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The Strange Villainization of the Walkable City

News Feed
Friday, May 31, 2024

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city. It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way. Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.” Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom. The 15-minute city asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure. These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry. Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass. “​​The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city. It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way. Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.” Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom. The 15-minute city asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure. These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry. Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass. “​​The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

Imagine you live in a town where everyday essentials like work, food, school, health care, and cultural activities all lie within a quick walk or bike ride from people’s homes. Your city has reduced residents’ reliance on car travel, freed you from your hellish commutes, and reconnected communities with one another. Public transit is reliable, concrete expanses have been transformed into lush green space, and carbon emissions are plummeting.

This was the idea sketched by Carlos Moreno, the Sorbonne University professor who pioneered the “15-minute city.” A computer scientist by training, Moreno spent the mid-2000s designing digital energy-management platforms to address urban sustainability. But he became convinced that tech-centered approaches would not solve cities’ problems. He began developing the 15-minute city idea, introducing it at the United Nations’ COP21 Climate Conference in 2015, and working with city leaders to test practices that could bring people closer to their needs and help improve environmental outcomes.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought a flood of high-profile attention to the 15-minute city. A group of nearly 100 mayors committed to implementing it in some form as a means toward a climate-friendly recovery from the crisis. At COP26 in 2021, architects put the strategy at the center of discussions of sustainable city development goals. The World Economic Forum released slick videos and articles endorsing the 15-minute city.

It’s probably no wonder, then, that the 15-minute city eventually penetrated the tinfoil hats of the far right. In 2023, climate deniers, QAnon types, radical libertarians, anti-vaxxers, and white supremacists seized on the World Economic Forum’s elite support for the idea. Fringe narratives made it synonymous with “climate lockdowns” and the “great reset,” in which governments would confine residents to open-air prisons, restricting and surveilling their movements (and perhaps forcing them to eat bugs). Online conspiracists compared the 15-minute city to the Warsaw Ghetto. Reactionary self-help author Jordan B. Peterson called it a scheme by “idiot tyrannical bureaucrats” to tell you where you’re allowed to drive. Moreno, in the normal course of events, became a lightning rod for insane abuse and death threats.

Conspiracists have little to fear, as Moreno’s resolutely non-sinister new book, The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, makes plain. To the decades of poor urban planning that have hastened climate emergency and caused dire “fragmentation,” Moreno poses a utopian solution: “happy proximity.” “We seek to foster mixed-use urban neighborhoods and living spaces that build strong links between people, strengthen social cohesion, and promote a better quality of life,” he writes. The book outlines a moderate program for a sustainable urban future, in which city officials enact incremental policy changes—more bike paths, better public transit, broader green space—that largely rely on private capital and pose little threat to the political status quo. But the thinking behind these features also evokes a more radical egalitarian vision, one that could decentralize work, improve neighborhood solidarity, and help end exploitative economic relationships, expanding our free time and reducing neighborhood displacement along the way.


Our current predicament owes, in part, to the planning principles of the twentieth century. The Athens Charter, a 1933 document published by renowned architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture, promoted the “radiant city,” an idealized plan that would zone urban areas for distinct uses: high-rise residential districts surrounded by green space, with separate industrial and commercial zones, all connected by high-speed transportation infrastructure. This aim to rationalize modern cities became enormously influential in postwar planning worldwide.

But the radiant city had its discontents. The construction of highways in places like New York and Paris wiped out whole neighborhoods, separated communities, and damaged the environment. Residential areas sprawled into the suburban outskirts. Car dependency and long commutes to work became the norm, eating into people’s precious free time. (Later came gentrification, as affluent suburbanites returned to the urban core.) “This expansion,” Moreno writes, “has occurred at the expense of proximity, community, and the traditional activities of city life, such as local markets, walks, and urban nature.”

Some modern thinkers fought to preserve more traditional neighborhood cohesion. In the midcentury, activist Jane Jacobs and her neighbors shot down a proposed highway that urban planner Robert Moses aimed to build through Lower Manhattan, and residents of Amsterdam kept their city bike-friendly by rejecting a destructive development plan. Meanwhile, some workplaces tried teleworking as early as the 1970s as a means of reducing commutes—it was an attempt at “bringing work to the worker”—but neither the tech nor the incentives for employers were strong enough to sustain it. Today, Moreno argues, we must again take up Jacobs’s call for cities that operate at a “human scale.”

In order to foster greater proximity, Moreno favors the idea of the “neighborhood unit,” in which cities are divided into autonomous, self-sufficient areas that provide residents with access to all essentials. He promotes no single model—no “magic copy-and-paste”—to achieve this end. Instead, buttressed by manifesto-like questions and kooky PowerPoint-style infographics, Moreno encourages broad measures: moving away from rigid zoning rules that separate city functions and toward greater versatility of uses. These changes, he claims, will advance more equitable cities, combat gentrification, and improve sustainability. “Our radical rethinking of our urban present is a crucial step toward transforming our cities into more balanced and fulfilling living spaces,” he writes.


There is, of course, a limit to how “radical” any policy can be when rammed through the meat grinder of liberal urban politics. One useful thing about the 15-minute city, as an idea, is that it asks planners to actually plan: to make thoughtful decisions about the entire urban ecosystem, what it contains, and for whom.

Yet city planning today is hamstrung by fiscal austerity and obsessed with economic growth. So much of it is outsourced to the private sector. Cities can try to diversify uses by reforming zoning, discouraging car use, and greening their concrete wastelands, but it’s largely up to developers where things like housing and health clinics and grocery stores go. Typically, they are built where there’s capital to extract—and not, for example, in poor communities of color. “There are aspects of this for which we do not have a solution,” Moreno told Politico in 2022, “because it’s a matter that’s up to private enterprise to change.”

