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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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Tribes Celebrate the End of the Largest Dam Removal Project in US History

The largest dam removal project in U.S. history has been completed near the California-Oregon border

The largest dam removal project in U.S. history was completed Wednesday, marking a major victory for tribes in the region who fought for decades to free hundreds of miles of the Klamath River near the California-Oregon border.Through protests, testimony and lawsuits, local tribes showcased the environmental devastation due to the four towering hydroelectric dams, especially to salmon, which are culturally and spiritually significant to tribes in the region.“Without that visioning and that advocacy and activism and the airplane miles that they racked up … to point out the damage that these dams were doing, not only to the environment, but to the social and cultural fabric of these tribal nations, there would be no dam removal,” said Mark Bransom, chief executive of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, the nonprofit entity created to oversee the project.Power company PacifiCorp built the dams to generate electricity between 1918 and 1962. But the structures halted the natural flow of the waterway that was once known as the third-largest salmon-producing river on the West Coast, disrupting the lifecycle of the region’s salmon. At the same time, the dams only produced a fraction of PacifiCorp’s energy at full capacity — enough to power about 70,000 homes. They also didn’t provide irrigation, drinking water or flood control, according to Klamath River Renewal Corporation.Since breaching the dams, anadromous fish regained access to their habitat, water temperature decreased and its quality improved, explained Michael Belchik, senior water policy analyst for the Yurok Tribe.But tribal advocates and activists see their work as far from finished, with some already refocusing their efforts on revegetation and other restoration work on the Klamath River and the surrounding land.Here’s a look at just a few of the many tribal members at the center of this struggle for dam removal:When Karuk tribal member Molli Myers took her first major step into the fight for Klamath dam removal, she was six months pregnant, had a toddler in tow and was in a foreign country for the first time. It was 2004 and she had organized a group of about 25 tribal members to fly to Scotland for the annual general stockholders meeting for Scottish Power, PacifiCorp’s parent company at the time.For hours, they protested outside with signs, sang and played drums. They cooked fish on Calton Hill over a fire of scotch barrels and gave it out to locals as they explained why they were there.“I really felt an urgency because I was having babies,” said Myers, who was born and raised in the middle Klamath in a traditional fishing family. “And so for me I was internalizing the responsibility to take care of their future.”The initial trigger for her to act came two years before that when she saw some of the tens of thousands of salmon die in the river from a bacterial outbreak caused by low water and warm temperatures.“Looking back on it now I wonder where would we be if that hadn’t happened," said Myers, 41. "Looking back on it now I can say, ‘Was this our creator’s call to action?’”She spent the next two decades protesting and flooding state and federal meetings with tribal testimony, including waiting with other tribal members at the doors of a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting at 4 a.m. in 2007 to ask Warren Buffett what he was going to do about the dams. PacifiCorp was at that point part of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. conglomerate.Today, those same children with her in Scotland are 21 and 19, and with the dams gone Myers said she sees the hope they and her other three children have about the future.“They can do whatever needs to get done because they saw it happen, they lived it, so now there’s no impossible for them," she said.For Yurok elder Jacqueline Winter, her feelings on the newly free-flowing river are more complicated. The 89-year-old’s son, Troy Fletcher, was the tribe’s point person for dam removal for two decades, testifying in front of the U.S. Congress and presenting to state and federal regulatory committees. But his true power came through his ability to bring people with radically conflicting viewpoints — from farmers to commercial fishers to tribal members — together. Winter said that came from his belief that everyone living along the river are relatives and deserve to be heard. “We’re all family. None of us can be left hurting and all of us have to give a little,” she said was his message.But at 53, the former executive director for the Yurok Tribe died unexpectedly from a heart attack, nearly a decade before that vision of a free-flowing river would finally be realized. Winter said when she saw the dams breached last month, it felt like his spirit was there through those he touched and she could finally let him go.“His vision became reality and I think he never doubted it,” she said. “He never doubted it. And those who worked closely with him never doubted it.”Former Klamath Tribes Chairman Jeff Mitchell’s work since the 1970s for dam removal came out of the belief that the salmon are their relatives.“They were gifted to us by our creator and given to us to preserve and to protect and also to help give us life,” said Mitchell, chair of the tribe’s Culture and Heritage Committee. “As such, the creator also instructed us to make sure that we do everything in our power to protect those fish.”The Klamath River’s headwaters lie on the tribe’s homelands in Oregon, and members once depended on salmon for 25% of their food. But for more than a century their waters have not held any salmon, he said.Mitchell and other tribal members’ fight to bring them back has cycled through several forms. There were the years of protesting, even gathering carcasses of fish after the 2002 fish kill and leaving them on the doorsteps of federal office buildings. There were his days of walking the halls of the state Legislature in Salem, Oregon, meeting with lawmakers about the millions in funding needed to make dam removal happen. Today, he said he feels like they achieved the impossible, but there’s still more work to do.“I’m happy that the dams are gone and we have passage,” he said. “But now I’m thinking about what are those fish coming home to? And that’s really the focus now, is how do we get the parties to start taking restoration actions and making that the top priority in all of this?”Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Newsom and state court judge throw wet blanket on Inland Empire warehouse boom

A judge tosses San Bernardino County's approval of a warehouse complex and Gov. Gavin Newsom reins in warehouse development with a new law.

