The 15-minute city (FMC or 15mC) is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services such as work, shopping, education, healthcare and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city. This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.
Implementing the concept typically involves mixed-use development, pedestrian friendly design, and improved access to public transit, alongside policies that reduce car dependency. This change in lifestyle may include remote working which reduces daily commuting and is supported by the recent widespread availability of information and communications technology. The concept has been described as a "return to a local way of life".
As people spend more time working from home or near their homes, there is less demand for large central office spaces and more need for flexible, local co-working spaces. The 15-minute city concept suggests a shift toward a decentralized network of workspaces within residential neighbourhoods, reducing the need for long commutes and promoting work-life balance.
The concept builds on earlier planning traditions as they emphasize walkability and mixed-use development, including New Urbanism and transit oriented development. In recent times, it builds upon similar pedestrian-centered principles found in New Urbanism, transit-oriented development, and other proposals that promote walkability, mixed-use developments, and compact, livable communities. Numerous models have been proposed about how the concept can be implemented, such as 15-minute cities being built from a series of smaller 5-minute neighborhoods, also known as complete communities or walkable neighborhoods. For walking, the most common way of active travel, a 15-minute radius corresponds roughly to a distance.
The concept gained significant traction in recent years after Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo included a plan to implement the 15-minute city concept during her 2020 re-election campaign. Since then, a number of cities worldwide have adopted the same goal and many researchers have used the 15-minute model as a spatial analysis tool to evaluate accessibility levels within the urban fabric.
In early 2023, conspiracy theories emerged that described 15-minute cities as instruments of government repression, claiming that they were a pretext to introduce restrictions on travel by car.
History
The 15-minute city concept is claimed to be derived from historical ideas about proximity and walkability, such as Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit although the association is explicitly derived from secondary sources - Moreno has never associated the 15 minute city with Perry's work or Ebenezer Howard's Garden City ideas in any of his work. As an inspiration for the 15-minute city, Carlos Moreno a Smart Cities Ambassador to Anne Hidalgo later spoke about Jane Jacobs's ideals presented in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs also emphasized the importance of human-scale neighborhoods with mixed use, as well as her opposition to car-dependent urban planning and urban sprawl. She believed that cities work best when they are shaped by local communities and are human-scale in terms of daily life. Retrospective publications align Jacobs' ideals with the concept of the 15-minute city.
The ongoing climate crisis and global COVID-19 pandemic prompted Moreno's team to frame a heightened focus on his 15-minute city branding concept. In July 2020, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group published a framework for cities to "build back better" using the 15-minute concept, referring specifically to plans implemented in Milan, Madrid, Edinburgh, and Seattle after COVID-19 outbreaks. Their report highlights the importance of inclusive community engagement through mechanisms like participatory budgeting and adjusting city plans and infrastructure to encourage dense, complete, overall communities.
A manifesto published in Barcelona in April 2020 by architecture theorist Massimo Paolini the Manifesto for the Reorganisation of the City after COVID-19 proposed radical change in the organization of cities in the wake of COVID-19. The proposal was endorsed by more than 2000 people, among them 160 academics and 350 architects. The proposal has four key elements: reorganization of mobility, (re)naturalization of the city, de-commodification of housing, and de-growth.
In early 2023, conspiracy theories began to flourish that described 15-minute cities as instruments of government repression, claiming that they were a pretext to introduce restrictions on travel by car. In fact, the '15-minute city' proposals do not involve any restrictions on travel by car, but emphasize a reduction in car dependency. Unrelated measures introduced to reduce traffic in some cities have been somehow confused with '15-minute cities'.
Research models The 15-minute city is a proposal for developing a polycentric city, where density is made pleasant, one's proximity is vibrant, and social intensity (a large number of productive, intricately linked social ties) is real. The key element of the model has been described by Carlos Moreno as "chrono-urbanism" or a refocus of interest on time value rather than time cost.
Moreno and the 15-minute city Professor Carlos Moreno's 2016 opinion piece in La Tribune business magazine introduced the 15-minute city concept as an aspirational call for future cities to be polycentric and to fulfill several essential functions within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from their dwellings such as living, working, and leisure. He describes a transformation from monofunctional urban spaces as being driven by four components: density, proximity, diversity and ubiquity.
