The Meaning of the (Fifteen Minute) City: Twenty-First Century Planning Through Ellul’s Eyes

“Any vision of city planning amounts to more than just a theory, but a worldview.”

Nearly every city worldwide is implementing a “smart city” strategy and a “fifteen-minute city” layout, with the aim of controlling resources. With the help of Christian thinkers such as French theologian Jacques Ellul, this essay examines two “smart city” plans. It finds that his warnings about dehumanization and lack of transcendence in twentieth-century secularism are realized in twenty-first-century excessive surveillance, profit motive, authoritarianism, and hubris.

A smart city collects data from thousands of devices, such as cameras, sensors, and monitors, using it all to make services and assets operate efficiently and to control human behavior. To be effective, such a network (often called “the internet of things”) must have all-encompassing application, which can have the unintended effect of dehumanizing individuals and extinguishing the transcendent. This effect is embodied in the maps and diagrams of ideal smart cities, which almost invariably omit places of worship.

The goals of smart-city planners reflect a view of humanity and a vision of globalist prerogative on a collision course with the corresponding views of most religions. The omniscience sought through surveillance devices, the omnipresence achieved by transit control and digital communications, and the omnipotence aspired to through electronically shared data and government enforcement all look problematic through a religious lens.

Jacques Ellul (who wrote the prescient Meaning of the City in 1951), and the Christian Caucus of the Congress for the New Urbanism, offer words of guidance, encouragement, and warning for those who plan our cities. In this article we examine the underlying philosophy of prominent secular planners, then look at case studies of two cities, conjecturing Ellul’s comments on vistas he saw only prophetically.

City Planners and the Church

Most planners expect to accomplish “sustainable development” through smart-city practices and fifteen-minute neighborhoods, minimizing energy consumption and rewarding environmental stewardship. Leading the way are secular entities such as the World Economic Forum, the Congress for the New Urbanism, and individuals such as Paris mayor Ann Hidalgo, American author and land-use planner Charles Marohn, architect of international projects Peter Calthorpe, and French/Colombian designer Carlos Moreno. Primary enthusiasms of the New Urbanism are technology with its “fourth industrial revolution” (4IR), and the reduction of “risk,” which simply refers to unexpected human conduct.

The 4IR vision, definitively articulated by Klaus Schwab, comprises transhumanist advances such as artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic modification, cryptocurrency, and the capture of endless data via massive surveillance and analytics. Affinity for surveillance stems “from a quasi-religious belief that the problems of society are technical in nature, mere matters of engineering that can be solved with only a little more data.” An extreme, malignant version of 4IR is manifest in the punitive “scoring” by the Chinese Communist Party. The scoring conducted in various Chinese cities discriminates harshly against religious people.

While Ellul and Charbonneau’s Bordeaux School urges us toward nature and love for the environment, Ellul might discern “technique” subverting the ecological stewardship by the New Urbanists. For him, technique was a thing “rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency.” Under the sway of technique, science and technology tend to replace nature as the locus of the sacred, inspiring awe in people. Darrell J. Fasching captures Ellul’s insights here: This awe [of technique] turns them into slaves . . . serving their new idols. A society of techniques undermines human freedom by requiring that we always choose the most rationally efficient techniques for every endeavor. No business or society can afford to choose a less efficient solution for fear of being rendered obsolete by their competitors.

Kinder, Gentler New Urbanists

Ellul did not have a chance to know many brilliant and good-hearted New Urbanists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They have resisted the brutalism of Marxist- and atheist-originated architecture and city layouts. Their projects seek to foster diverse and equitable neighborhoods—community. They have thoroughly adopted the agenda of environmentalists: fighting pollution, carbon emissions, and traffic with its noise, danger, and expense. But they tend to implement their aspirations with a lighter hand. They speak of public education, “nudging” the unwilling with small roll-outs and appeals to common sense, rather than grand impositions or financial penalties.

One of the luminaries of the movement is Jane Jacobs, whose words below evince some humility: We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves. . . . [I]n the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others’ social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. . . . [T]he destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. . . . [I]t is to [people], not buildings, that we must fit our plans. A wise city planner calls us to “rediscover human proportions . . . in our societies.”

Another New Urbanist fond of human proportions is Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, designer of the Kentlands outside of Washington, DC, and Seaside, Florida—whole communities built from the ground up. They feature front porches close to the street, so that passersby can chat with homeowners. The streets are narrow and walkable, minimizing car traffic. Unlike thoroughgoing secularists, she speaks of “the importance of focal places like churches.” As Jacques Ellul said, whereas “in the Middle Ages cities were built around cathedrals, so now they are built around industry.” Echoing that, Jeff Speck, international expert on walkable cities, notes that in the past, churches received “honorific places” in towns, on hills or other spots that commanded attention.

