I wanted to uncover cities. Now he is ‘public enemy number 1’.

For most of his 40-year career, Carlos Moreno, a scientist and business professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, worked in relative peace.

Many cities around the world have embraced a concept that it began developing in 2010. Called the 15-minute city, the idea is that everyday destinations such as schools, shops, and offices should be within walking or biking distance of your home. A group of nearly 100 mayors from around the world he embraced it as a way to help recover from the pandemic.

The conspiracy theorists were late, but suddenly.

In recent weeks, an avalanche of rumors and distortions has descended on Moreno’s proposal. Spurred in part by climate change deniers and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, false claims have circulated online, at protests, and even at government hearings that 15-minute cities were a forerunner of “climate change lockdowns” — urban “prison camps” in which the movements of residents would be monitored and severely restricted.

Many directly attacked Moreno, 63. He faced harassment in online forums and by email. He was accused without evidence of being an agent of an invisible totalitarian world government. He was compared to criminals and dictators.

For the first time in his career, he began receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment would come” and offered to nail him to a coffin or run him over with a cement roller.

“He was no longer a researcher, he was Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler,” Moreno said. “I have become, in a week, public enemy number 1.”

For high-profile figures, such as the infectious disease expert. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates, misinformation and the hostility it can cause have long been a part of the job description. But increasingly, even non-public professors and researchers have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 of those scientists who had given interviews to the media, the magazine Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats. Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

An epidemiologist maintains a folder on your computer to store all the death threats you receive just in case. An atmospheric science professor who studied global warming. receive a letter which contained white powder (looked like anthrax but turned out to be cornstarch). Professor of health law and science policy, in an article Referring to her experiences with death threats, lawsuits and online trolling, she wrote: “My skin is thick. I’m used to hate.

Moreno’s work hasn’t focused on the pandemic, though his idea of ​​15-minute cities has grown more popular since it began. Like many of his fellow academics who have faced campaigns of harassment and misinformation, he doesn’t know how to protect himself.

“I’m not entirely sure what the best reaction is: respond, don’t respond, call a press conference, write a press release,” he said. Academics, he said, “are relatively on their own.”

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics laboratory in Paris in 1983; the career he pursued involved starting a new company, meeting the Dalai Lama, and being knighted in the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spans many fields: automotive, medical, nuclear, military, and even household items.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” in his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities. The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” In the early 1900s, community-centered urban planning pioneered by the activist jane jacobs in the 1960s, including support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So called low traffic neighborhoodsor LTN, have been established in various British cities over the past decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing them without connecting them.

However, Moreno faced no harassment until conspiracy theorists mistakenly conflated 15-minute cities with the idea of ​​low-traffic neighborhoods in Britain.

Efforts to adopt LTN, which were approved for test last year at century-old Oxford, they have raised concerns that traffic reduction measures could cause congestion to spill into surrounding areas or make some properties less accessible. However, some people took advantage of other elements of the plan, including cameras meant to monitor license plates.

The result, according to misinformed conspiracy theorists: a nightmarish scenario in which residents would be confined in fenced-off open-air prisons in isolated areas. On February 18, when some 2,000 protesters gathered at a protest in Oxford, some carried signs claiming that 15-minute cities would become “ghettos” created by the World Economic Forum as a form of “tyrannical control.”

In fact, LTNs are championed by Oxfordshire County Council; Oxford City Council has cited the city of 15 minutes as an inspiration for his vision of the city in 2040. As both government bodies pointed out in an attempt to debunk rumors, neither proposal involves physical barriers. One concept is concerned with limiting cars, while the other focuses on bringing daily necessities closer to residents.

Still, Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “maybe the worst perversion imaginable” of the idea of ​​walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

TO british member of parliament He said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that “would cost us our personal liberties.” QAnon supporters saying the derailment of a train carrying dangerous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move aimed at pushing rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“The conspiracy mongers have built a whole story: climate denial, Covid-19, anti-vaccination, 5G controlling citizens’ brains, and the 15-minute city to introduce a perimeter for everyday life,” Moreno said. saying. “This narrative is totally crazy, totally irrational to us, but it makes sense to them.”

The multifaceted conspiracy theory quickly “fed” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, extrapolating and becoming this melting pot where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbies, conspiracy movements, anti-blockade groups and more. they saw an opportunity to insert their world view into the mainstream and take advantage of the news cycle,” he said.

The virulence currently directed at Moreno and researchers like him reflects “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,” King said. Modern day conspiracy theorists and extremists make scapegoats of people they disagree with for a wide range of social ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an atmosphere of “us against them,” he said.

The intensified rhetoric and the safeguards disintegration has caused many people in the academic community to abandon forums like Twitter for more specialized sites like Mastodonsaid Mrs. King. Last year, the American Psychological Association published an article suggesting that universities form security bureaus to help professors filter threatening messages, erase their personal information from the Internet, and gain access to counselling.

Moreno said he did not understand the intensity of the hatred directed at him.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything, as a researcher my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It’s totally unbelievable that we can receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”