Compare methods

	15-Minute City Analysis	Accessibility Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Human Geography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2021	1959
Originator	Carlos Moreno	Walter G. Hansen
Type	Descriptive proximity assessment of daily needs by active travel	Spatial index of the ease of reaching opportunities from a location
Seminal source	Moreno, C., Allam, Z., Chabaud, D., Gall, C., & Pratlong, F. (2021). Introducing the "15-Minute City": Sustainability, resilience and place identity in future post-pandemic cities. Smart Cities, 4(1), 93–111.	Hansen, W. G. (1959). How accessibility shapes land use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76.
Aliases	Fifteen-Minute City Analysis, Chrono-Urbanism Analysis, Proximity Index Analysis, Quarter-Hour City Assessment	Hansen Accessibility, Gravity Accessibility Measure, Potential Accessibility, Spatial Accessibility Index
Related	4	4
Summary	15-minute city analysis assesses how many of life's daily needs — shops, schools, healthcare, work, recreation — residents can reach within a short walk or bike ride, typically fifteen minutes, from their homes. Articulated by Carlos Moreno in 2021 under the banner of chrono-urbanism, the concept reorients planning around proximity and time rather than mobility and distance. The analysis operationalizes it by computing walk or cycle isochrones around residential locations and scoring how completely the essential categories of urban functions fall within reach, producing proximity indices that can be mapped, compared across neighbourhoods, and weighted by population.	Accessibility analysis measures how easily opportunities — jobs, shops, clinics, parks — can be reached from a given location, combining the attractiveness (size) of destinations with the cost of travelling to them. The gravity-based formulation introduced by Walter Hansen in 1959 sums the opportunities at all destinations, each discounted by a distance-decay function of travel cost, producing a single accessibility score per origin that has become a foundational concept in transport geography and urban planning.