Right after I wrote the post about 15-minute cities, the Deseret News Magazine ran a piece on the very topic.  Titled Strolling Into Controversy, the subtitle says,

The ‘15-minute city’ reimagines our car-centric urban spaces. Some are up in arms

One of the piece’s authors, Adele Peters, seems to get the basics right:

The basic concept of the “15-minute city,” as a way to reduce pollution from cars and to increase quality of life, isn’t new. … But as more cities have started talking about it, it’s also spawned a backlash. In the U.K., Conservative politician Nick Fletcher called 15-minute cities an “international socialist concept” that would “take away your personal freedoms.” In reality, the idea offers more freedom, not less. “What it means is as an individual, you aren’t relegated to your automobile.”

Still, people balk at the idea of changes in infrastructure that could make walking and biking easier. But people forget … that top-down planning created that car dependency, including zoning that keeps housing far from stores, or wide streets with fast traffic and little shade that few people want to walk on. It’s not so much that people choose to drive, as they’ve been forced into it by bad design.

However, the piece then switches to writing by Itxu Diaz, and drops into the conspiracy world:

… it is also reasonable to assume that the politicians who must implement this plan would feel quite comfortable imposing restrictions on citizens, as they demonstrated in the pandemic. And call me paranoid, but I don’t trust that the technocrats devising these systems will resist the urge to go Big Brother. Like any utopia, the 15-minute city could only work by giving too much power to the government.

Now Diaz is Spanish, and I think he may be viewing the planning world from that standpoint.  It’s hard to imagine that kind of top-down coercion being exercised in local communities here in the U.S.  If anything, as the efforts at zoning reform in a number of states have recently shown, top-down planning often results in non-acceptance and little or no implementation.  My friend, who I mentioned in my previous post on this topic, need not fear.