Still, many cities are making changes under the banner of the 15-minute city, mostly for the good. Mayors of the C40 Cities, a climate leadership organization, have been marketing the approach as an environmental remedy since at least 2015, when more than 1,000 gathered for the Paris climate summit. Since 2017, Paris itself has been working with Moreno’s research team to implement some version of the 15-minute city. In the time since then, the city has created 746 miles of protected bike paths, transformed highways along the Seine into pedestrian spaces, and established new community meeting places on school grounds. It has also redeveloped former industrial sites into multipurpose areas that include educational facilities, public housing, and vegetable gardens.

In 2020, the C40 cities officially adopted the 15-minute city as a strategy for managing the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, and many have tried some of its tenets. Cleveland, a onetime automotive town hit hard by deindustrialization and the subprime mortgage crisis, committed in 2022 to investing $3.5 million into safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, greening streets, and changing the zoning code to require public transit options with new development instead of off-street parking. Buenos Aires, Argentina, home to suffocating car traffic and rising heat waves, recently replaced swathes of pavement with vegetation and changed the building code of its central business district, where many office buildings now sit empty, to encourage mixed-use development. Busan, a tech-sector stronghold in South Korea, promised a 15-minute city initiative that will launch new living facilities focused on walking, competitions to design pedestrian-friendly environments, and pilot sites where public-private partnerships will help develop parks and infrastructure.

These changes are positive, if relatively modest. Moreno offers them, alongside other happy examples—from Portland, Oregon, to Tunisia to Melbourne—as evidence that the 15-minute city has become a “global movement.” “With proximity at its heart,” he writes, “it mobilizes a vast amount of creative energy to achieve a balance previously thought impossible: reconciling the fight against climate change with economic development, while promoting the social inclusion of the inhabitants of our towns and cities.” At the same time, it’s unclear whether these initiatives are measurably improving people’s experiences of walkability, services, or local ecology—let alone how, in the absence of tenant protections, they might accelerate gentrification. As yet, the record is short on evidence and long on breathless public statements from mayors bedazzled by a new urbanist buzzword.


It’s easy to see why the 15-minute city has captured the imagination of both liberal policymakers and right-wing conspiracists who are leery of their authority. From one perspective it’s a slick advertisement for the modern city-as-commodity, while from the other it conceals a perfect authoritarian plot. In Oxford, an English city that introduced some 15-minute planning concepts in 2022—such as traffic controls that would limit car congestion—thousands of protesters filled the streets, calling the change “dystopian.” Some demonstrators were arrested. Local media figures and the 1990s pop band Right Said Fred warned residents of dire threats to their “personal freedom.” The protesters, as one local representative said, seemed to overestimate officials’ competence to carry out malevolent plans. Frankly, they may also overestimate officials’ desire to carry out benevolent plans as well.

Beneath these ludicrous confrontations lie more consequential ones. Pollution from urban areas is damaging not only to the natural environment but to residents’ health and well-being, as The 15-Minute City notes. Cities are responsible for more than 70 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, contributing to rising global temperatures and declining air quality. Increasingly, cities relegate working people of color to the outlying sprawl, imposing long trips to work and even to buy groceries. But bringing decentralizing workplaces closer to homes, increasing access to urgent needs, and reducing car dependency are long-term projects, ones that will undoubtedly face resistance from developers, auto manufacturers, and the fossil fuel industry.

Moreno has little to say about how residents themselves might direct these changes. But it’s clear that it will require community-led action to meaningfully disrupt powerful interests. In a recent video essay about 15-minute cities on the Radical Planning YouTube channel, the urban planner host notes that leftist activists in Barcelona, inspired by the lack of car traffic and improved air quality during the pandemic, wrote a public manifesto in 2020 demanding a reorganization of the city that would encourage equity, affordability, and climate remediation. Their ideas included investing in free bike and public transit infrastructure, expanding tree canopies and green space, building public housing to reduce displacement, and curbing tourism to rein in harmful forms of economic growth. These demands would apply differently in different cities, but they give a taste of what a more fully realized 15-minute city, directed by popular appetite and opposed to limitless extraction, could encompass.

“​​The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, and aesthetic values we desire,” wrote urban geographer David Harvey in 2008, in the wake of the last global crisis. “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization.” Today, our cities are organized around the profit-seeking of elites, who believe that the city is their right. It’s this arrangement that’s truly unsustainable. In the years to come, as we face down radical climate change, it will take just such an exercise of collective power to reshape our cities in ways that serve a common right of urban well-being for all. As an expression of this collective “right to the city” for ordinary people, we could do much worse than the 15-minute ideal.

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RFK Jr. Knows Amazingly Little About Autism

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a […]

