15-Minute City Analysis
Also known as: Fifteen-Minute City Analysis, Chrono-Urbanism Analysis, Proximity Index Analysis, Quarter-Hour City Assessment
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.
Key highlights
- Translates an intuitive, communicable ideal of complete neighbourhoods into a measurable index.
- Uses true network walk/cycle isochrones, capturing barriers that straight-line buffers miss.
- Spans multiple daily-need categories, rewarding breadth of provision, not just one amenity type.
- Population-weighted aggregation supports equity analysis of who lives in a 15-minute neighbourhood.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use 15-minute city analysis when the planning question is about proximity and completeness of neighbourhoods — identifying amenity gaps, comparing districts, targeting where to add services, or communicating an accessibility vision to the public. It is well suited to descriptive, exploratory assessment of walkable daily-need access using open amenity and network data. It is less appropriate when the relevant trips are long-distance or necessarily motorized, when fifteen minutes is the wrong benchmark for the context (sparse rural or specialized services), or when capacity, quality, and competition for amenities matter, in which case gravity or floating-catchment accessibility measures are more informative than a binary proximity count.
Strengths & limitations
- Translates an intuitive, communicable ideal of complete neighbourhoods into a measurable index.
- Uses true network walk/cycle isochrones, capturing barriers that straight-line buffers miss.
- Spans multiple daily-need categories, rewarding breadth of provision, not just one amenity type.
- Population-weighted aggregation supports equity analysis of who lives in a 15-minute neighbourhood.
- Binary 'reachable within τ' counting ignores amenity quality, capacity, and how many options exist.
- Results are sensitive to the chosen time threshold, travel speed, and how categories are defined.
- Depends on the completeness of open points-of-interest data, which varies sharply by place.
- Proximity to amenities does not guarantee people will use them or that needs are actually met.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Is the 15-minute city analysis the same as accessibility analysis?
They are closely related but emphasize different things. Classic accessibility analysis produces a continuous, often gravity-weighted score of how much opportunity is reachable given travel cost. 15-minute city analysis is a specific, threshold-based application: it asks, for active travel within a fixed short time, whether each essential category of daily need is reachable, and aggregates that into a proximity index. It is essentially a cumulative-opportunity, multi-category, walk/cycle-focused form of accessibility analysis tuned to a planning ideal.
Why use network isochrones instead of a 15-minute circle?
Because people walk and cycle along streets, not through buildings or across rivers. A circle drawn at an average speed assumes unobstructed movement in every direction, which almost never holds: motorways, rail lines, rivers, and gaps in the pedestrian network can cut the truly reachable area to a fraction of the circle. Computing the isochrone on the real walk or cycle network gives the genuine set of reachable amenities and avoids systematically overstating proximity.
What are the categories of daily needs in a 15-minute city?
Moreno's framing groups urban functions into six social functions of daily life: living (housing), working, supplying (commerce, food, groceries), caring (health and wellbeing), learning (education), and enjoying (culture, leisure, recreation). A complete 15-minute neighbourhood provides access to all of them within a short walk or ride. In analysis, real amenities are mapped to these categories so the proximity index reflects the full breadth of daily needs rather than a single function.
Sources
- 1.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.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). 15-Minute City Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/urban-studies/fifteen-minute-city-analysis