Moreno later cites the work of Nikos Salingaros, who theorizes that an optimal density for urban development exists which would encourage local solutions to local problems. The authors discuss proximity in terms of both space and time, arguing that a 15-minute city would reduce the space and time necessary for activity. Diversity in this 15-minute city model refers to mixed-use development and multicultural neighborhoods, both of which Moreno and others argue would improve the urban experience and boost community participation in the planning process. Digitalization is a key aspect of the 15-minute city derived from smart cities. Moreno and others argue that a Fourth Industrial Revolution has reduced the need for commuting because of access to technology like virtual communication and online shopping. They conclude by stating that these four components, when implemented at scale, would form an accessible city with a high quality of life.
Recent research has attempted to quantify how closely cities align with the 15-minute model using spatial accessibility metrics. A 2024 study in Nature Cities developed a global framework assessing thousands of cities and measuring access to services within 15-minute travel thresholds. The study found inequalities in access within and between cities and proposed redistribution strategies to reduce accessibility gaps. A related Nature News article stated that the findings highlight measurable disparities and are supported by an online visualization tool for comparing cities.
Sweden's 1-minute city Started in 2019, as a pilot of mission-oriented innovation led by Vinnova, the Swedish government's innovation agency, a consortium including ArkDes (the Swedish national centre for architecture and design), Lundberg Design, Volvo Cars, Voi, municipalities in Stockholm, Umeå, Gothenburg, Helsingborg, Hultsfred, Härnösand, and Södertälje, led a project called Street Moves, framed explicitly around the idea of the '1-minute city' as noted in Vinnova's mission-oriented innovation 'playbook, Designing Missions.Hill, Dan (2022). Designing Missions: Mission-oriented innovation - a handbook from Vinnova Vinnova, Stockholm Noting that the 15-minute city is based largely around the provision and organisation of municipal services and infrastructures, via representative modes of urban planning, the Street Moves project explored how the 'one-minute scale of the street outside your front door' could enable more participative modes of engagement,O'Sullivan, Feargus (6 January 2021). Make Way for the 'One-Minute City' Bloomberg CityLab. Retrieved 27 April 2025. within the broader perspective of 15-minute city models. This one-minute city model can be seen as emphasising qualitative social, cultural, and political aspects of urbanism, in the context of the other chrono-urbanism models described here.Hill Dan, Bruno Matteo, Melo Hygor P. M., Takeuchi Yuichiro and Loreto Vittorio (2024). Cities beyond proximity Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A.38220240097
Implementations Asia In 2019, Singapore's Land Transport Authority proposed a master plan that included the goals of "20-minute towns" and a "45-minute city" by 2040.
Israel has embraced the concept of a 15-minute city in new residential developments. According to Orli Ronen, the head of the Urban Innovation and Sustainability Lab at the Porter School for Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, and central Jerusalem have been effective in delivering on the concept at least in part in new developments, but only Tel Aviv has been relatively successful.
Dubai launched the 20-minute city project in 2022, where residents are able to access daily needs & destinations within 20 minutes by foot or bicycle. The plan involves placing 55% of the residents within 800 meters of mass transit stations, allowing them to reach 80% of their daily needs and destinations.
In the Philippine's largest city, the government of Quezon City announced in 2023 its plans to implement the 15-minute city concept to establish a walkable, people-friendly, and sustainable community for its residents. Influenced by the city of Paris, the government aims to make urban development people-centered and to further reach the city's goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050.
China The 2016 Master Plan for Shanghai called for "15-minute community life circles", where residents could complete all of their daily activities within 15 minutes of walking. The community life circle has been implemented in other Chinese cities, like Baoding and Guangzhou. Xiong'an is also being developed under the 15-minute life circle concept.
The Standard for urban residential area planning and design (GB 50180–2018), a national standard that came into effect in 2018, stipulates four levels of residential areas: 15-min pedestrian-scale neighborhood, 10-min pedestrian-scale neighborhood, 5-min pedestrian-scale neighborhood, and a neighborhood block. Among them, "15-min pedestrian-scale neighborhood" means "residential area divided according to the principle that residents can meet their material, living and cultural demand by walking for 15 minutes; usually surrounded by urban trunk roads or site boundaries, with a population of 50,000 to 100,000 people (about 17,000 to 32,000 households) and complete supporting facilities."
Chengdu, to combat urban sprawl, commissioned the "Great City" plan, where development on the edges of the city would be dense enough to support all necessary services within a 15-minute walk.
Europe
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, introduced the 15-minute city concept in her 2020 re-election campaign and began implementing it during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, school playgrounds were converted to parks after school hours, while the Place de la Bastille and other squares have been revamped with trees and bicycle lanes.