limit their freedoms, but to give every citizen the option of walking wherever they need to go. But there are plenty of people out there, such as those who run the WEF and certain federal and local governments, who benefit from the public becoming comfortable with this idea so that they can implement these spaces on their own terms under the guise of the very sensible and amicable 15 minute city idea.

The downside of us skeptics throwing out the baby with the bathwater in terms of the 15 minute city idea and giving in to the fearmongering about a walkable city in general is dismissing what could otherwise be a helpful framework we can use to think about our urban and suburban living spaces. We cannot dismiss the benefits that a grassroots for the people, by the people approach to this type of city planning would be:

Less dependence on motor vehicles (which are taxed, tracked, and regulated), a dense population of people to connect with (which would enable barter, trade, and dissemination of ideas in a public forum as opposed to the internet which is trackable and censored), and other benefits of having the ability to walk your commute or your errands. Dismissing the idea completely is contradictory to how cities were built and planned before the invention of the motor vehicle and the fact that humans had to walk or bike their cities for thousands of years before the city planning most of us know today became popular. Having the option to drive further distances and having more options within a walkable distance could give us more opportunities to avoid government interventions if done by us. While those of us who live in places that are still relatively free, we have the option to continually say no to top down rules and regulations and work on improving our living situations. The anarchist, libertarian, and non-government affiliated folks can reclaim this concept by doing some small things here and there when we can, if we can:  

• Opening cash or trade posts at their homes to sell fruits, vegetables, and other homemade products in our preexisting neighborhoods.
• Open food trucks, farm stands, and other pop-up businesses in empty lots or communicate with business owners as to whether they would allow their parking lot to be used for a pop-up business.
• Find out what kinds of goods and services your neighbors and nearby businesses offer.
• Drive like a decent human being for the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists (especially in parking lots. I feel like some of y’all out there are trying to kill people?).
• Guerrilla crosswalks and bike lanes.
• Creating greenery and fence buffers for busy roads.
• Support businesses closest to you and show them local support.

This is a small list of small things that come to mind when I think of ways I can improve my own neighborhood and immediate city area. None of these things will make the major changes and bring utopia like many climate alarmists argue their plans will, but it’s what independent people can do for our communities little by little. Anyone who is trying to sell you a “perfect” city where everything is egalitarian and “green” is full of shit, frankly, because most of us have a lot of work to do in recuperating our urban spaces to be more human. For right now, we’re still coping with the way things are. No matter how desperate we get for things to change, welcoming in local and global governing bodies to make those changes for us brings both obvious and hidden dangers and fine print.