A Communist “Urbanate”

In light of the devastating fires in Los Angeles, it is important to mention that Los Angeles is one of the 100 or so cities that are part of the C40 Cities Initiative, a program developed by the United Nations to address the manufactured crisis of global warming/climate change and the globalist goals to remake the cities into their vision.  This vision happens to coincide with The Ideal Communist City. A 166-page book, written in 1968 in Milan, describes in detail the architects’ vision of building the perfect communist city. https://www.c40.org/

I had lived in a communist city for 20 years and it is no walk in the park, but Giancarlo de Carlo wrote about a view of a communist city which sounds eerily similar to the 15-minute cities of today proposed by globalist modern planners to transform our cities into self-contained prisons from which one can only escape via public transit. Residents cannot have a private vehicle and there are no public garages. Living space is dictated per person and the city itself is limited to a certain number of residents, all clustered within walking distance of where they work, play, shop, go to school, or entertain.

Supporters of the C40 Cities Initiative are the Open Society Foundations, Uber, FedEx, Google, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the UK Government, and the European Union. World Bank is a designated Partner.

The 15-minute city plan for Los Angeles is called the Livable Communities Initiative (LCI), “a plan to address LA’s housing, traffic and climate crisis by building 3-5 stories of gentle density above small retail along carefully chosen commercial streets that are transformed to be walkable, bikeable, and livable.” It is unclear what “gentle density” means and who makes these decisions, but it is not hard to speculate. It is also interesting to imagine how older people would bike and walk where they need to go. As Democrat communists have repeated, “never let a crisis go to waste,” and the scorched earth crisis in LA is the perfect opportunity to remake the city in the globalist vision promised by Biden to “build back better.” https://www.livablecommunitiesinitiative.com/

The livable communities website describes Mobility as “Creating a walkable, bikeable life where everyone can safely and pleasantly walk, bike, trike, use a golf cart, and access great transit, allows for housing without parking – a key tool in creating abundance of homes that are affordable to workers and moderate to low income households.”

An Urbanate will have all facilities needed for a prison-like community, i.e., schools, hospitals, shopping malls, waste management, recycling, sports centers, and public green areas. It is presented as a resort type where residents will have the highest standard of living possible. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/2198520

Because cities have been built by poor planning, the technate wants to erase them and build urbanates from a clean slate. Why bother to solve problems in the existing cities? The future of urban consumption in a 1.5°C world

Klaus Schwab of the WEF said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in 2015 that Los Angeles will be “Private Car-Driven-Free by 2030, transforming highways into parks and other public spheres.” Klaus Schwab: Los Angeles to Be "Private Car-Driven-Free" by 2030

The proposed 15-minute cities within the technocrats’ Urbanates appear eerily like the Ideal Communist City written about in 1968. This communist design concept is a world-wide urbanization called the New Unit of Settlement, built upon the “rich heritage left by Soviet architecture and urbanism in the 1920s.” The goal was to create the city of the future, “the material substructure of communist society.”

Having lived under communism for 20 years, I am familiar with the grey concrete apartments clustered around a shopping center that seldom had any food available and when it did, the lines were endless. These high-rise apartments were like prisons with reinforced concrete and 650 square feet of space for a family of three, about the size of an American hotel room.

The Ideal Communist City required “massive territorial-industrial complexes and the regrouping of vast populations at selected geographical points.”

To make an ideal communist city, architects proposed the distribution and re-ordering of the total population, i.e., “sizes of groups to be housed in communist society, limits on size of residential areas, distances between such areas, dynamics and discontinuity of the urbanization process.”

The need of each human being for food, clothing, and shelter was to be determined by planners, and the population’s movements to shape and control social processes. (pp. 15-17) Interior furnishings and exterior architecture and colors had to be determined by planners.

Now I understand why suddenly all the fast-food restaurants across the U.S. have remodeled their happy and colorful exteriors and interior furniture into various shades of grey, black, and beige, without the previously large windows, happy interior furniture, and play areas for children. They must have had a joint conference of Bauhaus utilitarian architecture to discourage humans from lingering inside and socializing.

Communist architects recommended the “intensive use of space in modern [high rise] buildings.” The residential complex will have lower-rise buildings for overnight nurseries and elementary schools, and high-rise structures for residential units for adults.”

