I had the privilege yesterday of hearing a series of talks by researchers at the University of Glasgow on 20 minute neighbourhoods.1 The talks covered areas like evidence surveys of health associations, GIS methods,2 and engagement with historical amenities.
I was vaguely aware that this kind of initiative is sometimes conflated with (ultra) low emission zones, and in recent years sometimes receives a hostile response from some audiences. So, in the Q&A, I asked if this had been their experience, what they think the causes of the hositility were, and what (if anything) is best to do about it.
The researchers had encountered such responses, and the coordinator sent a link to a youtube video introducing the research they were involved in. Only around 2% of those who viewed the video decided to comment on it, but it surprised me that the vast majority did express the kind of hostility I was thinking about. The top few comments are indicative:
The WEF would love a hunger game society so it is great to see that citizens are fighting back against this ultimate dystopia control.
what a scam, while the people planned these 20 min neighbourhoods are flying in private jets and eating kobe beef. lol
20 minute, 15 minute, 10 minute, 5 minute, until your minutes are tied to your social credit score, your digital Id, your Va$zxiNation status and limited by whatever restrictions you’re under for wrong-think. Utterly despicable .
Only by the fifth ranked comment is there a response broadly supportive of the initiative, though is more lamenting than hopeful:
I live in a nearby Glasgow satellite (Paisley). There are 80,000 people and no supermarket within walking distance of the town centre never mind a Cartier store.
It’s a post industrial ghetto.
Even the socially conscious Co-op left 10 years go.
On the possible reasons for such responses, the researchers suggests that COVID may be a factor. On what to do about it, there was less clarity, except to be mindful that many people may not change their mind on such issues, so engaging with them might not be worth the time involved.
The COVID explanation definitely seems part of it, and is evident in some of the examples above. 2020 and 2021 was a confusing time, and the popularity of conspiracy theories which offered ‘answers’ seems to have grown as a result. Within the conspiracy theory linking Lockdown to ULEZ and walkable neighbourhoods, Lockdown was a dress rehearsal, an attempt to understand just how pliant and willing to give up on hard earned freedoms the populace at large would be when told such restrictions were necessary and temporary. Initiatives like Walkable Neighbourhoods are then framed as something like ‘the next phase’, initiatives which curtail freedom on a permanent rather than temporary basis, with the ultimate endpoint being something like ‘prison cities’, where everyone is controlled and monitored at all times in some kind of Orwellian nightmare.
Clearly, there seems to be a lot of imputation and extrapolation involved in getting from ‘being able to walk to school while passing some nice buildings’ to 1984. But perhaps having a preexisting set of assumptions, which link driving to freedom and so walking to tyranny, is something that makes people more susceptible to the conspiratorial way of thinking outlined above. Let’s consider this some more.
In surveys of household affluence from decades gone by, my understanding3 is that some surveys used to ask UK adults questions along the lines of: “How many cooked meals with meat did you eat in the last week?” The idea of such questions was that, if people could afford to eat more meat, they would do. Such questions were considered unobtrusive measures of individual and household means, because the individual wants, to eat as much meat as one could afford to do so, was simply taken as given.
A few years ago Gapminder generalised something like this principle to international development, providing simple but graphic illustrations of how what people eat, drink, and use as transport varies across four very broad income levels. I’ve made this illustration the main image for this blog post.
If we look at income level 1, under $2 a day, people are obligate walkers, and they’re likely to be obligate vegans, relying on a simple grain to survive. As they reach higher levels, they start to be able to afford to augment their simple stable dish with vegetables, spices and meat. And they start to move from walking, to being able to afford a bicycle, then a motorcycle, then finally a car. The changing transport mode is presented as what people move onto when they can afford to do so, with each form presenting new found physical freedoms to go along with the new found financial freedoms their higher income level now affords them.
My suspicion is that many people who adopted the kind of conspiracy theory sketched above, which leads to the kind of hostile comments to the kind of walkability initiatives being discussed, did so because they internalised something like the Gapminder model of development both too deeply and too crudely. In particular, they conflate driving with money and freedom, and so not driving with poverty and restriction. I suspect it’s easier to subscribe to the car=freedom equation when you have direct experience of not being able to afford to own or run a car, of driving being a genuine hard-won freedom. In social epi parlance, I suspect there’s likely to be a socioeconomic gradient in hostility to walkability initiatives, as for many poorer people the idea of not being allowed to do something you can only just afford to do (and want to do in large part because you can only just afford to do), would seem inherently perverse.
Personally, as a city-dwelling vegetarian, my intuitions are all in support of Walkability initiatives. I’m just trying to be mindful of how those with different circumstances may look at the same things, but see something very different!
Footnotes
This generalises to ‘x minute neighbourhoods’, e.g. 15 minute neighbourhoods, 30 minute neighbourhoods, 10 minute neighbourhoods.↩︎
In practice this seemed to be the identification of whether and how many common amenities are within 800 metres of someone’s home.↩︎
Please correct me if I’m wrong, or provide an example or two if I’m not. I wasn’t able to find an example dataset before, so might be confabulating this!↩︎