Thursday, October 15, 2020

Do You Live in a 15 Minute City?

In the last six months I have not traveled outside of East London. I do not own a car and at the moment I am reluctant to use public transport. Consequently my world has become a lot smaller. Luckily, however, I live in a '15 minute city'. Which means that all my essential needs can be accessed in 15 minutes from my home by foot or by bike.

The concept of the 15 Minute City was developed by Professor Carlos Moreno of the Sorbonne. The idea of the 15 Minute City is a new approach to city planning which wants to make urban living more liveable and sustainable by ensuring that all the essential needs of individuals can be accessed without having to get in a car or use public transport. The importance of this concept has become more apparent to many people during the current global epidemic.

The essential needs of individuals include such things as grocery stores, health care, cultural attractions, transit stops, educational facilities and leisure activities. You can answer the question Do you live in a “15-minute” city? by using HERE's new interactive map. Enter your address or zip-code into the map and it will show you all the Groceries, Medical Facilities, Cultural Sites, Educational Facilities, Transit Stops and Leisure Facilities within a 15 minute walk of your home. The map will also tell you if your address qualifies as a 15 Minute City or not

Currently Do you live in 15-minute city? only appears to work for addresses in the USA.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey Keir! Love this map. Any interest in talking to us? We're very focused on the 15 minute city for NYC, and would love to be able to help promote your work here.

Unknown said...

Hey Keir,

Any chance you can run this analysis at the urban scale to identify which neighborhoods are amenity-rich vs those that are deserts? In NYC, e.g.?

Keir Clarke said...

@Unknown - I didn't make this map. This is the work of HERE maps. You could run the analysis yourself using https://overpass-turbo.eu/ and OpenStreetMap data. For example here is a link to supermarkets in Manhattan - https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/Z4G