The Tories say 15-minute cities are sinister. That’s nonsense – here’s the truth

Following hard on the prime minister’s defence of the drivers who are supposedly victimised by London’s Ulez extension, and Penny Mordaunt’s rubbishing of 20mph speed limits in Wales (currently in force in parts of her own constituency), we now have the transport secretary, Mark Harper, denouncing “sinister … so-called 15-minute cities”.

This dismissal of measures that provide safer, pleasanter and more sustainable urban living is being pressed in the name of “freedom”: the freedom of city-dwellers to live unharassed by meddling environmentalist do-gooders; the freedom, in Sunak’s words, of drivers “to use their cars to do all the things that matter to them” – a liberty supposedly under threat from the “anti-motorist” Labour party.

It is not difficult to counter this rhetoric, beginning with Sunak’s risible attempt to divide between “drivers” and a “woke” community that supposedly never gets behind the wheel of a car. Harper’s attempt to cast advocates of cleaner air and pedestrianised streets as lefty enthusiasts of totalitarian traffic management is equally ludicrous. Such a view of “things that matter” shows little concern for the safety of children and their need for space to play, or the peace of mind of parents and carers. Nor does it recognise those more complex human beings who drive and approve of the freedoms protected by “anti-motorist” laws, and are happy to obey them.

The idea of less car-dominated streets is hardly new. It is almost 50 years since the woonerven acquired legal status in the Netherlands; they are areas in which pedestrians and cyclists have priority over motorists. Vehicles can move at walking pace in – but not through – the woonerf, which is above all a convivial space where people can stroll, meet, talk and play. Municipalities across Europe, and even some in the UK, have been implementing similar schemes for decades.

It is barely believable that initiatives such as low-traffic neighbourhoods and the Ulez in London are under attack, at a time when rising carbon emissions make the greening of cities all the more urgent. Yet despite the vicious manner in which the Tories have begun to rail against these schemes, the Labour leadership has so far lacked the courage and imagination to make the case for them. Indeed, Labour reportedly ditched plans for a UK-wide Ulez extension after the Uxbridge byelection, and in response to recent Tory attacks has merely criticised the government record on potholes and petrol prices.

This is more alarming given the urgent need for politicians (and all of us) to focus, beyond the particular issue of cars in cities, on the policies essential to major ecological reconstruction. There are voices on the right calling for net zero to be deferred – or even abandoned, in the case of Nigel Farage – because getting there will be too painful. Left-of-centre politicians understandably, but implausibly, look to technological innovation to allow us to go on with our customary lifestyles: to turn up the air conditioning when it gets hot, to buy as many cheap flights and cars as we choose, to consume as lavishly as we can afford. Renewed and accelerated economic growth – partly engendered by the expansion of green production (for instance, of electric cars) – will supposedly ensure that everybody is getting better off, so nobody will mind if the richest 1% continue to own almost half the world’s wealth.

In the current framing of the debate on greening the future, neither side has suggested that we might not want to persist for ever in the exploitative and acquisitive way of life to which we have become accustomed. The consensus holds across the party political divide that we must at all costs preserve the consumerist lifestyle. However, to talk only of the pains of changed consumption is to ignore the many downsides to the “good life” of western affluence – the stress, time-scarcity, insecurity, pollution and toxic waste – and the benefits to be had from moving to a less growth- and work-driven way of living.

Creating a sustainable economic order will certainly require changes in the everyday lives of most people, especially in rich countries. (It will also require greater equality, and the promotion of collective rather than individual interests, which is why it should be especially a project of the left.) But such changes can be framed and pursued as enabling a more convivial, enjoyable and fulfilling existence. In reflecting on the wider politics of eco-transition, we can learn from the hopeful and, ultimately, hedonistic dynamic that has powered the development of woonerven and similar projects that aim for more livable towns and cities.

A positive vision of a green renaissance is essential once we acknowledge that we are not entering a short period of adjustment, after which business as usual can resume, but embarking on a decades-long transition. Security and a good life for everyone will be the objective, on the basis of a circular and reproductive – and thus necessarily post-capitalist – economy. It is not reasonable to expect progressive politicians to declare that they already have a blueprint for this transition, let alone to spell out each step on the way.

But an imaginative vision of the society it might inaugurate is badly needed, at a time when our vision of the future, reduced to avoidance or mitigation of climate catastrophe, is devoid of utopian hope. If left-leaning politicians do not acknowledge the need for far-reaching transformation, and do not persuade voters to support the changes it will require, the populist right is poised to implement its own agenda: an agenda of defiant ecological inaction, plus the mobilisation via the culture war of resentment against anyone – migrants, “woke” ecologists and greens, cyclists, the scientific elite – who can be made scapegoats for the crises that lie in wait.