On The Prisoner television show

McGill University campus, 1940s

The Beatles “Revolution 9” could be used as a surrealistic sound track, played over a psychedelic montage of images, for Patrick McGoohan’s television drama, The Prisoner (1967-1968). The protagonist in The Prisoner is played by McGoohan, a former secret agent who suddenly resigns his post but offers no explanation for his decision. McGoohan’s former employer finds his sudden resignation suspicious and McGoohan is abducted from his home and finds himself incarcerated at an unknown seaside location referred to as The Village; his identity is also attacked, he is referred to by his new name, Number Six; the head of The Village is, of course, Number One. The Village is a precursor, and suggestive of, the 15-minute city; in this case it is a place to keep former government employees, all with numbers for names, and they live in relative freedom (the freedom of farm animals), socializing, playing chess, reading The Village newspaper, and some inhabitants are informers on other inhabitants of The Village. The Village is no gulag, it might be called a benevolent incarceration, it is comfortable but no one can leave and the authorities are always attempting to either control or get information out of the inhabitants, and they are all prisoners. But Number Six is not a typical inhabitant, he fights back, he tries to escape. When interrogated Number Six repeats, “I Am Not a Number; I Am a Free Man”; his strength lies in his not surrendering to his jailers, his remaining freedom lies in his refusal to give up information about himself. He says, "I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own!"  The whole series of seventeen episodes is a metaphor for our own existence; who do we believe and what do we believe? There is a penalty for noncompliance with the authorities, it is to be an outcast, detained, attacked, and denied one’s freedom; it is to be gaslighted. While other inhabitants of The Village have been pacified, Number Six constantly challenges the authority of his jailers; he is more determined than the other prisoners. No one escapes from The Village, attempted escape results in being chased down by an ominous giant inflated object called Rover, and inhabitants of The Village are constantly surveilled by CCTV. The Village is a dystopia somewhere between George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; it predates the 15 minute city. What else can we take from The Prisoner? It is that we are now, and have always been, prisoners, prisoners of ideas, race, social class, wealth, privilege or poverty, politics, our birth, gender, age, and/or religion, and this has decided the purpose and meaning of our existence. Our prison is self made and no one can free you but yourself. The Beatles were fans of The Prisoner and a Beatles song, “All You Need is Love”, was played during in the final episode; is it any wonder that the refrain, "Number Nine, Number Nine", is repeated in The Beatles most idiosyncratic song, “Revolution 9”? The Prisoner is both a psychological and political metaphor for contemporary life, now more so than in 1967. I nominate Laurence Fox to play in any remake of The Prisoner or a life of Patrick McGoohan.                                                         

Be seeing you.

The promise of the 15 Minute City

     

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half-alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

--The Who, “Won't Get Fooled Again"

Here is a definition of the 15 Minute city, from a Wikipedia article; it is  

an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city.[4] This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.

The 15 minute city sounds lovely, we can all live in small communities and have all the amenities of life within walking distance, no cars, no traffic, no hustle and bustle, no hassle! Only pollution free air as we ride our bicycles waving to each other, to the fellow walking on the sidewalk by a florist shop where he stops to converse with the shop owner and buy a few roses for his partner. It is all happiness and community living! And if you suggest the opposite, that the 15 Minute City is a nightmare waiting to happen, a way to control the movement of the population, you are a right wing conspiracy nut. But that is exactly where we know the 15 Minute City is leading, we all know it; for instance, a CBC article published on 26 June 2024 reads "Edmonton promises residents 'freedom of movement' to calm concerns around 15-minute cities". 

Urban planners have not solved the problem of homelessness so why would we believe they can provide the utopia of a 15 minute city? We saw how major cities in China, during the covid episode, isolated parts of cities with walls and guards, the movement of inhabitants were strictly controlled, some were kept isolated in their apartments and were supplied with groceries only out of the kindness of relatives and friends, some went hungry. Some people managed to escape and buy groceries outside of the area of their very real imprisonment. The 15 Minute City is ideal for times of pandemics, it is designed for limiting people's freedom of movement, and limiting information being communicated from one group to another. It is also a time for the abrogation of freedom of speech.

