15 Minutes. For Whom? Why proximity alone cannot define an accessible city.
The 15-minute city has become one of the most influential ideas in contemporary urban planning. Its promise is both simple and appealing: to organize urban life so that most everyday needs can be satisfied within a short distance from home, ideally through walking, cycling, or public transportation. Schools, shops, healthcare facilities, public spaces, and recreational opportunities should be distributed across the urban fabric rather than concentrated in distant destinations. In a world increasingly concerned with car dependency, environmental sustainability, and the quality of everyday life, the appeal of this model is understandable.
There is considerable value in this approach. Bringing essential services closer to where people live can reduce unnecessary travel, encourage active mobility, strengthen neighbourhood life, and improve the relationship between people and their immediate surroundings. Proximity is undoubtedly an important component of a well-functioning city. Yet the popularity of the 15-minute concept also raises a more fundamental question, one that is often overlooked in discussions about urban proximity: fifteen minutes for whom?
The problem is not the ambition to create more complete and walkable neighbourhoods. It is the assumption that geographical proximity, expressed through a common measure of travel time, can adequately describe the relationship between people and urban opportunities. Fifteen minutes is a measure of time, but time alone tells us remarkably little about the actual experience of accessing a place.
Consider two people living in the same neighbourhood, at exactly the same distance from a public park, a supermarket, or a healthcare facility. A healthy young adult may comfortably reach these destinations on foot, while an elderly person with reduced mobility may find the same journey exhausting or even impossible. A child may perceive a busy intersection as an insurmountable obstacle, while an adult crosses it without hesitation. A pregnant woman, a parent pushing a stroller, or someone using a wheelchair may experience the same street through entirely different physical constraints. Even a person who has recently arrived in the city, unfamiliar with its transport systems, language, or social conventions, may encounter difficulties that remain invisible to a long-term resident.
These differences are not marginal exceptions to an otherwise universal urban condition. They are intrinsic to the way cities are experienced. Accessibility is not simply a property of places or transport networks. It emerges from the relationship between individuals, their capabilities, the urban environment, and the opportunities they seek to reach.
This relationship is also far from static. The same person may experience radically different levels of accessibility depending on the circumstances. A pleasant fifteen-minute walk in mild weather can become physically demanding under extreme heat or heavy rain. A street that feels welcoming during the day may become intimidating at night, particularly when poorly illuminated or lacking active public frontages. A railway station may be perfectly accessible until its lift stops working. A familiar route may suddenly become difficult because of temporary construction, traffic congestion, or the deterioration of pedestrian infrastructure.
The distance has not changed, and neither has the location of the destination. Yet the actual possibility of reaching it has been transformed.
This distinction reveals one of the limitations of interpreting urban life primarily through fixed geographical distances or travel-time thresholds. A fifteen-minute radius may describe the potential distribution of services around a home, but it cannot automatically tell us whether those services are effectively accessible, usable, affordable, welcoming, or appropriate for the people who need them.
A neighbourhood may contain everything on a map and still fail to provide meaningful access to its inhabitants.
Beyond the Geography of Proximity
Urban planning has traditionally relied on spatial representations that simplify the complexity of the city. Distances, densities, land uses, transport networks, and service catchment areas are essential instruments for understanding and organizing urban development. The 15-minute city belongs to this tradition, translating the distribution of everyday functions into a spatial and temporal framework that can be mapped, measured, and communicated.
However, the experience of accessibility cannot be fully represented by drawing a circle around a residential address or calculating the time required to reach a destination. Two places may be equally close in geographical terms while being profoundly different in their practical accessibility.
A public park located five minutes from home may be separated from the surrounding neighbourhood by a dangerous road, a railway corridor, or a continuous perimeter fence. A hospital may be geographically close but difficult to reach without a private vehicle. A cultural facility may be within walking distance but financially inaccessible to some residents. A public square may be physically open to everyone while its design, management, or social environment discourages certain groups from using it.
In all these situations, proximity exists without necessarily producing accessibility.
This suggests that urban opportunities should not be understood merely as destinations distributed across space. Their actual value depends on the conditions under which people can reach, enter, use, and benefit from them. The quality of pedestrian infrastructure, the continuity of public space, the availability of transport alternatives, the presence of physical and social barriers, and the characteristics of individual users all contribute to determining whether an opportunity is genuinely accessible.
The challenge for urban design is therefore not only to reduce the distance between homes and services, but also to improve the conditions that transform spatial proximity into real opportunities for urban life.
The City Changes with the Person
Perhaps the most important implication of this perspective is that there is no single accessible city experienced equally by all its inhabitants.
We may share the same streets, public spaces, transport systems, and urban facilities, but we do not necessarily inhabit the same city in terms of the opportunities available to us. Age, physical capabilities, economic resources, cultural familiarity, personal circumstances, and even perceptions of safety influence the geography of our everyday lives.