In summary A judge tosses San Bernardino County’s approval of a warehouse complex and Gov. Gavin Newsom reins in warehouse development with a new law. It’s been a rough couple weeks for warehouse developers in the Inland Empire. Two weeks ago a San Bernardino Superior Court overturned the county’s approval of a massive warehouse complex on more than 2 million acres in the community of Bloomington. Then on Sunday Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that reins in warehouse development statewide by tightening building standards and restricting diesel truck routes in neighborhoods.  The new law is likely to have a big impact in the Inland Empire, which already includes 4,000 warehouses that sprawl over nearly 40 square miles. Those facilities bring jobs, but also air pollution, noise and traffic. Environmental activists applauded the court case reversing the Bloomington warehouse approval. Developers of the Bloomington warehouse complex proposed building three new distribution centers, including a cavernous facility of more than a million square feet. Their plan involved buying and demolishing more than 100 homes. A coalition of nonprofits sued San Bernardino County and the developer in 2022, saying officials missed the mark on environmental standards. On Sept. 17 Superior Court Judge Donald Alvarez agreed. He overturned the project approval and its environmental impact report, ruling that it failed to offer reasonable alternatives or properly analyze impacts on air quality, noise, energy and greenhouse gas emissions. “We are very happy that the judge has looked at all the evidence and agreed” the environmental review was inadequate, said Alondra Mateo, a community organizer with the San Bernardino-based People’s Collective for Environmental Justice, which sued to stop the project. The demolition of homes that carved away a swath of the community goes beyond typical development concerns, Mateo said: “It’s not just an environmental impact; it’s a cultural impact, it’s a mental health impact.”  Then on Sunday Newsom approved the warehouse law authored by Inland Empire Democratic Assemblymembers Eloise Gómez Reyes and Juan Carillo. The law passed in the final hours of the legislative session in August, provoking criticism from all sides. While advocates for the logistics industry panned the law as a job-killer, community groups say its public health protections aren’t strict enough. Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership, described the law as bad policy “created in a smoke-filled room without experts.” He predicted it will hurt jobs in  the Inland Empire and other parts of Southern California. Environmental groups weren’t any happier. The law requires warehouse loading docks be set back 300 to 500 feet from to sensitive sites, including homes, schools and playgrounds. That’s not enough of a buffer to protect nearby residents, Mateo said, arguing that the ideal distance should be about one kilometer, which is more than 3,280 feet. Reyes has said the law offers a starting point that local governments can expand on to protect public health. Mateo maintained it gives developers an out, enabling them to comply with the letter of the law by meeting minimum limits. Lawmakers acknowledged the law will require amendments. The critics are ready to go. Industry groups say they’ll press for more flexible rules, while environmental groups want stricter ones. “If anything we’re going to push even harder,” Mateo said.

Who Are the 2024 MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Fellows?

