Heard of 15-minute cities, how about 5-minute cities?

Picture this: a "revolutionary" neighbourhood where everything you need—groceries, school, work, a park, is supposedly just a 5-minute walk away. Sound convenient?  Like a quaint little village where life is simple and sweet. Imagine too rows of pretty flowers, clean streets and safe cycle lanes. Does that sound anything like Pride in Place launched recently by the UK Government. Perfect, right?

Wrong. Strip away the glossy brochures and feel-good headlines, and what you're left with is something far darker: a shrinking, suffocating trap designed to limit your world to a tiny radius of about 400 meters. That's the harsh reality of so-called 5-minute towns or neighbourhoods, like the Nordhavn experiment in Copenhagen, where planners literally drew circles around metro stops and crammed life inside them. Cars? "Not welcome." Freedom to roam? Severely curtailed. Your daily existence? Confined to a bubble that feels more like a cell than a community.

This isn't evolution, it's compression.  A 5-minute radius is brutally small. Step outside that invisible line, and suddenly you're in "the beyond", far from the basics they claim are "all you need." Need a specialist doctor? A different job? Friends or family across town? A spontaneous road trip? Tough luck. Your world shrinks to what fits in that tight circle. Variety dies. Choice evaporates. You're not living freely; you're effectively contained.

The real nightmare creeps in when you realize this will be weaponised. We've already seen how 15-minute cities sparked mass outrage, people marching in the streets, calling them open-air prisons, climate lockdowns, surveillance zones with cameras tracking every move. Conspiracy or not, the fear is real: if 15 minutes felt like control, 5 minutes is the next level down the dystopian ladder. Tighter zones mean easier monitoring, easier restrictions, easier enforcement of "you stay in your sector." Think digital IDs at the edges, fines for crossing lines, or worse still, rules that start as "for your health/climate/safety" and end as unbreakable chains.

For families, the vulnerable, the restless human spirit, this is suffocation. Kids trapped in micro-worlds with no room to explore. People with disabilities or special needs boxed out. The illusion of "everything nearby" hides the terror: everything else is forbidden or out of reach.

This isn't cosy. It's a prison dressed up as paradise. A slow erosion of autonomy where your life is micromanaged, your movements predictable and monitored, your horizons deliberately narrowed.

No. Keep your towns open, sprawling if needed, messy and free. Walkable streets? Yes. Local options? Great. But shrink the world to 5 minutes and call it progress? That would appear to be ‘captivity’. For those old enough to remember, cast your minds back to, ‘The Prisoner’ starring Patrick McGooghan. What number will you be?

What can we do? We can BE AWARE. Watch for the signs, question everything, rule nothing out and reject the cage. Demand space to breathe, move, connect on your terms. Because once they lock you in a 5-minute bubble, escaping from it becomes the real crime.