What we now have in all of our cities — homelessness, unemployment, and food insecurity —won’t be solved by the 15 minute city; there is no quick fix for these social problems and the 15 Minute City won’t change this, it will only make it easier to control people. It occurs to me that some 15 minute cities will be homeless encampments, isolated to protect the inhabitants of other 15 minute cities from poor people, drug addicts, and people labelled undesirable by what remains of the middle class. We already have this, it is part of urban living. Problems that aren't solved now won't be suddenly solved by the  15 minute city; they will only continue and get worse. This is common sense.

In different ways our society is disintegrating, what we had is a thing of the past and what we are left with is the detritus of the past. For instance, in Canada we live in fear of losing our family doctors, the family doctor is increasingly a thing of the past as is the middle class and the aspirations of the middle class: too many people can no longer afford to buy a house in which to raise their family, some can't afford to rent an apartment; a growing number of people are unemployed and unhoused; food banks can't keep up with the growing number of people using their services; there are a growing number of people who are addicted to fentanyl and other drugs. The 15 minute city is a fairly shallow diversion from these growing problems; the old society has collapsed and the new society is one defined by globalization and progressive ideology. We are deluged with immigrants, they are cheap labour, just when citizens can't find work and are criticized for not taking low paying jobs; in the 1980s and 1990s we exported our jobs to the Third World, now we are importing the Third World to work here. Under the present regime our population has exploded to 41M people; the floodgates for immigration are open and yet our society can't house, employ, or feed our current population. 

A study at McGill University  (from McGill’s Institutional Communications, 21 June 2024) is redefining the 15 Minute City, 

Published in the Journal of Urban Mobility, the study examines travel behaviour and geospatial data from Montreal and finds, contrary to expectations, that only a small fraction of households can feasibly meet all their daily needs within 15 minutes of home using active transportation.

"Our study challenges the notion of a one-size-fits-all approach to urban planning,” says Ahmed El-Geneidy, Professor at McGill University’s School of Urban Planning. “While the 15-minute city concept has gained momentum globally, our research emphasizes the importance of locally relevant strategies that consider the diverse needs and realities of communities."

The research suggests a 30-minute model may be more realistic for North American cities, provided appropriate urban-design changes are made. Furthermore, the researchers underscore the need for urban-sustainability strategies that address not only travel behaviours but also neighborhood characteristics, household dynamics and social equity concerns.

If the 15 minute city becomes a 30 minute city, and then the 30 minute city becomes the 60 minute city, then what we have is what we already have, a “city” with the same problems that we are now facing. The 15 minute city is about social control and keeping citizens isolated; don’t be fooled again, it is a false utopia as are all utopias, nothing else. 

Addendum: in this article published on 27 August 2024 citizens of Brandon, Manitoba, fear the 15 minute city will be imposed on them. 

Poundbury, The Village, and the 15 Minute City

On television, a few days before the coronation of King Charles III, there was a programme on Charles's idea of a model village, Poundbury, in the south of England. This community was designed by Charles in the 1980s to highlight his concept of the perfect community; for instance, everything is within walking distance and cars are restricted or banned. These are all fairly commonplace ideas today but, when imposed by someone who has more privileges than any of us, it is a bit galling: it is the limited and privileged vision of someone who has had it all and now thinks he can impose his vision on other people, for their betterment. I was repelled by Poundbury, it seemed to me to be a place of social control made acceptable with the inhabitants' consent; they like living in this place or they'd live somewhere else. It's a community for the managerial class. There are rules and regulations for everything, enforced by a town council, and reinforced with the peer pressure of a homogeneous population. 

