How to best achieve the 15-Minute City ideal

The Complexity Science Hub (CSH), based  in Austria, have taken a deep dive into 15-minute cities, or proximity-based cities as they also refer to them.

For hundreds of town and cities around the world, the team worked out how close individual areas were to fulfilling the 15 minute ideal. Specifically, they looked at the time needed to access the closest services by bike or on foot. The services they considered were:

• Outdoor activities
• Learning
• Supplies
• Eating
• Moving
• Cultural activities
• Physical exercise
• Services
• Healthcare

Having applied this to many cities worldwide, the team have created an open-access platform (whatif.sonycsl.it/15mincity)  for everyone to explore cities or specific areas of them.

Over half the world’s population now live in cities and, despite what some people would have us believe, the 15-minute city offers solutions to a wide range of urban problems, such as traffic, pollution, social isolation, and quality of life. 

Vittorio Loreto, external faculty member at the Complexity Science Hub said: ‘Our results revealed stark disparities in access to services, both within cities and between different regions, meaning that urban areas present a high level of inequality. For example, areas with many services in a city could be more expensive and only those who can afford it are able to live there.

‘On a global scale, many cities in Europe score highly in terms of accessibility, with Vienna being a prime example. However, most of the cities in the USA, Africa, and parts of Asia require significantly longer times to access basic services.’

The team also considered whether more resources were necessarily the answer or whether the inequality they found could be reduced by redistributing the services. They asked: ‘Does a neighborhood need a massive transportation enhancement to reach essential services or a more capillary distribution of essential proximity services?’

To address this, they created a ‘relocation algorithm,’ to understand how to increase the number of people who can access services in a given urban area, to simulate how a city would respond to an increase in services and how the number of required services can vary among different cities.

Loreto said: ‘We observe considerable differences between cities in terms of the minimum number of additional services required to fulfill the 15-minute city concept. Even more interesting, we observe that the very notion of a proximity-based city is not even conceivable in many cases, and a radically new paradigm has to be conceived.’

The below graphic shows the average proximity time to access important services by foot and by bike in a number of major cities.

The paper can be purchased here.

Images: Sony Computer Science Laboratories – Rome, Joint Initiative CREF-SONY