While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying “disease” that “destroys,” as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by “environmental factors,” a still-speculative thesis that’s clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines.  Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism. In the course of his remarks, he detoured into a rabbit hole filled with pseudoscience about the condition, providing a vast display of all the things he does not seem to know about current research and basic facts about the condition. Here’s a list of just a few of the major pieces of misinformation Kennedy shared.  Falsely framing autism as a debilitating “disease” and an “epidemic”   Kennedy’s ableist and factually incorrect framing of autism relies on explicitly calling it a “disease,” when most scientists refer to it as a “disorder.” Many autistic self-advocates object to that framing too, saying that autism is part of the wide range of human neurodiversity. According to data released in 2021, roughly 61.8 million people worldwide are believed to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Most significantly, autism is widely agreed to exist on a spectrum—hence its clinical name, “autism spectrum disorder”—and autistic people have a wide range of abilities and ways that their autism expresses itself. In remarks that drew the most scrutiny, Kennedy depicted profound autism as something that inevitably robs children of their abilities, proclaiming: “These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” (Our colleague Julia Métraux interviewed autistic poet and attorney Elizabeth McClellan earlier this week, who said his remarks are “useless eaters rhetoric,” the eugenicist idea used by Nazi Germany in the 1930s to dehumanize and eventually murder disabled people.) A press release issued by HHS this week even referred to autistic children as “afflicted.” Kennedy previously claimed that under his guidance, HHS intends to uncover the causes of autism by September, a timeline as improbable as it is highly specific.  One autism researcher, who asked to speak anonymously in order to freely address their concerns, told Mother Jones that framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. The notion that there is a single cause of autism is, to put it mildly, not at all backed up by the decades of research on this highly complex diagnosis. Framing autism as a “disease” with environmental causes seemed designed to set up Kennedy “as the ‘savior’ to the autism community” when he claims to have discovered its cause. Declaring that autism is “clearly” caused by “environmental toxins”  But Kennedy took on step towards meeting this self-imposed deadline by stating, “This is coming from an environmental toxin,” adding the provocative assertion, “And somebody made a profit by putting that environmental toxin into our air, our water, our medicines, our food.” He promised that within two to three weeks “we’re going to announce a series of new studies to identify precisely what environmental toxins are causing it.” He also floated the idea of using AI to help in those studies.  The causes of autism are still being studied, but it’s widely thought that both genetics and environmental factors likely play a role in who develops it. Nor are those environmental factors necessarily “toxins.” Dr. Paul Offit is a virologist, a pediatrician, the chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine used in infants. He told Mother Jones that a variety of factors can contribute to the risk of developing autism, including advanced maternal or paternal age, intrauterine infections when the mother is pregnant, genetics, and maternal health. “What those four things all have in common is that you’re born with autism,” he says. All the evidence, he says, “is that these are events that are occurring while the child is in the womb,” rather than what anti-vaccine advocates have suggested many times, that autism is caused by vaccines received after the child is born. Craig Newschaffer, a professor of biobehavioral health and an autism researcher at Pennsylvania State University’s College of Health and Human Development, said that while he believes environmental exposures could play a role in autism, the interaction between those and other factors is incredibly complex. “There’s probably a constellation of environmental factors that could be involved here that they probably account on their own for small increases in risk,” he said, “and they probably work in concert with genetic mechanisms.” Rejecting the idea that increased autism rates are due in part to better diagnosis and surveillance The press conference was called to respond to a new CDC report which showed a small increase in the number of 8-year-olds diagnosed with autism. Kennedy repeatedly rejected the idea that the increase was due to better autism diagnosis tools and surveillance, declaring that making that argument amounted to “epidemic denial,” and saying that genes “don’t cause epidemics.” Kennedy also said that the root causes of autism could be found much faster “because of A.I. and because of the digitalization of health records that are now available to us.” Craig Newschaffer, who has spent the better part of his career studying potential causes of autism, called Kennedy’s idea of using artificial intelligence to quickly solve the mystery of autism “extremely infeasible.” He noted large-scale efforts are already underway to use machine learning to analyze existing autism datasets—but the results of those studies, he said, are at least five years away.  Yet Penn State’s Newschaffer said his research had suggested that expanded diagnostic capabilities were indeed an important contributor to increasing autism rates. “There’s been lots of accumulation [of evidence] that the diagnostic tendency is a strong, strong factor in this,” he said.   Claiming there are “no” older autistic adults To bolster his claim that environmental exposures are causing autism rates to climb, Kennedy argued that older adults are not autistic. “Have you ever seen anybody our age—I’m 71 years old—with full-blown autism?” he asked. “Headbanging, nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, stimming, toe-walking, these other stereotypical features—where are these people walking around the mall?” Putting aside the scornful and stigmatizing way Kennedy spoke about profoundly autistic people, it’s simply not true that there are no older autistic adults, which we know for many reasons, including the fact that their health outcomes have been studied for years. Autistic elderly people are at greater risk than the general population for a range of health conditions, including cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and they’re also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression. Older autistic adults report loneliness at higher rates than the general population, and research suggests that many of them could benefit from the social services and support they do not currently receive. All of these factors could limit the likelihood that Kennedy might see them “walking around the mall.”  Relying on an expert who has connections to pseudoscience groups Kennedy also brought Dr. Walter Zahorodny to join him on the stage. An associate professor of pediatrics at Rutgers University’s medical school, he has been a lead researcher on the New Jersey Autism Study, which has monitored the state’s autism rate for two decades.    Zahorodny said during the press conference that he believed that the uptick in autism rates could not be explained by expanded diagnostic criteria. “I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether we call it an epidemic tsunami or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors,” he said, echoing Kennedy who has also claimed it is triggered by “toxic exposure.” Zahorodny has collaborated with researchers and groups who deal in pseudoscience or are controversial in the autism community. He appeared in a 2018 video produced by SafeMinds, a group that has suggested that mercury in vaccines causes autism and regularly works with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense. In 2020, Zahorodny co-authored a study of autism rates in Black and Hispanic children with Cynthia Nevison, a University of Colorado climate scientist who is also a contributor to Children’s Health Defense. There, she writes not about climate but rather about her frustration with the lack of research into the “root causes” of autism. In addition, Zahorodny appeared on a 2020 episode of a podcast produced by the National Council on Severe Autism, which has come under fire for its support of the use of restraints for autistic people.  Melissa Alfieri Collins, an anti-vaccine activist in New Jersey, said in an email to Mother Jones that she had worked with Zahorodny in 2019 on her effort to defeat a bill that would have eliminated religious exemptions for childhood vaccination requirements. Zahorodny, Collins recalled, briefed legislators and “stated that vaccines could not currently be ruled out as one of multiple possible causes of sharply increasing autism prevalence.” The bill ultimately failed. Zahorodny did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Overall, Kennedy’s message worried autism researchers and mainstream scientists. But it was received ecstatically by the anti-vaccine community he’s long been a part of. Anti-vaccine activist Larry Cook, a California naturopath and one-man anti-vaccine clearinghouse, approvingly shared a tweet from Kennedy, underlining the places where the secretary referred to the “autism epidemic” and characterized autism as being “preventable.”  “We had the answers over 40 years ago,” Cook tweeted. “They were buried, dismissed, ridiculed, assassinated.”  Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist and the former spokesperson for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, who’s now the CEO of a group he co-founded with Kennedy called MAHA Action, also expressed his enthusiasm. “For decades we have been gaslit by every HHS Secretary that stood at this podium and denied that autism was an epidemic as it climbed from 1 in 10k to 1 in 31 (1 in 12.5 boys in CA),” he tweeted. “If you are watching a news organization that is not celebrating RFKJ in this historic moment it’s time to cancel your subscription forever. It’s now clear who they work for. #MAHA”