       This programme on Poundbury immediately reminded me of The Village, the setting for most of the episodes of The Prisoner television series broadcast in 1967-1968; this was a very popular programme, disturbing, dystopian, and Orwellian, starring Patrick McGoohan. The Village is a place for containing people who know too much regarding British intelligence; they have been warehoused in The Village, put out to a benevolent pasture, kept alive and in a comfortable prison life, but without bars, without cells; if you behave and accept life in The Village you will do well there. Meanwhile, someone like Number Six, played by Patrick McGoohan (none of the inhabitants of The Village have names, they are referred to by a number), is tolerated and even indulged. What the authorities ostensibly want from Number Six is to know why he quit his job at MI5 or MI6. But this is really beside the point, the mission of his captors is to break him down, make him lose his own thoughts, make him into a number, make him believe the concept of reality they want him to believe, as happened to Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. 

    The other comparison with Poundbury is the 15 Minute City, another form of potential social control that seems, on the surface, to be benign and even a lovely place to live one day. However, this is an example of urban planning gone wrong, it suggests that the best community is one in which all of the necessities of life -- grocery stores, pharmacies, places of work, schools -- are easily reached within a fifteen minute walk or bicycle ride. It almost sounds good except that many of us have always lived in a place where everything is available within a fifteen minute walk; but we didn't talk about it or try to make it something it isn't, it was the organic expression of city life, the way we live, and for many people it still is. 

    Where I live everything is within walking distance, it always has been; that is city life, that is living in a community that is part of a neighbourhood that is part of a borough that is part of a city. No one feels contained by where they live, it is nothing special; when it becomes something "special", needlessly part of a new urban planning idea, then it takes on other qualities; there is a dark, shadow side to all of this happiness and convenience that is imposed on us. Post-Covid many people are working from home, and some people have quit their jobs because they no longer want to work in an office, or live in the city where their workplace is located. Urban planning is trying to re-invent the wheel, and it is coming out square and not round; if you oppose their idea of the future city you are some kind of conspiracy nut, but that is just their way of dealing with anyone who disagrees with them. An extension of the 15 Minute City is the fenced off gated communities already existing in the United States, with a guard at the entrance. You walk everywhere and if you have a mobility problem you will get around on a golf cart, but there are consequences to living in the 15 Minute Gated City, or The Village . . . 

    Do we really want to live in this type of place? There will be no room here for the exceptional, the eccentric, the rebellious, the odd ball who lets his grass grow long and his ramshackle house unpainted. Whether it is Poundbury or The Village or the 15 Minute City these are places for the unimaginative managerial class, the values of this class will control all of us. And, no doubt, fences will be put up around those other unfortunate communities, the homeless (now referred to as the "unhoused") who inhabit parts of many North American cities. No, they are not "unhoused", they are homeless with all of the pathos, suffering, and terrible insecurity this word suggests; to be "unhoused" is an antiseptic word that denies the emotional meaning of living on the street. 

    And what of the arts, spirituality, free thinkers, anarchists or nihilists, odd balls and misfits, the angry, the grieving, or the ecstatic; what if you let your place deteriorate, will you be isolated by peer pressure or a council investigation? This is not a place of barking dogs, crowded streets, the smell of someone's cooking, living cheek to jowl with your neighbours so you can hear them fighting, laughing, talking, humanity as lived by the poor, the artist class, the thinkers, or the way things were in the past that many immigrants to North America experienced; immigrants produced ambitious people who worked hard to make money and move up the social ladder, and they even improved society with jobs and philanthropy; this is not included or suggested, or can even exist in a place like Poundbury or The Village, there is nothing suggesting social mobility, creativity, or freedom of thought in those places; they are retirement living, places of stasis. 

    A recent newspaper article on Glasgow has a subtitle, "Scotland's biggest city is a brawny celebration of industry, ingenuity and individualism", things not found in Poundbury, the Village, or the 15 Minute City. Montreal is a city of neighbourhoods, each distinctive, just as New York City is a city of boroughs, all different and unique -- Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island -- just their names resonate with qualities of distinctiveness, ambition, vibrancy, and life. There is a totalitarian feeling to Poundbury, a place that is a reflection of King Charles's concept of an ideal society; but what does he know about how average people live or what they aspire to? It's a good thing he is only a king and has no real power, and being king he will be limited in what he is allowed to say about the future of society. 

    Be seeing you.