Admittedly, Plater-Zyberk has not escaped Christian detractors. To her boast that by providing suitable buildings, “the evolution of society is secured,” Christian professor David Wang retorts that “what’s achieved at best is a mechanized mirage.” One experiences not just queasiness at the pomposity of Plater-Zyberk’s claim but a rueful chuckle at how little she accounts for human desires of others, who can’t always march in lockstep. As Jane Jacobs once said of another designer, “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.” David Wang calls the Kentlands and Seaside “stage sets” hurriedly built, instead of being, as Jacques Ellul might say, “nourished by men” who shared a “common spirit” and built with “shared, human scale tools.” Other New Urban projects would definitely trouble Ellul. Let us examine two city plans and notice their “spirit” and “tools.”

Oxford, England: Excessive Surveillance and Undemocratic Processes

Oxford is a city that has existed since medieval times and whose local government operated in a democratic fashion, up to a point. Oxford’s current “smart” plan is to divide the city into six districts, surrounded by a ring road; driving between districts (through “traffic filters”) would be forbidden; each private vehicle would be permitted to enter another district only one hundred times per year, as tallied by cameras watching car tags. After that, a fine of seventy pounds would be levied. A driver’s alternative is to go out to the ring road and then drive into another district, resulting in what one critic of Barcelona’s similar plan calls “a Kafkaesque nightmare” resulting in wasted fuel and time. This is the quintessential “fifteen-minute city,” wherein each district offers all one needs (or all that planners think one needs) within a fifteen-minute walk from home: work, shopping, transit hubs, entertainment. There is no provision for places of worship.

The advantage of this scheme is a reduction in traffic, theoretically. The drawbacks are the lack of freedom of movement, and, in Oxford, lack of transparency and stubbornness of the officials—one of whom “insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not”—concocting the scheme and engaging poorly with the public after the February 2023 protest in the streets.

One member of the evangelical Halley Chapel nearby, who attended a protest and was interviewed in Oxford on August 4, 2023, said, “I am open to considering in theory that the city and county didn’t primarily intend to surveil us or deprive us of freedom. But look at the sequence of events. They didn’t start by arranging amenities so that we could have a walkable community. They have started by putting in bollards, cameras, and monitoring systems. That tells you all you need to know.” She resonates with protests in San Diego, where residents have objected to pervasive drones, facial recognition throughout the city, use of audio when only video recording was originally envisioned, and even “gait” analysis to identify hikers seen on outdoor cameras.

Christian philosopher Julianne Romanello almost echoes Ellul as she warns that “smart cities” overreach their legitimate powers by surveillance of every intersection and every utility use in a household—recalling Ellul’s cautionary portrayal of the restless city dweller as one who “cannot stand to be constantly seen, and heard.” In The Secular City, theologian Harvey Cox bemoans the loss of privacy in the city. This valuable feature of life in Oxford could be lost. The people of Toronto rejected a similarly ambitious roll-out due to privacy concerns. Too easily, “the shift from monitoring to actuation” happens—“the ability to know gives way to the power to control.”

Julianne Romanello asserts on her website, heartsoverhexagons.com, that nudging people into districts appeals to the state and its cronies because it clusters people into manageable bunches. It felt to many Oxonians that the local scheme was rife with a will to power. After a plan was set forth for public consultation, Oxford County Council’s cabinet member for travel announced prematurely in November that the scheme was “going to happen, definitely,” regardless of public opinion. One observer said, “Oxford residents are surely right to object to their local councillors foisting this initiative on them without their consent.”

The peaceful inhabitants of Oxford are not easily roused, but it seems Ellul would approve their outcry. “So when Ellul calls for a ‘personalist’ revolution, he is calling for active resistance to a process of massification which characterizes contemporary society—he is calling us to rediscover human proportions in our politics and in our societies.” As a Protestant knowing the ethical and intellectual weakness of humans, Ellul would also see the imposition of surveillance as not only intrusive but reckless.

One current observer wryly says it thus: “The internet of things” . . . ought to be . . . short for “the internet of things that should not be connected to the internet.” Inevitably, some bored teen will hack your smart fridge to flood your kitchen while you’re away; the more urban infrastructure is computerised, the more vulnerable it will be to cyber-attack. The “smart city” is the hackable city. As Australian data scientist Geoff Webb has warned, “What you are about to lose is your privacy. Actually, it’s worse than that. You aren’t just going to lose your privacy, you’re going to have to watch the very concept of privacy be rewritten under your nose.

The Line, Saudi Arabia: Hubris and the Profit Motive

The Line project in the desert of Saudi Arabia was the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and a government fund that originated it. It is being constructed in a narrow ribbon of land, with a pair of mirrored glass walls (500 meters tall and 200 meters wide, running 170 meters— about 100 miles) within which 9 million people will live and rarely leave, as if in a giant ant farm. Foreign workers (the huge majority being young men) will do the labor but will likely not live within the project. The Saudi government has authorized lethal force to clear out prior residents and make way for the elaborate construction. The Line includes automobiles, in hopes of energy efficiency.