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See 26 Captivating Images From the World Press Photo Contest

In stark black-and-white and stunning color, this year's winning photographs capture global events on a human scale

See 26 Captivating Images From the World Press Photo Contest In stark black-and-white and stunning color, this year’s winning photographs capture global events on a human scale Eli Wizevich - History Correspondent April 17, 2025 9:00 a.m. LaBrea Letson, 8, sells lemonade made with bottled water outside her grandmother’s home near the derailment site. A van passing by tests the air for hazardous chemicals. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME A total of 3,778 photojournalists and documentary photographers from 141 countries submitted 59,320 photographs for consideration in this year’s World Press Photo Contest. They covered the year’s biggest stories—including the war in Gaza, migration and climate change—as well as the ordinary lives playing out beneath and beyond the headlines. “The world is not the same as it was in 1955 when World Press Photo was founded,” Joumana El Zein Khoury, the executive director of World Press Photo, an Amsterdam-based nonprofit, says in a statement. “We live in a time when it is easier than ever to look away, to scroll past, to disengage,” she adds. “But these images do not let us do that. They cut through the noise, forcing us to acknowledge what is unfolding, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it makes us question the world we live in—and our own role within it.” On March 27, World Press Photo announced 42 regional winners selected by juries from six regions: Africa; Asia-Pacific and Oceania; Europe; North and Central America; South America; and West, Central and South Asia. From this pool of submissions, judges selected one global winner and two other finalists, which were revealed on April 17. The photos that follow include all three global finalists, as well as a selection of regional winners. World Press Photo of the Year: Mahmoud Ajjour, Aged 9 Mahmoud Ajjour, 9, who was injured during an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, finds refuge and medical help in Qatar. Samar Abu Elouf, for the New York Times As Mahmoud Ajjour’s family fled an Israeli attack on Gaza City in March 2024, the 9-year-old turned around to urge others along. An explosion tore through both of his arms. Ajjour and his family fled to Qatar, where he received medical treatment. Although he’s begun to settle into a new life, Ajjour requires special assistance for most daily activities. He dreams of getting prosthetics. “One of the most difficult things Mahmoud’s mother explained to me was how when Mahmoud first came to the realization that his arms were amputated, the first sentence he said to her was, ‘How will I be able to hug you?’” Samar Abu Elouf, the photojournalist who took the photo for the New York Times in June 2024, recalled in a statement. Like Ajjour, Abu Elouf is also from Gaza. She was evacuated in December 2023 and now lives in the same apartment complex as Ajjour in Doha, Qatar. Children have suffered greatly during the Israel-Hamas war. U.N. agencies say that more than 13,000 have been killed, while an estimated 25,000 have been injured, as the Associated Press’ Edith M. Lederer reported in January. “This young boy’s life deserves to be understood, and this picture does what great photojournalism can do: provide a layered entry point into a complex story, and the incentive to prolong one’s encounter with that story,” says Lucy Conticello, chair of the global jury, in a statement. “In my opinion, this image by Samar Abu Elouf was a clear winner from the start.” World Press Photo of the Year Finalist: Night Crossing Chinese migrants warm themselves during a cold rain after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. John Moore, Getty Images In Night Crossing, photojournalist John Moore captures a group of Chinese migrants warming themselves around a fire in Campo, California, after crossing the United States-Mexico border. In recent years, American officials have seen an increase in undocumented Chinese migration. Driven by financial hardship, political suppression and religious persecution, roughly 38,200 unauthorized Chinese migrants were apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the southern border in 2024—up from roughly 2,200 in 2022, according to World Press Photo. But even if successful, crossing the border is only the beginning of the struggle. “In the United States now, certainly among the immigrant community and specifically the undocumented immigrant community, there is a real sense of fear because people don’t know what’s going to happen one day to the next,” Moore says in a statement. World Press Photo of the Year Finalist: Droughts in the Amazon A young man brings food to his mother, who lives in the village of Manacapuru. The village was once accessible by boat, but because of the drought, he must walk more than a mile along the dry riverbed of the Solimões River to reach her. Musuk Nolte, Panos Pictures, Bertha Foundation To bring food to his mother, the young man in Musuk Nolte’s photograph used to take a boat across the Solimões River in Brazil. But severe droughts have caused water levels in the Amazon to drop to historically low levels. Now he must trek over a mile across the dry riverbed. Setting a human figure against a stark backdrop, Nolte spotlights the way climate change threatens both nature and civilization.  “Photographing this crisis made the global interconnectedness of ecosystems more evident,” Nolte explains. “Sometimes we think that these events do not affect us, but in the medium and long term they have an impact.” Regional Winner: Africa, Singles A groom poses for a portrait at his wedding. In Sudan, marking a wedding with celebratory gunfire is a tradition. Mosab Abushama Since 2023, Sudan has been ravaged by civil war. It has claimed roughly 150,000 lives, and 12 million people have fled their homes. Mosab Abushama’s photograph, titled Life Won’t Stop, features a young groom posing for a mobile phone portrait, a gun in his hand and another leaning against the wall behind him. “Despite the clashes and random shelling in the city, the wedding was a simple but joyous occasion with family and friends,” Mosab recalls. As is traditional in Sudan, celebratory gunfire was part of the wedding. In the context of the brutal war, the groom’s arsenal contains a double meaning. “The war in Sudan, which began in April 2023, brought horrors and displacement, forcing me to leave my childhood home and move to another part of the city. It was a time none of us ever expected to live through,” Mosab explains. “Yet, this wedding was a reminder of the joy of everyday life still possible amidst the tragedy and despair.” Regional Winner: Asia-Pacific and Oceania, Long-Term Project Tāme Iti, a prominent Tūhoe activist bearing a traditional facial tattoo, stands at the 2014 Tūhoe-Crown Settlement Day ceremony, where the government formally apologized for historical injustices. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Horses roam freely in Te Urewera, serving as crucial transportation in the rugged terrain. