A little over a year ago, the American left started talking about a concept called 15-minute cities. The idea behind them is that you’d have every amenity you’d need in your day-to-day life in a 15 minute walking distance. And people are surprisingly very solidly against this idea. To people like me who live in metropolitan areas, or like, anywhere that isn’t suburban, this ‘new’ idea is already so normalized that I had to double check if these people are really describing what they’re describing. 63% of all Americans live in suburban areas, this is double the amount living in cities.
The USA has the 11th highest obesity rate in the world, we can almost call it the 1st since all 10 of the countries who pass it are island nations with an average population of less than 100,000, that phenomenon is related to a sudden change of diet in the recently globalized way of life in the Pacific, it’s unrelated. The fact that a large portion of Americans are obese shouldn’t be surprising to most people familiar with US American culinary ‘culture’. There are discourses about living in an ‘ingredient household’, that being a household that has ingredients rather than instant frozen food, and how that’s actually an abnormal way to live. Or when the American version of the same snacks get banned in the EU because they contain nutrients that can’t legally be used in EU products. Having said all that, I think one of the main culprits that very commonly gets overlooked in this discussion is that settlements in the US are made to cater to cars rather than humans.
In an average non-American city, going out to buy groceries is as simple as walking into the store, buying them, and walking back home. In the American suburbs, this process is complicated by the fact that there are no supermarkets and the nearest Walmart is a 40 minute walk. So, of course, Americans use their cars to get to places. The fact that they’re forced to drive everywhere, even for things that we, outside the US, deem ‘walking activities’, results in them basically not walking anywhere at all. And it isn’t just that their cardboard houses are physically far away from their destination, it’s that the roads are quite literally only built with cars in mind. There are no sidewalks.
Then, you might be wondering, how do people without cars get to places? The answer isn’t public transportation, there’s none, but rather they ask people to drive them. And if there’s nobody willing to do that, they’re just stuck. A life where you can’t walk, take the bus, or the metro, or the train, or even a taxi to get anywhere.
So, why are people so against the idea of 15-minute cities? Well, the actual question is, who are the people against the idea of 15-minute cities? The answer will definitely not surprise you because it’s Trump supporters. These people obsessed with their own corrupt idea of freedom where that term is synonymous with conservatism, and anything that wants to change their current values and way of life is evil, as if their ancestors didn’t have to endure change to get to that very point. Their arguments against these walkable and humane cities is that the government will have maximum surveillance over them, think cameras everywhere. I seriously don’t know the mental gymnastics they had to do in order to get to that conclusion, and I don’t want to find out. The giant backlash over the suggestion of 15-minute cities is, in my opinion, the greatest example of a big group of people transforming an idea into something entirely unrelated, getting mad at the thing that they made up themselves, and blaming the other side. This definitely isn’t a new thing for political groups, it happens to everyone and everywhere. If the only time you hear about a topic is when people in ‘your own group’ tell you about it, that topic very quickly turns into a web of exaggerated mess. You’d have no reason to hear it from ‘the other side’, since they’re always wrong, and the chamber you built and filled with echoes of yourself is always right.