Additional key features of The Line are:

• planning without input from the public
• comprehensive design—all is lavish but pre-planned
• relational community is not a primary goal at first, due to the artificial nature of the project; workers are mostly foreign to the location
• churches (or even mosques) are not mentioned in the plans

Planners promise that it will be an energy-saving wonder, with all desired amenities within an easy walk. One critic warns that it will “trap” its inhabitants in a “a gigantic canyon with no natural light, requiring enormous amounts of electricity to maintain liveable temperatures.” Independent calculations show that the trains provided will have to make so many stops that they will run slower than the rate of a walk.

The official video for The Line features its preeminent designers as they gaze off to a far horizon, surrounded by sweeping natural views. There is a sense of unlimited creativity and potential in the ad. The uplifting music suggests that the inspiration for these visionaries is open space and nature. This makes sense: Sweeping views of the natural world do refresh and inspire humans. The disturbing thing is that all the inspiration and freedom rest with these elite, unelected contractors.

Those who live in The Line will have no such chance at creativity; all will have been planned for them, and they will be lucky to be able to experience the environment outside their walls, due to what Jacques Ellul anticipated in future metropolises: “the elimination of sun and wind.” This is the Utopia that Jane Jacobs complained of, in which “the right to have plans of any significance” resides with a tiny elite.

Anyone who wants to start a church or school within The Line will be thwarted by the prior plans for every square inch of the structure and by limited access to others beyond one’s immediate neighborhood. Theologians would say that to be made in the image of God is to create, to explore, dream, and be curious (Prov 25:2)—not to just consume, comply, and live within constraints.

Local tribes who have made their home in the affected area have objected, but lethal force has been authorized to rebuff protests. One person has been fatally shot, and forty languish in detention. Predictable damage to the environment, including death to large numbers of birds, and costs have already halted the breakneck speed of the “megalomaniac” construction. Yet a Saudi colonel who previously worked on The Line says, “Mohamed Bin Salman will let nothing stand in the way.” Perhaps the basic objection of both Ellul and Romanello would be the hubris that is the impetus of The Line—the authoritarian power of the few over the many. Ellul says,

[This arrogance] is the tragedy of ideal cities, the terrible problem of modern urbanism, as of older utopianism . . . [of ] the technician who thinks to make a city the ideal place for man’s full development,
equilibrium [equity?], and virtue, and the politician who thinks to construct around giant cities the perfect society where men can get along without God . . . and to put himself in the center.

Ellul essentially prophesied fifteen-minute cities, forecasting “the piling up of human bodies” in “a checkerboard of rabbit cages or thirty-story apartment buildings . . . [filled in with] stores, cinemas, schools, the business and shopping district,” (and lacking churches). David Wang, Christian architect and professor, says Ellul would abhor “the merely technological [which] metastasizes into a technological consciousness which permeates all thinking even while it enables thinking itself.”

Ellul seemed to foresee The Line when he said, “[A city dweller] has no silent zone; he lives in a perpetual noise that eliminates any isolation, any meditation, any authentic contact. And soon he can no longer tolerate the judgement of silence.” A human in a metropolis, said Ellul, is part of a “crowd . . . never separate, never physically alone . . . separated from himself and others by a sheet of glass, invisible yet present . . . never alone yet deserted . . . simply a stranger . . . not to be a free man.”

“If the desert is a place of demons, the city is a place of idols,” said Ellul, seeming to describe The Line with both clauses of that statement. By way of explanation, Ellul went on thus: “[The city] arrogantly offers independence from God, which is illusory. For . . . the rhythm of days and seasons, the city tries to substitute liberty, that is the possibility for man to do what he wants when he wants. But this liberty is a farce.”

As an example of this loss of liberty, we consider that urban programs can become ensnared with greed, waste, and secrecy, with citizens’ data being captured and trafficked. Huge amounts of data hemorrhage into private hands, which can use it unethically. Data can also be exploited via a “largely unregulated industry of data brokers, quieter firms that specialize in gathering people’s personal information from public and private sources, and making it available to other companies for marketing, employment, financial and other purposes.”

Bicycle trackers, fingerprint scanners, and traffic-light cameras are wonderful gadgets, but the companies marketing them have a profit motive that thoughtful people naturally question. The data raked in, an estimated $200 billion industry “in surveillance capitalism” in the US alone, can legally or illegally land in the wrong hands for the “right” price. Ellul observed that “the person who disappears into the city becomes merchandise.” He said that a person “cannot hope for a better utilization of [the city], because he is not the one using it. We could even turn it around and say that he is the one being used.” Or, as a Google design ethicist said, “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.”