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Carol Teepa sits in her kitchen with her youngest grandchild, Mia, and her son, Wanea, one of more than 20 children she adopted. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Ruiha Te Tana, 12, relaxes at her grandfather's home. Built by an ancestor in 1916, the homestead serves as a living archive of Tūhoe history. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Mihiata Teepa, 16, and her Tūhoe Māori Rugby League U16 teammates perform a haka during practice before a game. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Children from the Teepa family drive the younger siblings home after a swim in the river. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Apprentices from a local school learn essential farming skills at Tataiwhetu Trust, an organic dairy farm. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] Teepa children share a watermelon. John Rangikapua Teepa and his wife, Carol, have raised more than 20 children adopted according to the Māori whāngai custom. Tatsiana Chypsanava, Pulitzer Center, New Zealand Geographic [/] The Ngāi Tūhoe people of New Zealand’s Te Urewera region are known for their fiercely independent spirit. Their homeland in the hills of the North Island isolated them from British settlers. As a result, the Tūhoe have maintained their language and cultural identity. The photos by Tatsiana Chypsanava, a Belarusian-born photojournalist currently based in New Zealand, show a landscape and a people side by side. Men with traditional face tattoos, girls performing a haka before a rugby game and horses grazing in a pasture are all part of a complex, isolated world. Chypsanava’s long-term photography project shows how intertwined the natural world is with the Tūhoe community. As the guiding philosophy of one Tūhoe family farm expresses, “Ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata” (“When the land is in good health, so too are the people”). Regional Winner: Europe, Singles A man from the Luhansk region lies injured in a field hospital set up in an underground winery near Bakhmut. His left leg and arm were later amputated. Nanna Heitmann, Magnum Photos, for the New York Times Just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the self-proclaimed separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk called on men to serve in Russian-backed militias. The young man in Underground Field Hospital, Nanna Heitmann’s photograph for the New York Times, was recruited to fight for the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic’s militia just two days before the invasion. Pictured in January 2024, the soldier is splayed out in a makeshift field hospital in a winery near the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. His left leg and arm were later amputated, and Bakhmut has been devastated by the war. Regional Winner: North and Central America, Stories Rick Tsai, an East Palestine resident, walks in Sulphur Run near the train derailment site wearing protective gear. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] LaBrea Letson, 8, sells lemonade made with bottled water outside her grandmother’s home near the derailment site. A van passing by tests the air for hazardous chemicals. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] Connie Fortner addresses National Transportation and Safety Board members after several hours of listening to the board’s investigative findings. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] Phil Gurley (left) of the EPA gives a presentation on the remediation process to a biology class at East Palestine High School. Rebecca Kiger, Center for Contemporary Documentation, TIME [/] For two days after the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023, train cars full of hazardous materials and carcinogenic gases kept burning. But the full extent of the environmental and human disaster lasted much longer, as chemicals leached into rivers and residents continued to advocate for protection. In the aftermath, photojournalist Rebecca Kiger embedded with residents as they navigated new medical and political challenges. Her stark black-and-white photographs for the Center for Contemporary Documentation provide a window into their struggle. Kiger’s photos capture both uncertainty and resilience. One photograph depicts a young girl selling lemonade. With tap water no longer safe, she made the lemonade with bottled water. Regional Winner: South America, Singles A stranded Boeing 727-200 surrounded by floodwaters at Salgado Filho International Airport in Brazil Anselmo Cunha, Agence France-Presse Anselmo Cunha’s Aircraft on Flooded Tarmac was taken in May 2024, as heavy rainfalls in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul caused devastating flooding. The image shows a grounded airplane surrounded by floodwaters. In doing so, it hints at both the cause (air travel burning fossil fuels) and effect (floodwaters) of climate change in the very same frame. Regional Winner: West, Central and South Asia, Long-Term Projects A kolbar follows an arduous mountain path. Kolbars’ packs can weigh more than 100 pounds, and crossings can take up to 12 hours. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Kolbars make the perilous climb on a border crossing route known as the “Passage of Death” because of the number of lives it claims. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Thousands have lost their lives crossing these mountains. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] At least 2,463 kolbars were killed or injured in Iranian Kurdistan between 2011 and 2024. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Khaled, 32, had to have both eyes removed after being shot in the head by a border guard. He has two children, who are 2 and 7. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Some goods kolbars carry across the border are freely available in Iran, but they fuel a thriving black market in the region that avoids import duties. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Mohammad, 22, shares a farewell with his mother before embarking on a journey to Europe to seek better opportunities. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] Many of the goods brought in by kolbars end up in luxury stores across the nation. Ebrahim Alipoor [/] In Bullets Have No Borders, Ebrahim Alipoor, a photographer from the Kurdistan province in Iran, captures a stark reality of life for many in his region. To avoid Iranian government bans of imports like household appliances, cell phones and clothing, kolbars (border couriers) carry products strapped on their back from Iraq and Turkey and into Iran. In Iranian Kurdistan, unemployment is widespread, leading many disenfranchised men to pursue this dangerous career. Deliveries can weigh more than 100 pounds, and journeys can take up to half a day. But even sure-footed and sturdy kolbars are always in grave danger. Khaled, a 32-year-old kolbar, had to have both eyes removed after a border guard shot him in the head. Alipoor’s black-and-white images reveal a perilous world. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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Is your community at risk? How to access data and tell stories about EtO

Grist journalists share how we investigated this story and how to learn more about ethylene oxide emissions in your area.

