The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Rhinoceros Party from their Donkeys' Party.
Today we drive our SUV down to the Values Lab to look at the concept of 15-minute cities. Is this just a crank preoccupation?
And of course, there’s the perennial High Traffic Online Neighbourhood that is Charlie’s Attic, this week including polling on what counts as ‘almost half’.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
'15-minute cities'
The last few weeks have seen the notion of so-called ’15-minute cities’ placed at the centre of intense controversy. Originally a niche idea developed by planners and architects, it has been attacked by Tory MPs – and, subsequently, taken up by conspiracy theorists – after global cities including London began to pilot the notion. It now risks becoming the latest ‘culture war’ hot button issue.
Indeed, campaigners in Oxford recently took to the streets, ostensibly to march against Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) but with a wider focus on 15-minute cities. (These latter two things are in fact completely different but have become conflated within the debate).
Campaigners against 15-minute cities have been mocked by the Guardian here and debunked by Full Fact here. And there is no shortage of online explainers, like this one or this one, about what 15-minute-cities really are. This piece argues that advocates of the idea need to explain it better.
One thing we know from our values work – and one reason why myth-busting explainers often fail – is that core motivations tend to drive responses to policies. Hence, we thought we’d leave our idyllic urban village, hop on the bike, and mosey down to the Values Lab to see what people think of 15-minute cities.
The chart below shows which of the following two ways of living the three values segments prefer, forced to choose between two options:
‘A community where the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, shops, pubs etc are several miles away’;
‘A community where the houses are smaller and closer together, but schools, shops, pubs etc are within walking distance’.
This, in a nutshell, is the 15-minute city distinction, with fans of the concept tending to prefer the latter model.
As we can see from the chart, not all values groups prefer the latter model. In particular, there is a big difference between ethics-driven Pioneers, who tend to favour it and aspirational Prospectors who tend not to. Socially conservative Settlers are much more even, combining, perhaps, a ‘home is my castle’ instinct and a nostalgic craving for community.
Why might Pioneers and Prospectors disagree? The answer is probably that the former are motivated by inner fulfilment, and tend to be more focused on social connections, whereas Prospectors are outer-directed and see houses as an identifier of status.
The core point here is that, underlying the 15-minute-cities debate, there is a genuine attitudinal difference within society: clearly, it will be harder to sell the idea to the Prospector population who increasingly form the largest segment of people in urban areas in particular. This runs counter to the normative claim, put forward by Pioneers online, that ultra-localism is a no brainer – which only conspiracists would balk at. And it perhaps explains why, at a time when their party is flagging in the polls, Tory MPs might be pulling at this particular thread.
And finally this week Charlie’s Attic, your intellectual commute from the city centre to the edge of town:
Allow your jaw to drop at how southern-centric the UK population is.