The American Civil Liberties Union eloquently stated it this way: There’s simply no way to forecast how these immense powers—disproportionately accumulating in the hands of corporations seeking financial advantage and governments craving ever more control—will be used. Chances are, big data and the Internet of Things will make it harder for us to control our own lives, as we grow increasingly transparent to powerful corporations and government institutions that are becoming more opaque to us.

Ways Forward for Wise People

Ellul wrestled throughout his career with how much energy to devote to activism, to revolution. But his theology and perhaps his temperament centered him consistently on the spiritual, and in The Meaning of the City he suggested four spiritual responses to urban problems.

Prayer
“We are not first asked to preach and convert Babylon,” says Ellul, “but to pray. . . . Our duty is to pray for the good of the city.” He speaks of prayerful hands as “not clasped in passion, or fury, or tragedy. They are calm. . . . But that simplicity does not bespeak ease. It conveys assurance.” Tim Keller, pastor for many years at New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, said that believers should pray “not only for the flourishing of their city’s churches and evangelistic witness, but also for the very life of the city—for the health of its economy, the justice of its governance, and the relationships” found there.

Humility
Much has been noted above about Ellul’s concerns over lack of humility among urban planners. Subsequent thinkers have elaborated. “Skeptical optimist” and author of an inspiring book on walkable cities Kevin Klinkenberg manifests a refreshing modesty when he says, As I talk to people about my city, they tend to want simple, practical work done to make life better. But our leadership and many activist
groups instead seem to be obsessed with big, utopian ideas, policies, and projects. Those big ideas might captivate the imagination, especially of the young, but the overall track record is they nearly always fail spectacularly. . . . [ J]ust for a while, let’s set aside the smugness and arrogance that’s so common with lovers of big cities. It’s a big world out there, full of lots of great people that love to live very different lives. We don’t have the only way.

Pardon
Confronted with the brokenness of society as it gropes for solutions, Ellul says, “So far as the solution is concerned, it cannot be a rational one; it can only be a solution in terms of life, and the acceptance of forgiveness given in Jesus Christ.” That life is best imparted by humans extending gracious human hands: Ellul observes, “We have seen that down through history God’s answer to the construction of man’s closed world was to move in just the same. . . . And if he is there by his hidden presence, he is also there by those whom he sends.” “The only standard for us to act is that of God’s pardon. And this pardon teaches us, much better than any historical considerations, the vanity and the relativity of man’s work, since everything depends on forgiveness. God’s pardon will make the city of man into the new Jerusalem.”

Humor
Scripture makes clear that in no endeavor can we take ourselves too seriously. Ellul says, “What keeps us from our active pessimism into a sterile catastrophism is . . . humor, a form of Christian liberty in our participation in man’s work. . . . So we must put our heart into the city, but keep it ours by humor.” Jeff Speck and Donald Shoup are two New Urbanists who bring a self-deprecating and jolly style to a sometimes too-serious subject.

Hope
Ellul voices hope thus: “God has not resigned himself to man’s refusal. He wants all of man with all that he is and all that he does.” God formed the plan of uniting “all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” Things on earth! It is not restricted to “natural” things, to the creation itself. No such distinction is made. God’s plan includes things invented by man, what he laboriously put together . . . [b]oth his technical failures and the marvels of his cleverness. . . . God’s way of judging is not ours. What will He preserve? We have no way of telling. Perhaps the great summing up will include all that exists, as the ark sheltered both unclean animals and clean.

Jason Thacker, director of the research institute at the Ethics and LibertyCommission of the Southern Baptist Convention and lead drafter of “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles,” expresses his hope thus: “Christians must cultivate a sense of wisdom and discernment” about technology. He says we still have “agency” and must help our culture in making decisions about development. The Hebrew Scriptures teach that by wisdom a house is built (Prov 24:3), and even a poor man can “save a city by his wisdom” (Eccl 9:5).

Conclusion
City planning, though plagued with the temptations of fallen humans, is mainly sincerely bent on the common good, on hope for a better future. It is up to us to provide the conscience, spiritual discernment, and vision that others may lack. Ellul says, “We must salute these idealists. They are right in doing what they are doing and wrong in believing they will ever get City anywhere. For the struggle . . . is taking place in a realm never reached by man.” Instead, Christian real estate developer and founder of the Proximity Project Sara Joy Proppe emphasizes “strengthening the church to be very active stewards and have their place” in their location. “The built environment is such a conduit for living out the gospel.” Ultimately, transcendent hope remains. In Ellul’s words, “Civilizations pass and go under, leaving behind a few ruins buried in vines. . . . But nothing is forgotten. All the pain and hope represented by these walls is taken over by God. And because of it all, God is preparing this same setting for man, but made new.”