The 15-minute city: assumptions, opportunities and limitations

The concept of the 15-minute city, though created only recently, has quickly become one of the most popular concepts in urban planning around the world (Teixeira et al., 2024). Its creator, Colombian–French scholar Carlos Moreno, postulates an urban environment that allows residents to sufficiently satisfy their most important needs of work, trade, healthcare, education and entertainment within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their place of residence, allowing them a better quality of life (Moreno et al., 2021).
The concept of a city in which all basic activities of residents can be carried out in close proximity to
their place of residence thus stands in opposition to the idea of modernism, which is a key urban concept of the 20th century that has shaped modern cities and involves the spatial separation of major urban functions (Pozoukidou & Chatziyiannaki, 2021). Modernism is also a response to the rapid development of private car transport, which causes air and noise pollution and the need for heavy expansion of road and parking infrastructure, which is occupying ever larger areas in cities (Ibraeva et al., 2020). The growing wealth of urban dwellers and related consumerism of recent decades have led people to seek new living spaces, caused cities to expand, and increased the distance of workplaces from places of residence and services (Teixeira et al., 2024). Moreover, the decline in population density and the associated drop in profitability of public transport have consistently increased dependence on private vehicles, resulting in greater individualism and weakened or reduced the number of the direct social relationships born of face-to-face contact. All this has caused many cities to lose their “human scale” and become less liveable (Allam et al., 2022). These phenomena drove the search for new princiles by which to organise space and new directions of urban development, and the concept of the fifteen-minute city (FMC) to which this article is devoted is one such set of principles. Originally proposed in the press in 2016 (Moreno, 2016) and presented more broadly in the 2020 re election campaign of the Paris authorities (Allam et al., 2022), it was only further specified in a 2021 article in the context of the new challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic (Moreno et al., 2021). Since then, it has inspired both practitioners, as a framework for urban planning and policy, and urban researchers, as a tool for analysing spatial accessibility in cities (Willberg, Fink & Toivonen 2023; Mouratidis, 2024).

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387305461_The_15-minute_city_assumptions_opportunities_and_limitations