Lea esta nota en español. How this story came about When Grist reporters began talking to environmental advocates about ethylene oxide in 2023, we repeatedly heard that warehouses were a threat and that neither regulators nor community activists had any idea where they were. The advocates emphasized that, even as the Environmental Protection Agency was cracking down on emissions from sterilization facilities, it was overlooking warehouses. No one knew exactly how many of these warehouses existed, where they were located, or how much ethylene oxide they emitted. Ethylene oxide is a highly toxic substance, so we were taken aback by how little was known. We decided to try to fill in those gaps.  What we found  We found that two Cardinal Health warehouses in El Paso, Texas, likely pose a greater threat than a sterilization facility nearby. The emissions were resulting in additional cancer risk for a neighboring community that is higher than allowed by the EPA. We also identified about 30 other warehouses that emit ethylene oxide across the country. They are used by companies such as Boston Scientific, ConMed, and Becton Dickinson, as well as Cardinal Health. And they are not restricted to industrial parts of towns — they are near schools and playgrounds, gyms and apartment complexes. From the outside, the warehouses do not attract attention. They look like any other distribution center. Many occupy hundreds of thousands of square feet, and dozens of trucks pull in and out every day. But when medical products are loaded, unloaded, and moved from these facilities, they belch ethylene oxide into the air. Most nearby residents have no idea that the nondescript buildings are a source of toxic pollution. Neither do most truck drivers, who are often hired on a contract basis, or many of the workers employed at the warehouses. When Grist reported on the Cardinal Health warehouses in El Paso, our reporters handed out flyers to residents and workers so they could learn more and contact us. They’re available to view and download below: For residents  For workers  How we identified the warehouses The first list of roughly 30 warehouses primarily includes facilities that have reported ethylene oxide emissions to either the EPA or South Coast Air Quality Management District. We obtained these addresses by submitting public records requests to the agencies. We also identified a few warehouses on this list by speaking with truck drivers transporting medical devices from sterilization facilities to warehouses.  The second list consists of warehouses that are owned or operated by some of the nation’s major medical device manufacturers. Since we had a list of 30 warehouses we know emit ethylene oxide, we identified the medical device manufacturers and distributors utilizing those warehouses for storage. We then expanded the search to all warehouses used by those companies. To be clear, there is no evidence to suggest that every warehouse on the second list emits ethylene oxide. Instead, they are being presented for further research by local reporters and concerned citizens.  Warehouses storing products sterilized with ethylene oxide Grist assembled a list of U.S. warehouses that have reported storing products sterilized with ethylene oxide and others used by major medical device manufacturers and distributors. Confirmed Potential Loading map data… Source: Grist analysis Map: Lylla Younes / Clayton Aldern / Grist A full list of the warehouse addresses and company responses to Grist questions can be found here. How to find warehouses in your area Look through the two lists we’ve compiled. Are any in your area? Are there any companies that operate in your region or your state?  If you don’t find any warehouses in your region on our lists, make a list of the medical device companies and distributors in your state. The major companies we’ve come across in our research are Cardinal Health, Medline, and Owens & Minor. Then attempt to identify where they warehouse products. You can find this information by looking at: The company’s website Some companies list their facilities — including warehouses — in the “About Us” or “Locations” sections of their website. If the company maintains a jobs portal, look for any warehouse-related positions and whether it lists a location of employment.  SEC filings If the company is publicly traded, it will need to submit financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Search the SEC’s EDGAR database for the company’s filings. Sometimes, companies disclose their risk to litigation or regulation related to ethylene oxide. Some companies also list their assets, including facility locations, in these filings.  Google Maps Search for a medical device company in your area. For instance, if you’re interested in Medline, you can try “Medline warehouse” or “Medline distribution center” and see if any come up near you.  Read the story The unregulated link in a toxic supply chain Naveena Sadasivam & Lylla Younes If I’m a local reporter or a concerned resident, what can I do with this information now that I know where a warehouse is?  Once you’ve identified a warehouse that you suspect might store products sterilized with ethylene oxide, you can try to confirm whether it emits the chemical through one of these methods: Submit records requests to local and state environmental agencies Reach out to the city or state agency that permits air quality in your region. Often it’s the state department of environmental quality, but sometimes they can be regional air quality districts (like in California) or city environmental offices. Ask for all air quality permit applications submitted by the warehouse operator in question or all correspondence by the warehouse operator that mentions ethylene oxide. Try to connect it to a sterilization facility Products are first fumigated with ethylene oxide at sterilization facilities before being sent to warehouses for storage. If products are being delivered from a sterilizer to the warehouse you’re investigating, that’s a strong indicator that the warehouse emits some amount of ethylene oxide. There are two main approaches to take when trying to flesh out the supply chain to warehouses. Talk to the drivers dropping off at warehouses: You can try to determine where products are coming from by talking to the truck drivers delivering shipments to the warehouse.  Talk to the drivers leaving sterilization facilities: There are fewer than 100 sterilization facilities in the country, and the EPA maintains a list of them here. If one is near you, you can ask drivers for information about where they are taking the products. Contact the company: Some companies have public relations or community engagement staff who respond to resident questions. Try reaching out to see if they’re open to talking to you.  Talk to workers Try to speak with the warehouse workers while they’re on break or at the end of their shift. Companies are required to inform their workers about ethylene oxide exposure, so you could ask questions about whether they’ve been in any meetings where managers referenced exposure to a chemical. Even still, many workers aren’t aware that they’re being exposed to ethylene oxide. But ask them if the facility has air quality monitors, and if so, whether they know what it’s monitoring for. Grist reporters posted flyers all over the area surrounding the warehouse that was found to emit EtO. Naveena Sadasivam If I’m a resident wanting to get involved but have no journalism experience, what can I do to get more information? Take a look at this 2023 map and report assessing 104 facilities that emit ethylene oxide by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Any member of the public can file a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request to get public information from the federal government. You can also file an open records request to get information from local and state agencies. There are many resources to help you craft these: – FOIA Wiki, made by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press – The federal FOIA website Read our other stories to learn more details about ethylene oxide: – ‘Dulce’: How a sweet-smelling chemical upended life in Salinas, Puerto Rico – An invisible chemical is poisoning thousands of unsuspecting warehouse workers This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Is your community at risk? How to access data and tell stories about EtO on Apr 16, 2025.

