15-minute city
A planning idea in which residents can reach everyday needs, such as shops, schools, healthcare and work, within a fifteen minute walk or cycle from home.
The 15-minute city is a planning concept in which most everyday needs can be reached within about a fifteen minute walk or cycle from home: shops, schools, childcare, healthcare, work and leisure. The aim is less car dependency, shorter journeys and neighbourhoods that function as neighbourhoods.
The idea is older than the name. Similar proposals have appeared repeatedly in planning history under different labels, each defining a neighbourhood by the distance a person can comfortably cover on foot. What is new is the ability to measure it, because checking whether a city meets the standard requires travel times across the real network to a whole set of destination types at once.
Measuring it also exposes what the slogan leaves open. Fifteen minutes for whom, walking at what speed, to which destinations, at what time of day. A city can look excellent if you count any shop and any green space, and much worse if you require a food shop, a primary school and a doctor. The threshold and the destination list are the analysis, so state them rather than reporting a single percentage.