15-minute city

A theoretical framework based on walking and bicycling sheds makes the 15-minute city more useful to cities and planners.

We need a theoretical framework that is based on the metric of time, applying to areas that are larger than individual neighborhoods, to help organize metropolitan regions. The 15-minute city is a useful tool to analyze and plan regions and subregions, because the concept introduces larger planning sheds with measurable sizes that can be organized as diverse, accessible places. The distances are radically different for different modes of transportation within the 15-minute city, such as walking, bicycling, or small electric vehicles. The rigor involves defining the theoretical areas of the sheds, establishing a hierarchy of uses within each, and measuring the diversity at every scale. Although the 15-minute city is a buzzword, it also has Moreno elucidates his rather loose approach: “It is noteworthy that while the concept of ‘chrono-urbanism’ may seem arbitrary for some—e.g., why 15 min and not 17 min?—this concept is not rigid in nature and is proposed with the intent to be tailored to individual cities based on both their morphology and specific needs and characteristics. At a time when the 15-minute city is rapidly taking hold as a land-use term, major plans will be based on the idea. “Providing residents (and tourists) with everything they need to thrive right outside their doorstep offers countless benefits, from the social to the environmental, but its actual enactment proves to be a challenge. Second, some proponents argue that the 15-minute city doesn’t need further defining and should be left alone, as previously (and vaguely) described. [credited](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city) with coining the term in 2016, but the concept itself is decades old. As [recent research](https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2023/01/27/low-income-people-need-15-minute-city) has shown, the 15-minute city is particularly important for low-to-moderate income residents who depend on the cost savings from taking fewer automobile trips. First, some critics think the “15-minute city” doesn’t meaningfully add to urban planning knowledge and it should be ignored.