The communist planners suggested that children be separated from their parents at some point while they were tended to by scientifically trained educators because “mere experience of life and paternal or maternal sentiments are not enough to equip a person to teach correctly a member of society.” (p. 56)

The children were to be housed in low-rise buildings away from their parents. “It is said that a socialized system of education is inhumane toward parents, for it takes their children away and does not give them a chance to see them and participate in their education.” (p. 56)

The ideal communist city with such residential hubs would not allot more than 225 square feet per person and 50-75 square feet for a small child’s play and sleep. (p. 66)

“The spatial isolation of apartments in high-rise residential blocks allows the concentration of a very large number of people in a relatively small space and the creation of an efficient system of services.” (pp. 69-70)

The three basic apartment prototypes suggested were for single individuals, for couples, and for two couples (a generation of older people and a younger couple with children). (p. 71)

The architects of this ideal communist city call their residential hubs/prisons, new unit of settlement (NUS). Each NUS sector, with a radius of 1.2 miles, was planned for 100,000 residents and many regions with NUS settlements. It sounds like a controlled ghetto. The architects of 1968 called such zones “rationally planned areas.”

They proposed that NUS will relate to other new units of settlement via a system of rapid transportation, unifying the whole urbanized region. The architects proposed the “distribution of the labor force with equal efficiency over the whole region and regulate the immigration of people into an urbanized region in addition to its normal population expansion by settling other persons in new units of settlement (NUS).” The entire population would be distributed across the ghettos called NUS. The “ideal communist city” had a rigidly set population size for each NUS. (p. 114)

The new units of settlement were planned on a pedestrian scale, elimination of danger from vehicular traffic, and green belts, all on 200 acres. Each high-rise was densely populated. Consumer services were provided for 25,000 people at a time. (p. 118-119)

The logic of this kind of change from cities to “smart cities,” “ideal cities,” “15-minute cities,” “urbanates,” or whatever the government decides to call it, is standardization, multiform construction, total population and mobility control, uniformity (Bauhaus ugly), and rewilding of land no longer allowed to human trespassing. The excuse is that we must save the planet from human destruction, an idea heavily promoted by the profitable climate change industry.

“Technically perfect high-rise buildings are seen as the ascetic spirit.” (p. 159) Having lived in such communist high-rise concrete buildings (5-9 stories apartment complexes), I can assure you that our spirit was not just ascetic, it was depressed, oppressed, and devoid of humanity and compassion for fellow residents  who lived in the same state of hunger, lack of freedom, mobility, and government tyranny.

Read the file about SmartLA 2028, published in December 2020. You will find many similarities. https://ita.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph1626/files/2021-05/SmartLA2028%20-%20Smart%20City%20Strategy.pdf?trk=public_post_comment-text

The SmartLA 2028 blueprint displays a map of Pacific Palisades, Santa Monica, and Hollywood areas, now seriously fire damaged. What a coincidence!

 

 

 

 

 

15-Minute Cities Or Climate Lockdowns

U.N. Agenda 21/2030 is closer than ever to completion. One component, the 15-minute city/neighborhood, is being imposed in the U.S. without the informed consent and vote of the community, just as they had introduced the ICLEI membership into many parts of the U.S. decades ago.

ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) is now Local Governments for Sustainability. Environmental ‘Sustainability’ is the lynchpin of U.N. Agenda 21/2030 and ICLEI is the non-governmental organization (NGO) that promotes it to local governments around the world.

ICLEI, an NGO headquartered initially in Germany (now has 20 offices around the world, including New York), sent activists to board meetings and presented regional plans and local plans with new designs for communities, without the input of the local communities affected.

People were busy, so they thought other community members voted for the mixed-use development plans to fight the imaginary global warming and therefore it had to be good. Who would not want green spaces, bike lanes, and endless parks?

NGOs vilified the developed way of life, fossil fuels, use of cars, and our mobility. But the goal turned out to be a lot more than just the greening of the planet, reducing pollution, and undependable green energy, it was about total control of every facet of human activity, the carbon footprint taxation, and the CO2 capture. The climate change industry was born when the global warming narrative proved to be just a scam.

U.N. and its affiliated green NGOs introduced five-minute walk or bike to work/school, commuting by train, mixed-use high raise tiny apartments without parking garages and businesses on the first floor to save the planet from global warming Armageddon.

