How did a vision to make cities more liveable become twisted into a totalitarian dystopia?

Conspiracy theories about Covid and climate change may have lost momentum but the next dubious theory is never far away. Making our cities more liveable and compact is suddenly a secret plan to entrap us.

A design showing Auckland's Queen Street pedestrianised with light rail running through it.

It started as a transformational idea about how our cities should look and feel.

Now it's become a fast-growing world-wide conspiracy.

How did the '15-minute city' concept get so out of hand?

Today, The Detail talks to Auckland University senior lecturer in architecture and planning Bill McKay about the concept, and extremism researcher and author Byron C Clark about the conspiracy.

"It stems from a movement that goes back decades called 'new urbanism', which was basically saying 'we've spent 100 years commuting from suburbs, mainly in cars, we need to get back to a much more sustainable way of doing things," McKay says.

But the idea didn't really reach the mainstream until it was popularised by French professor Carlos Moreno in 2015.

McKay says the style of cities we have in New Zealand are only about 100 years old.

"In New Zealand we take it for granted that we live in suburbs and that we commute to where we need to go, whether it's the supermarket, or dropping kids at school, or going to work," he says.

"It's a highly artificial way of living. So the idea of a 15-minute city is taking us back to how cities used to be hundreds of years ago, where you could actually live not too far from where you worked or where you do your shopping."

He says the car is largely responsible for that change and altering people's perceptions is hard.

"In a way, New Zealanders see their cars a bit like Americans see guns - 'don't you dare try and take that off me'.

"Another way of thinking about cars is they're like pets. They're actually bad for the environment and they spend 95 percent of their time lying around doing nothing, they're way more expensive to keep than you really think, but we love them.

"There's a mix of a love of cars, suspicion about congestion charges, trying to keep cars out of cities, that is being conflated with the 15-minute city notion."

And that could be part of the reason for the growth of the conspiracy in New Zealand.

Clark, the author of Fear: New Zealand's hostile underworld of extremists, has been watching it closely…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details