Activism
Chemicals
Government

Beneath the biotech boom

MIT historian Robin Scheffler’s research shows how local regulations helped create certainty and safety principles that enabled an industry’s massive growth.

It’s considered a scientific landmark: A 1975 meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, shaped a new safety regime for recombinant DNA, ensuring that researchers would apply caution to gene splicing. Those ideas have been so useful that in the decades since, when new topics in scientific safety arise, there are still calls for Asilomar-type conferences to craft good ground rules.There’s something missing from this narrative, though: It took more than the Asilomar conference to set today’s standards. The Asilomar concepts were created with academic research in mind — but the biotechnology industry also makes products, and standards for that were formulated after Asilomar.“The Asilomar meeting and Asilomar principles did not settle the question of the safety of genetic engineering,” says MIT scholar Robin Scheffler, author of a newly published research paper on the subject.Instead, as Scheffler documents in the paper, Asilomar helped generate further debate, but those industry principles were set down later in the 1970s — first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where politicians and concerned citizens wanted local biotech firms to be good neighbors. In response, the city passed safety laws for the emerging industry. And rather than heading off to places with zero regulations, local firms — including a fledgling Biogen — stayed put. Over the decades, the Boston area became the world leader in biotech.Why stay? In essence, regulations gave biotech firms the certainty they needed to grow — and build. Lenders and real-estate developers needed signals that long-term investment in labs and facilities made sense. Generally, as Scheffler notes, even though “the idea that regulations can be anchoring for business does not have a lot of pull” in economic theory, in this case, regulations did matter.“The trajectory of the industry in Cambridge, including biotechnology companies deciding to accommodate regulation, is remarkable,” says Scheffler. “It’s hard to imagine the American biotechnology industry without this dense cluster in Boston and Cambridge. These things that happened on a very local scale had huge echoes.”Scheffler’s article, “Asilomar Goes Underground: The Long Legacy of Recombinant DNA Hazard Debates for the Greater Boston Area Biotechnology Industry,” appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Biology. Scheffler is an associate professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.Business: Banking on certaintyTo be clear, the Asilomar conference of 1975 did produce real results. Asilomar led to a system that helped evaluate projects’ potential risk and determine appropriate safety measures. The U.S. federal government subsequently adopted Asilomar-like principles for research it funded.But in 1976, debate over the subject arose again in Cambridge, especially following a cover story in a local newspaper, the Boston Phoenix. Residents became concerned that recombinant DNA projects would lead to, hypothetically, new microorganisms that could damage public health.“Scientists had not considered urban public health,” Scheffler says. “The Cambridge recombinant DNA debate in the 1970s made it a matter of what your neighbors think.”After several months of hearings, research, and public debate (sometimes involving MIT faculty) stretching into early 1977, Cambridge adopted a somewhat stricter framework than the federal government had proposed for the handling of materials used in recombinant DNA work.“Asilomar took on a new life in local regulations,” says Scheffler, whose research included government archives, news accounts, industry records, and more.But a funny thing happened after Cambridge passed its recombinant DNA rules: The nascent biotech industry took root, and other area towns passed their own versions of the Cambridge rules.“Not only did cities create more safety regulations,” Scheffler observes, “but the people asking for them switched from being left-wing activists or populist mayors to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council and real estate development concerns.”Indeed, he adds, “What’s interesting is how quickly safety concerns about recombinant DNA evaporated. Many people against recombinant DNA came to change their thinking.” And while some local residents continued to express concerns about the environmental impact of labs, “those are questions people ask when they no longer worry about the safety of the core work itself.”Unlike federal regulations, these local laws applied to not only lab research but also products, and as such they let firms know they could work in a stable business environment with regulatory certainty. That mattered financially, and in a specific way: It helped companies build the buildings they needed to produce the products they had invented.“The venture capital cycle for biotechnology companies was very focused on the research and exciting intellectual ideas, but then you have the bricks and mortar,” Scheffler says, referring to biotech production facilities. “The bricks and mortar is actually the harder problem for a lot of startup biotechnology companies.”After all, he notes, “Venture capital will throw money after big discoveries, but a banker issuing a construction loan has very different priorities and is much more sensitive to things like factory permits and access to sewers 10 years from now. That’s why all these towns around Massachusetts passed regulations, as a way of assuring that.”To grow globally, act locallyOf course, one additional reason biotech firms decided to land in the Boston area was the intellectual capital: With so many local universities, there was a lot of industry talent in the region. Local faculty co-founded some of the high-flying firms.“The defining trait of the Cambridge-Boston biotechnology cluster is its density, right around the universities,” Scheffler says. “That’s a unique feature local regulations encouraged.”It’s also the case, Scheffler notes, that some biotech firms did engage in venue-shopping to avoid regulations at first, although that was more the case in California, another state where the industry emerged. Still, the Boston-area regulations seemed to assuage both industry and public worries about the subject.The foundations of biotechnology regulation in Massachusetts contain some additional historical quirks, including the time in the late 1970s when the city of Cambridge mistakenly omitted the recombinant DNA safety rules from its annually published bylaws, meaning the regulations were inactive. Officials at Biogen sent them a reminder to restore the laws to the books.Half a century on from Asilomar, its broad downstream effects are not just a set of research principles — but also, refracted through the Cambridge episode, key ideas about public discussion and input; reducing uncertainty for business, the particular financing needs of industries; the impact of local and regional regulation; and the openness of startups to recognizing what might help them thrive.“It’s a different way to think about the legacy of Asilomar,” Scheffler says. “And it’s a real contrast with what some people might expect from following scientists alone.” 