For a child, the accessible city may consist of a relatively small network of familiar streets, playgrounds, schools, and places where independent movement is possible. For an elderly person, it may be structured around comfortable walking routes, frequent resting opportunities, accessible public transportation, and nearby social spaces. For a young professional, it may extend across a metropolitan region through an efficient combination of public transport and other mobility services.
These are not simply different preferences within the same urban geography. They represent different geographies of opportunity, produced by the interaction between personal capabilities and the characteristics of the city.
Moreover, these geographies evolve throughout our lives. The city we experience as children is not the same city we navigate as adults, and it may become a very different environment as we grow older. Temporary illness, injury, changing family responsibilities, or economic circumstances can alter our capacity to move and participate in urban life.
An accessible city should therefore not be designed around an abstract, standardized individual whose mobility, resources, and capabilities remain constant. It should recognize the diversity and variability of human experience as a fundamental condition of urban life.
This also requires a different approach to understanding and mapping accessibility. Rather than representing only the distribution of destinations and travel times, we need to investigate the actual relationships between people and opportunities: where access becomes difficult, which barriers interrupt everyday journeys, how conditions change over time, and which urban environments enable or restrict participation.
Such an approach would make accessibility mapping not only an analytical instrument, but also a design tool capable of revealing inequalities and identifying opportunities for spatial transformation.
The City Cannot Fit Inside Fifteen Minutes
There is another important limitation to the idea of organizing urban life primarily around the neighbourhood: the city is much more than the sum of its local services.
Even the most complete and well-designed fifteen-minute neighbourhood cannot contain the full range of opportunities that make urban life meaningful. Universities, specialized hospitals, major employment centres, cultural institutions, large metropolitan parks, railway stations, airports, and many other facilities necessarily operate at scales that extend far beyond the immediate residential environment.
And urban life is not limited to essential services. People travel to visit friends and relatives, discover unfamiliar places, participate in cultural events, explore nature, pursue professional ambitions, or simply experience something different from their everyday surroundings.
The richness of the city lies precisely in its capacity to connect people with opportunities that are not necessarily located close to home.
Historically, cities have developed through relationships between different scales of accessibility, from the immediate surroundings of the dwelling to neighbourhood centres, urban districts, metropolitan networks, and wider territorial systems. These scales are not alternatives to one another. They are complementary dimensions of urban life.
A successful neighbourhood should offer convenient access to everyday necessities, but it should also provide effective connections to the rest of the city. Local completeness should not become local confinement.
This distinction is particularly important when considering the social dimension of urban accessibility. Restricting our understanding of urban quality to what is available within a short distance from home risks overlooking the inequalities produced by access to opportunities at larger scales. Two neighbourhoods may offer similar everyday services while their residents experience very different possibilities for education, employment, healthcare, recreation, and social participation across the metropolitan territory.
The question is therefore not simply whether people can satisfy their daily needs within fifteen minutes, but whether the organization of the city enables them to access a sufficiently broad and meaningful range of opportunities throughout their lives.
From Proximity to Effective Accessibility
None of these considerations diminishes the importance of proximity. On the contrary, they suggest that proximity should be understood as one of the fundamental components of accessibility, rather than as its equivalent.
Reducing unnecessary travel remains a valuable urban objective. Creating walkable neighbourhoods, distributing essential services, and strengthening local public spaces are important strategies for improving urban quality of life. But they represent only part of a broader challenge.
The next step is to move from measuring how close opportunities are to understanding how effectively people can access them.
This shift has significant implications for urban planning and design. It requires us to consider the continuity and quality of public space, the diversity of mobility options, the removal of physical and social barriers, the adaptability of urban environments, and the relationship between local neighbourhoods and wider metropolitan systems.
Above all, it requires us to recognize that accessibility is not an abstract spatial condition that can be defined once and applied equally to everyone. It is a lived relationship between people and the city, shaped by individual capabilities, environmental conditions, social circumstances, and the changing geography of urban opportunities.
While working on The Accessible City — Designing Urban Life Beyond Proximity, I have increasingly returned to a simple distinction that, in my view, deserves a more central place in contemporary urban design.
Instead of asking only how many services are located within fifteen minutes of a person's home, we should ask what that person can actually reach, under which conditions, and with what degree of independence, comfort, and freedom.
The difference may appear subtle, but its implications are profound. It shifts the focus from the distribution of urban functions to the actual possibilities of participating in urban life. From standardized distances to differentiated human experiences. From the geometry of proximity to the geography of opportunities.
Ultimately, the ambition should not be to create a city where everyone lives within the same fifteen-minute radius, but one where people with different capabilities, resources, and circumstances can genuinely benefit from the opportunities that urban life has to offer.
The same fifteen minutes can contain profoundly different cities.
And designing an accessible city begins by recognizing those differences.
Francesco Procacci
This Urban Essay explores one of the central ideas developed in my forthcoming book, The Accessible City — Designing Urban Life Beyond Proximity, an investigation into how urban design can move beyond geographical proximity to create more inclusive, connected, and genuinely accessible cities.