Young and gentrified urban neighborhoods welcomed the plan, bike lanes were introduced everywhere with very few users. But the rest of America was not so sold on the idea because Americans live in a vast country, and they love the freedom of the road.

The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset pushed the idea of living in an expanded 15-minute neighborhood with amenities to satisfy most urbanites. They won’t call it a climate lockdown, or an expensive concentration of apartment dwellers who cannot leave their area and intrude on other areas without a penalty. Those are details that are not specifically addressed. If they did, few would love the idea.

The WEF is introducing it as the “biggest urban ideas to emerge from the pandemic, the 15-minute city or 15-minute neighborhood,” imagined by the Colombian-French urbanist Carlos Moreno, the son of a Colombian farmer, now a professor in France. Moreno was a member of the left-wing M-19 movement when he fled Colombia at the age of 20. He is an advisor to the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, a Spanish-French politician who is a member of the Socialist Party.

In 2020 Moreno published two articles “Urban life and proximity at the time of Covid-19” in Editions de l’Observatoire, and “Droit de Cite, de la ville-monde a la ville du quart d’heure” (Freedom of the city, from the world city to the city of the quarter of an hour), in Editions de l’Observatoire.

Moreno’s idea is that everything you need to live, i.e., shops, schools, work, doctor’s offices, parks, libraries, restaurants, and everything else that makes life worth living is located within “a short 15-minute walk or bike ride from home.” The neighborhood zone becomes an ‘isochrone.’

What is an isochrone (iso=same, chrone=time)? Isochrones are maps that show the areas you can reach within a travel time limit. The only difference between a forced camp and these zones is the fact that camps had tall walls and locked gates, but the 15-minute neighborhood zone has electronic gates and cameras that take your picture and fine you later.

Having lived under communism for twenty years, I understand the limitations of city travel, of village travel, and the limited travel radius within and without the city or village that we were allowed by the government and by our own facility to travel, given the limited modes of transportation at our disposal, walking, bike, train, or buses vis-à-vis our limited means to buy ticket prices or monthly subsidized passes. Permission had to be sought to move from place to place if a person stayed more than a week in a relative’s home. And nobody could move from any village to the nearest city without government permission.

One must parcel the 15-minute city into small spaces. Who needs so much space? Who needs a car and parking spaces? You can’t find what you need in the 15-minute neighborhood? Too bad, you can only leave your zone so many times a year without having to pay a fine. There will be e-gates that will monitor your cars if you leave and there will be facial recognition software taking your picture as you drive away to see your sister who happens to live in the next parceled zone, both controlled by e-gates.

Fifteen-minute cities or neighborhoods to save the planet from climate change Armageddon? It is a climate lockdown and the excuse is CO2, the gas of plant life. Ask Katie Hopkins.

The city of Oxford, she said, will be divided into six parts. “You will only have the freedom to operate in the part that you live in.” If you want to go out of your zone, you will have to go out on an approved route on the outside of the city to re-enter another section of the city.” You will not be allowed to cross other zones. If you do, electronic gates and facial recognition will know that you have crossed an unauthorized zone. You can apply for permission to visit another zone, but you will only be allowed to do this 100 times per year. The Oxford Council passed this monstrosity, and it will be implemented within two years. The fine for going over the allowed visits on your pass is £100, $122.43. https://youtu.be/wkZDcVFIxRI?si=tGdddjvcYgQL5EfM

The half-baked idea of 15-minute cities was sold because cars pollute, you must hunt for a parking space, CO2 is bad for the planet even though it is the gas of plant life and without it, we can’t grow much food nor get oxygen from CO2-absorbing trees that produce oxygen.

Melbourne already jumped on the wagon with 800-meter radius communities.

Portland’s Climate Action Plan “calls for more vibrant neighborhood in which 90% of the resident can walk or bike to fulfill their daily needs.”

People already know what a mess Portland is in, yet they are proposing to spend $750 million on a climate action plan.

Paris, with its mayor Anne Hidalgo and her advisor Carlos Moreno, has been pushing the idea since 2020 – promote active mobility instead of cars. Car speed is 30 km/hr., cars are banned along the Seine one Sunday each month, and bike lanes will be installed on every street by 2024.

What a kumbaya these 15-minutes of freedom cities/neighborhoods will be! Mixed-used developments, no parking, no cars, residences (notice how they don’t call them apartments or homes), schools, shops, doctors, restaurants stand side by side in “diverse neighborhoods.” The new model for the larger city has “devolved into small, repeating parts.”

