A real comment from someone who believes the 15 minute city conspiracy theory, in response to a post promoting livable city design: "Let’s lock humanity in 15 minutes cities. Ban nature from human life and experiment on a life absolutely disconnected from the environment. Your handlers are proud of your glorification of slavery"
I’ll never cease to be amazed by how some folks can remain steadfastly suspicious of elites—so long as they’re the “liberal” kind. But when conservative elites, billion-dollar media corporations, and culture-war politicians spin up a totalitarian eco-conspiracy about “15-minute cities,” the same folks swallow the story whole. Suddenly, the people who spend their careers tricking working-class Americans into fighting for elite economic interests are recast as our heroes, bravely standing up to globalist tyranny.
“It’s us and ExxonMobil against the prison cities!”
Let’s step back. What does this conspiracy actually accomplish? Nothing—other than getting people to fight for the shackles they don’t even realize they’re already chained to.
Do you feel free when you’re stuck in traffic for hours a day, commuting to a job you probably don’t like, choking on tailpipe exhaust?
Do you feel free when your city is built almost entirely for cars, where a gallon of gas is the price of admission to basic survival?
Does endless suburban sprawl, cul-de-sacs, and food deserts scream liberty to you? Are the 50,000+ Americans who die every year from vehicle-related air pollution “free”?
Take a look at Arizona sprawl, or Atlanta’s traffic, or Los Angeles’ infamous smog. These aren’t dystopian renderings of authoritarian prison cities in 2050. These are the cities we live in today—built not by communist tyrants, but by capitalist ideology and profit-maximizing corporations. Whether the flavor is red-state conservative or blue-state liberal, the logic is the same: design cities for cars, fossil fuels, and developer profits. Human well-being, freedom, and health come last.
This is the bitter irony. The very people railing against “authoritarian 15-minute cities” are defending a system that already strips them of autonomy and choice. A system that dictates: drive or die. A system that forces families into debt just to own a vehicle, then locks them into hours of unpaid labor on the freeway. But because the conspiracy casts this misery as “freedom,” the cage becomes invisible.
What 15-Minute Cities Really Mean
At its core, the “15-minute city” isn’t about control. It’s about convenience. It means being able to walk or bike to the grocery store instead of driving twenty minutes for milk. It means your kids can walk safely to school without crossing six-lane arterials. It means a doctor’s office, a park, and a café are close enough to reach without burning a gallon of gas. It means neighborhoods where elderly people don’t lose their independence the second they can’t drive, and where teenagers don’t need to beg for a ride to meet friends.
In other words: it’s about reclaiming freedom. Freedom from traffic. Freedom from wasted hours of your life idling in gridlock. Freedom from the stress of car dependency and the cost of maintaining a machine that eats up a quarter of your income just so you can function in daily life.
Cities organized around human scale are not some globalist fever dream. They’re simply places designed so human beings can live healthier, easier, more connected lives. Walkable streets, corner groceries, bike paths, and local parks aren’t chains—they’re tools that let us breathe easier, live longer, and spend more of our precious time on the things that actually matter.
Real-World Proof
We don’t have to imagine this. Paris is redesigning streets to prioritize bikes, parks, and local shops so daily life is within easy reach. Barcelona’s “superblocks” are cutting traffic inside neighborhoods and opening space for kids, cafés, and community life. Amsterdam has been proving for decades that a city can thrive with bikes and trams at its core instead of cars.
And closer to home, New York’s transformation of Times Square from a chaotic car-clogged intersection into a pedestrian plaza shows how a single redesign can change the daily experience of millions. Portland, Oregon, has invested for years in bike infrastructure and mixed-use neighborhoods where people can actually live near what they need. Even small towns like Davis, California, long ago built networks that make cycling safer and easier than driving for short trips.
None of this is new or radical. In fact, most American towns and cities before the 1950s were essentially “15-minute cities” by default. People lived near their work, shopped at the corner store, and sent their kids to the neighborhood school—all without needing a car. What changed wasn’t some utopian experiment in human freedom, but the dominance of car companies, oil companies, and developers who profited by dismantling streetcar systems, bulldozing walkable neighborhoods, and replacing them with sprawling, car-dependent suburbs.
So let’s call this what it is: 15-minute cities are just a return to common sense. They’re not a plot to enslave us—they’re a way to unshackle us from a system that already has.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.