Friction-Minutes City: Testing and Protesting Global Urban Ideas

Abstract (English)

The 15-Minute City (15MC) has become one of the most globally visible models of post-carbon urban planning. It has sparked enthusiastic uptake by municipal governments, urban practitioners, and policy networks, all seeking to implement it to local contexts. Academic literature largely follows this trend, focusing on the analytical and technical dimensions of Moreno’s idea.
This paper seeks to reverse the usual focus on implementation. Instead of asking what the 15MC does to local actors, we ask what is done to it as it encounters practical and discursive frictions in a specific context.
We draw on a case study from Poznań, a city of 500,000 in western Poland. Within the research and development project SPECIFIC, we designed a transition experiment in which small businesses and NGOs tested electric cargo bikes as a way of reducing car dependency. As the experiment drew attention from local media, we received applications—but also encountered backlash in the form of heated online discussions about the 15MC and cargo bike usage.
We follow these discussions to develop an ethnographic account of the meanings, materialities, and competences mobilised when the concept comes to town.
The comments reveal a tangle of associations: cargo bikes are framed not as tools of ecological transition, but as symbols of economic decline, leftist overreach, and spatial inequality. The 15MC itself becomes entangled in imaginaries of historical trauma, evoking memories of totalitarianism and the spatial logic of concentration camps. Rather than signalling intimacy and care, localness is recoded as regression disguised as modernisation.
We claim that reflection on the 15MC and urban transition should go beyond implementation by acknowledging their entanglement with historical memory, social imaginaries, and lived infrastructures of fear, inequality, and control. In doing so, it exposes the heterogeneity of the concept and unsettles the ethnocentric assumptions embedded in its circulation