But America is a “suburban nation” and WEF recognizes that the concept is not a good fit. Perhaps Manhattan or Brooklyn, parts of Boston and Cambridge, but the rest of America can only have the 15-minute city by car. The 15-minute city meets human needs but leaves desires wanting | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

What about the non-affluent neighborhoods where theft and crime are rampant, where businesses are closing shops and leaving? Where do they fit in the new grand scheme of reengineering humanity?

What about small towns spread out and villages? How are they going to parcel them out? And who is policing the comings and goings of residents and administering fines? And how is every ‘climate lockdown zone’ going to acquire doctors, hospitals, clinics, cinemas, museums, theaters, operas, universities, schools?

 

 

 

Travel While You Can

Cherry blossoms 
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2022

Travel will soon become a thing of the past. Not only are the globalists getting ready to shut down commercial airports, destroying all the industries dependent on travel, but air transportation will no longer be available to the masses, it will only be allowed to those who have billions, who can afford their own jets, and have enough money for landing fees at the few remaining commercial and private airports.

Besides the interdiction of a large contingent of combustion engine cars in EU cities by 2050, air conditioning, gas stoves, gas heating systems, wood-fired ovens, and other amenities that make modern life more comfortable and livable will disappear in the U.S. By 2050 only electric vehicles will be allowed on EU roads. No Fossil Fuels-Powered Cars in Europe Cities by 2050 - autoevolution

In the new digital currency world being implemented rapidly around the globe, travel will be a privilege that only the mega rich will be able to afford. The masses are encouraged to join the virtual reality realm if they want to see the real world.

The New York Times is already mentally preparing/indoctrinating the masses with bizarre arguments against travel. The statement that many people make, “I love to travel,” is thus classified by the author, Agnes Callard, as “the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make.” I wonder how she would feel if only allowed to move on foot within her 15-minute city, in a very limited radius her entire life.

To support her view, the author uses examples from famous people like G. K. Chesterton who wrote that “travel narrows the mind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson who called travel “a fool’s paradise,” Socrates and Immanuel Kant who seldom left their homes, and the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa who penned in his “Book of Disquiet” the following, “I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places…. The idea of traveling nauseates me … Ah, let those who don’t exist travel!... Travel is for those who cannot feel…. Only extreme poverty of the imagination justified having to move around to feel.”

In this new and twisted view, if you love to travel, you are a fool, you cannot feel, and you are lacking imagination. Who knew that exploration of new lands, horizons, landmarks, and other historical and archeological sites suddenly became passe because the globalists gave the orders to the mainstream media to indoctrinate the masses that travel is bad, and you are shallow and lacking if you do.

Callard wrote that “tourism is what we call traveling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them.” The Case Against Travel | The New Yorker

I’ve never treated my travels as shallow. I walked in the steps of history with much anticipation and pride and reached places I’ve only dreamed of. I’ve learned more things from my travels domestically and internationally than I had ever learned in all the years I spent in public schools and in college classrooms. And I was paying close attention to the professorial lectures since I was paying the tuition.

The New York Times is also suggesting that we should take pilgrimage-style vacations where we travel on foot. What a healthy idea if you can walk all day. But so many people are unable to do so. Health reasons, handicaps, and other issues prevent them from traveling on foot, but they would still love to have the experience of nature, learn from archeological digs, see paintings, sculptures, beautiful buildings, experience cuisines abroad for themselves. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/travel/long-walk-exercise.html

Globalists are suggesting replacing travel with virtual reality, a fake experience that does not begin to fill the thrill one experiences in front of a masterpiece or a statue at the Louvre or the awe of seeing the pyramids of Egypt and the Sphinx.

Billionaires, bureaucrats at the U.N., and mouthpieces writing for leftist magazines do not have the right to take away our freedom to experience history, archeology, nature, other countries, monuments, mountains, lakes, churches, famous statues in person. They are trying to control 8 billion people under the bogus premise that humanity is in peril. They must control everything we do in our daily lives to save us from ourselves because they know better, they are the gods of sustainability, the cornerstone of United Nations Agenda 2030, saving the planet from imaginary carbon emission Armageddon while the billionaires and their sycophant bureaucrats are jetting around the world in their private planes, mega yachts, and other fossil fuel driven machines that emit tons of carbon.