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Notes -
The concept of '15-minute cities' came up a few weeks ago, but since then it appears to have piggybacked off a local dispute in Oxford to become the locus of the latest so-called 'far-right conspiracy theory'. The proposed measure certainly codes as dystopian to me on this side of the pond, even as someone who is generally supportive of new urbanist ideas, but I can't speak to how it plays in Europe.
I've often felt that the culture war battle lines on these urban planning issues have not been as clearly drawn as those on gender, immigration, or abortion, mostly due to a lack of attention, but that time appears to be coming to an end. Though seeing as we already can't build anything, I suppose it isn't much of a loss.
Sooner or later, the right will (hopefully) come to understand a few hard-hitting things:
NIMBY:ism is not only good but morally necessary to create and sustain worthwhile communities. Not just their character but also their architectural beauty and natural endowments (e.g. parks, tree-lined pathways).
Regulation is an unavoidable fact in order to bring all of this about. The neoliberal rage against regulation will only lead to poorly built cardboard boxes mashed together into historic neighbourhoods, crammed with people of dubious moral character (as this would be "affordable housing" that YIMBYists love to praise).
Getting rid of most cars in inner cities would also be a good start and many European cities are moving in this direction. Some faster (Oslo) and some slower (Paris) but it's slowly coming together.
That all said, if someone truly thinks that car-centric sprawl suburbia is the peak of human existence, then all the more power to you. I just don't think many on the right are actually on board with that once they take time to think. The issue is that many have neoliberal priors that prevents them from going to the logical conclusion. Housing policy is difficult because there isn't a clear-cut left vs right divide and most folks prefer to stay in tribes where thinking independently is discouraged and you can just follow the herd.
If the regulation was always done by a crusty Oxbridge-educated High Anglican Tory with the politics of the 1950s and the aesthetic tastes of the 1590s (or the equivalent e.g. a sombre unimaginative Norweigian) I would probably favour regulation every time. However, there is no way to guarantee that, and the problems are complex, e.g. avoiding high density development (the classic NIMBY position) comes into conflict with not wanting car-entric sprawl suburbia.
The steelman neoliberal position is normally not that a spontaneous order is optimal, but that it is less likely to produce very suboptimal outcomes than more regulated approaches. Sometimes that is right and sometimes it is wrong, but a neoliberal is not committed to the idea that car-centric sprawl suburbia is optimal - not least because many of them want high density concentrated cities.
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