The John D

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced Tuesday its 2024 class of fellows, often known as recipients of the “genius grant."The 22 fellows will each receive a grant of $800,000 over five years to spend however they want. They were selected from nominations in a yearslong process that solicits input from their communities and peers. Fellows do not apply and are never officially informed that they’ve been nominated unless they are selected for the award.The interdisciplinary award seeks to “enable” people with a track record and the potential to produce additional extraordinary work, said Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program.Loka Ashwood, 39, Lexington, Kentucky, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky who studies how environmental issues, corporations and state policy intersect to harm rural communities and reduce their trust in democracy.Ruha Benjamin, 46, Princeton, New Jersey, a transdisciplinary scholar and writer at Princeton University who studies how new technologies and medical research often reinforce social and racial inequality and bias.Justin Vivian Bond, 61, New York, an artist and performer who, in their long career as cabaret singer, has stood up for civil rights, offered solace and humor to members of the gay community and inspired other transgender artists.Jericho Brown, 48, Atlanta, a poet at Emory University whose lyrical work explores contemporary culture in part through vulnerable self-reflection and experimentation in form.Tony Cokes, 68, Providence, Rhode Island, a media artist at Brown University whose video works often use text and fragments from contemporary culture to communicate social critique, including of police violence and torture.Nicola Dell, 42, New York, a computer and information scientist at Cornell Tech, who has studied how technology can be used for intimate partner abuse and has developed tools and programs to help survivors of such abuse. Johnny Gandelsman, 46, New Paltz, New York, a violinist and producer who has revisited classical works using different styles and techniques while also elevating the work of contemporary composers. Sterlin Harjo, 44, Tulsa, Oklahoma, a filmmaker whose work, including the television series “Reservation Dogs” that he co-created, is grounded in the daily lives of Native American communities.Juan Felipe Herrera, 75, Fresno, California, a poet, educator and writer dedicated to expressing the shared experiences of the Mexican-American community through often bilingual work that crosses genres and draws on both contemporary events and the cultures of pre-colonial societies. Ling Ma, 41, Chicago, a fiction writer whose often surreal or speculative stories build from and shed light on contemporary experiences of alienation, immigration and materialism. Jennifer L. Morgan, 58, New York, a historian at New York University whose work focuses on enslaved African women, revealing how the wealth of slaveowners and the growth of the economy was built on their exploitation and reproductive labor. Martha Muñoz, 39, New Haven, Connecticut, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University whose research investigates what factors drive the rates and patterns of evolution. Shaikaja Paik, 50, Cincinnati, a historian of modern India at the University of Cincinnati whose work explores caste discrimination and its intersection with gender and sexuality in the lives of Dalit women. Joseph Parker, 44, Pasadena, California, an evolutionary biologist studying rove beetles at the California Institute of Technology and the evolutionary origins of their symbiotic relationship with other species. Ebony G. Patterson, 43, Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, a multimedia artist who has created intricate, layered, immersive works using a wide range of materials to explore social histories, sometimes juxtaposing vibrant landscapes with objects of mourning. Shamel Pitts, 39, Brooklyn, New York, a dancer and choreographer whose collaborative work with the artist group TRIBE, which he founded, imagines futures free from oppression, especially for members of the African diaspora. Wendy Red Star, 43, Portland, Oregon, a visual artist who draws on archival material to challenge colonial narratives and center the perspective of Native Americans. Jason Reynolds, 40, Washington, D.C., a children's and young adult writer, whose genre-crossing books often reflect the experiences of Black children and who encouraged children to tell their own stories as a former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.Dorothy Roberts, 68, Philadelphia, a legal scholar and public policy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who researches the racial inequities in child welfare systems and health systems that have denied agency to especially Black women over their bodies. Keivan G. Stassun, 52, Nashville, Tennessee, a science educator and astronomer at Vanderbilt University who has championed the recruitment of science students from diverse backgrounds, including neurodiverse students, in addition to his research on star evolution. Benjamin Van Mooy, 52, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who studies plankton and the critical role they play in sustaining marine life.Alice Wong, 50 San Francisco, a writer, editor and disability justice activist who founded the Disability Visibility Project in 2014, among other campaigns, to bring attention to the experiences of disabled people and the discrimination and obstacles they face. Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

