15-minute city: Why time shouldn’t be the only factor in future city planning | Researchers have developed a tool to measure how close cities are to the ideal of being a 15-minute city, uncovering significant inequalities along the way

Sections from the news release:

>The 15-minute city, a concept where essential services are accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride, has become increasingly popular in urban planning in recent years. This is because it offers solutions to several pressing challenges in urban areas, such as traffic, pollution, social isolation, and quality of life. With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities—and this figure steadily increasing—these issues are becoming ever more critical.
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>In a recent study, published in Nature Cities, researchers now provide a worldwide quantification of how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city.
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>The research team didn’t stop at identifying these disparities but went a step further: what if the same resources and services were redistributed? Would it be possible to increase the accessibility, which would lead to less inequality in a city? Or does it require more resources? In short: Does a neighborhood, for example, need a massive transportation enhancement to reach essential services or a more capillary distribution of essential proximity services?
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>Why is all this important? Fundamentally, it helps us better understand the cities we inhabit, the complex challenges residents face, and the diverse potential solutions. It also highlights that no two cities are alike, meaning each requires unique, tailored approaches to its complexities. The 15-minute city is just one of many frameworks that can help address these challenges. In the study, the researchers concluded, that the merely time-based ideal of a city is not enough to create a liveable city. Instead, we should start to create value-based cities, where local population densities, socio-economic and cultural factors are taken into account.
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>By utilizing such a model, urban planners, engineers, and policymakers can focus on creating customized solutions for their cities rather than one-size-fits-all approaches. This ensures cities become more accessible to a broader range of people. Building more equitable cities has vast advantages. Better access to healthcare, education, culture, amenities, and the many opportunities cities offer as hubs of human creativity contribute to making us more engaged and informed global citizens.

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Research link: [A universal framework for inclusive 15-minute cities](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-024-00119-4)

Abstract:

>Proximity-based cities have attracted much attention in recent years. The ‘15-minute city’, in particular, heralded a new vision for cities where essential services must be easily accessible. Despite its undoubted merit in stimulating discussion on new organization of cities, the 15-minute city cannot be applicable everywhere, and its very definition raises a few concerns. Here we tackle the feasibility and practicability of the 15-minute city model in many cities worldwide. We provide a worldwide quantification of how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city. To this end, we measure the accessibility times to resources and services, and we reveal strong heterogeneity of accessibility within and across cities, with a pivotal role played by local population densities. We provide an online platform (https://whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity/) to access and visualize accessibility scores for virtually all cities worldwide. The heterogeneity of accessibility within cities is one of the sources of inequality. We thus simulate how much a better redistribution of resources and services could heal inequity by keeping the same resources and services or by allowing for virtually infinite resources. We highlight pronounced discrepancies among cities in the minimum number of additional services needed to comply with the 15-minute city concept. We conclude that the proximity-based paradigm must be generalized to work on a wide range of local population densities. Finally, socio-economic and cultural factors should be included to shift from time-based to value-based cities.