Activism
Business
Government

Katy Perry set for space with all-women crew on Blue Origin rocket

Six women—including pop star Katy Perry—are set to blast off into space as part of an all-women suborbital mission

Katy Perry set for space with all-women crew on Blue Origin rocketMaddie MolloyBBC Climate & Science reporterGetty ImagesThe singer will be aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocketPop star Katy Perry and five other women are set to blast into space aboard Jeff Bezos' space tourism rocket.The singer will be joined by Bezos's fiancée Lauren Sánchez and CBS presenter Gayle King.The New Shepard rocket is due to lift off from its West Texas launch site and the launch window opens at 08:30 local time (14:30 BST). The flight will last around 11 minutes and take the crew more than 100km (62 miles) above Earth, crossing the internationally recognised boundary of space and giving the crew a few moments of weightlessness.Also on board are former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn.The spacecraft is fully autonomous, requiring no pilots, and the crew will not manually operate the vehicle.The capsule will return to Earth with a parachute-assisted soft landing, while the rocket booster will land itself around two miles away from the launch site."If you had told me that I would be part of the first-ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you. Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. Although we didn't grow up with much, I never stopped looking at the world with hopeful WONDER!" Mrs Perry said in a social media post.Blue Origin says the last all-female spaceflight was over 60 years ago when Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space on a solo mission aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6. Since then, there have been no other all-female spaceflights but women have made numerous significant contributions. Blue Origin is a private space company founded in 2000 by Bezos, the billionaire entrepreneur who also started Amazon.Although Blue Origin has not released full ticket prices, a $150,000 (£114,575.85) deposit is required to reserve a seat—underlining the exclusivity of these early flights.Alongside its suborbital tourism business, the company is also developing long-term space infrastructure, including reusable rockets and lunar landing systems. The New Shepard rocket is designed to be fully reusable and its booster returns to the launch pad for vertical landings after each flight, reducing overall costs.According to US law, astronauts must complete comprehensive training for their specific roles.Blue Origin says its New Shepard passengers are trained over two days with a focus on physical fitness, emergency protocols, details about the safety measures and procedures for zero gravity.Additionally, there are two support members referred to as Crew Member Seven: one provides continuous guidance to astronauts, while the other maintains communication from the control room during the mission.BBC / Maddie MolloyThe rise of space tourism has prompted criticism that it is too exclusive and environmentally damaging.Supporters argue that private companies are accelerating innovation and making space more accessible.Professor Brian Cox told the BBC in 2024: "Our civilisation needs to expand beyond our planet for so many reasons," and believes that collaboration between NASA and commercial firms is a positive step.But critics raise significant environmental concerns.They say that as more and more rockets are launched, the risks of harming the ozone layer increases.A 2022 study by Professor Eloise Marais from University College London found that rocket soot in the upper atmosphere has a warming effect which is 500 times greater than when released by planes closer to Earth.The high cost of space tourism makes it inaccessible to most people, with these expensive missions out of reach for the majority.Critics, including actress Olivia Munn, questioned the optics of this particular venture, remarking "There's a lot of people who can't even afford eggs," during an appearance on Today with Jenna & Friends.Astronaut Tim Peake has defended the value of human space travel, especially in relation to tackling global issues such as climate change.At the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Peake voiced his disappointment that space exploration was increasingly seen as a pursuit for the wealthy, stating: "I personally am a fan of using space for science and for the benefit of everybody back on Earth, so in that respect, I feel disappointed that space is being tarred with that brush."Watch Blue Origin's Last Spaceflight on the New Shepard RocketWatch: Blue Origin's tenth human space mission blast offAdditonal reporting by Victoria Gill and Kate Stephens, BBC Climate and Science.

Activism
Business
Climate

Suggested Viewing

In His Own Home

Heavily armed officers of the University of Florida police department in Gainesville, FL, responding to a 911 call from a neighbor who heard screams, break into the campus apartment of Ghanaian graduate student, Kofi Adu-Brempong. Clad in SWAT gear and ready to attack, they see the disabled doctoral student, sitting with a metal table leg in his hand and within a minute of entry, shoot the unarmed man in the face. Adu-Brempong, who because of childhood polio, needed a cane to walk, and had been suffering from mental illness, now has severe facial injuries, and is charged with resisting arrest. He is guarded outside his hospital door, his legs shackled together when going to the bathroom. The officer who shoots Kofi, and who had previously been caught cruising through town throwing eggs at residents of a Black neighborhood, is not suspended or fired. Student protests lead the administration to drop charges but calls for revoking SWAT-like teams on campus go unheard. Kofi’s shooting is not an isolated incident but part of an ongoing pattern of police brutality against Blacks and a stark reminder of the dangers of increasingly militarized campuses nationwide. In His Own Home came out of outrage by a small group of concerned community members committed to seeing social justice happen on a local level. This documentary is an educational and organizing tool, especially calling for our communities to be safe from violence by racist and over-armed police.

Social Justice
Health
Activism

Gulf Coast Love Story

Dayna Reggero has been listening along the beaches and the bayous of the Gulf Coast to artists who are remembering, healing, and building a safe movement to vision a better future in the dangerous world of oil and gas.

Social Justice
Culture
Activism

Wake Up People!

Environmental activists have been camping in Sodros for more than four months with the purpose of stopping the trees from being cut down. In the past few days Chinese company CRBC workers have been showing up at the site accompanied by the police and gendarmerie forces. The activists have been requesting to see the permits and the documentation for the work they are planning to conduct from the CRBC workers. The CRBC workers haven’t shown any of the permits. Also, the work has begun without a construction board being clearly visible, which is mandatory by law.

Sustainable
Social Justice
Nature

L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life): From Standing Rock To The Swamp

On the banks of Louisiana, fierce Indigenous women are ready to fight—to stop the corporate blacksnake and preserve their way of life. They are risking everything to protect Mother Earth from the predatory fossil fuel companies that seek to poison it. The film follows water protector Cherri Foytlin in the swamps of Louisiana as she leads us on a no-nonsense journey of indigenous resistance to the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP), which is an extension of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The pipelines are part of an ongoing legacy of colonization and slow genocide. At the heart of the struggle is a battle between people and profit.

Indigenous
Resources
Activism

The Whale Guitar: Instrument of Change

Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

Music
Activism
Climate

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