Mexico's Sheinbaum Takes Office, Making History as First Woman President

By David Alire GarciaMEXICO CITY (Reuters) - When Claudia Sheinbaum takes her oath of office on Tuesday, formally becoming Mexico's first woman...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - When Claudia Sheinbaum takes her oath of office on Tuesday, formally becoming Mexico's first woman president, she will adopt a new government logo that nods to the aspirations of young girls."A young Mexican woman will be the emblem of Mexico's government," Sheinbaum wrote a day earlier in a post on social media, unveiling the logo showing a young woman in profile hoisting a Mexican flag, her hair pulled back into a ponytail not unlike the incoming president's signature look.Sheinbaum has embraced her historic feat in one of Latin America's more socially conservative countries, which until now has been ruled by a series of 65 men since winning its independence from Spain two centuries ago.The former mayor of the sprawling Mexican capital, Sheinbaum has been bolstered by the popularity of outgoing leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, her political benefactor going back nearly a quarter century.But as the former climate scientist steps out of her predecessor's shadow to lead the world's largest Spanish-speaking nation, Sheinbaum will also face doubts and opposition from critics alarmed by the outgoing president's 11th-hour reform drive.Enacted last month, the reforms included a judicial overhaul that will over the next three years replace all of the country's judges with new jurists elected by popular vote."Our hard-won democracy will be transformed, for all practical purposes, into a one-party autocracy," wrote former President Ernesto Zedillo in a Sunday guest essay for Britain's Economist Magazine.Critics of Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum fear their ruling Morena party has too much power, and that democratic checks on executive power will be undermined.The judicial overhaul's implementation will fall to Sheinbaum, who will also face a widening government budget deficit that could crimp popular welfare spending and costly crime-fighting initiatives at a time when the economy is only expected to grow modestly.The 62-year-old Sheinbaum promised continuity on the campaign trail, and now faces the balancing act of advancing Lopez Obrador's state-centric economic polices, especially over natural resources such as oil and minerals, while also making progress on issues seen as his weak points like the environment and security.She also makes history as the first president of Jewish heritage in the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country.Sheinbaum's inauguration caps an unlikely four-decade climb that has taken the daughter of activist academics to the presidential palace.Six years ago, she made history as Mexico City's first elected woman mayor. Until she stepped down last year to run for president, Sheinbaum was known as a data-driven manager, winning plaudits for reducing the megacity's homicide rate by half, by boosting security spending on an expanded police force with higher salaries.She has pledged to replicate the strategy across Mexico, where drug cartels exert widespread influence.Sheinbaum has also promised to continue generous social spending on old-age pensions and youth scholarships, even though the government's 2024 fiscal deficit is estimated at nearly 6% of gross domestic product.While she has expressed interest growing renewable energy projects, she has also said she will ensure the dominance of Mexico's state-owned oil and power companies while opposing any privatizations.In 1995, Sheinbaum earned her doctorate in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and then pursued an academic career, including a stint on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which later shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.She launched her political career in 2000, when Lopez Obrador, then-Mexico City's newly elected mayor, tapped her to be his environmental chief, tasked with improving the smoggy capital's air quality, highways and public transport.Sheinbaum served as the chief spokesperson for Lopez Obrador's first campaign for president in 2006, which he narrowly lost.In 2015, she was elected to run Mexico City's largest borough, Tlalpan, and became the capital's mayor three years later. That was the same year that Lopez Obrador's third bid for the presidency ended in his own triumph, winning by a margin of more than 17 million votes.Last June, Sheinbaum bested her mentor's margin of victory, polling more than 19 million votes ahead of her closest competitor, who was also a woman.(Reporting by David Alire Garcia; Editing by Christopher Cushing)Copyright 2024 Thomson Reuters.

To Save the Sea review – Brent Spar oil rig resounds with song in a Greenpeace musical

Tron, GlasgowNearly 30 years on, environmental activists’ occupation of the North Sea fuel store gets an ambitious, heartfelt musical treatmentThis time last year, Just Stop Oil protestors interrupted a performance of Les Misérables. They reasoned a musical about rebellion was the right place to protest about the impending climate catastrophe. To Save the Sea is also a musical about resistance, but there is no cause for a skirmish. It makes the environmental point brilliantly enough on its own.Written and directed by Isla Cowan and Andy McGregor for Sleeping Warrior, it is a through-composed tribute to the Greenpeace occupation of the Brent Spar oil store in 1995. In today’s pessimistic age, the action stands as a beacon of climate activism; for all its precariousness and near defeat, it made a difference. Continue reading...

This time last year, Just Stop Oil protestors interrupted a performance of Les Misérables. They reasoned a musical about rebellion was the right place to protest about the impending climate catastrophe. To Save the Sea is also a musical about resistance, but there is no cause for a skirmish. It makes the environmental point brilliantly enough on its own.Written and directed by Isla Cowan and Andy McGregor for Sleeping Warrior, it is a through-composed tribute to the Greenpeace occupation of the Brent Spar oil store in 1995. In today’s pessimistic age, the action stands as a beacon of climate activism; for all its precariousness and near defeat, it made a difference.After Brent Spar had fulfilled its purpose, Shell had intended to dump its toxic remnants in the North Sea. Prime minister John Major was on side. The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was not. The Greenpeace occupation captured the imagination of consumers. Shell had the muscle to dispense with the protesters but not the resources to deal with a boycott. The people won out.To Save the Sea. Photograph: Mihaela BodlovicSpotting the potential of this David-and-Goliath conflict, complete with its high-seas drama, Cowan and McGregor field an eight-strong company in a show that bulges with ambition. Where the activists belt out strident musical-theatre anthems with titles such as One Foot in Front of Another and Bring It On, their opponents trade in comic show tunes, the better to send up their roles as villains of the piece. The songs are clear and catchy, giving not only emotional heft to the activists’ commitment but also a sense of jeopardy – not to mention the sting of satire.It would be great to see the show taken up a scale: it calls out for a live band. But as it stands, it is a galvanising ensemble piece. Staged on a rugged gantry designed by Claire Halleran and dramatically lit by Simon Wilkinson, it has heart, humour and political nous.

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