15 Minute City Maps

 

Recently the concept of the Fifteen Minute City has inspired a number of different interactive city maps. A 15 Minute City is an urban environment which promotes a sustainable life by ensuring that all the essential needs of individuals can be accessed without having to get in a car or use public transport. The essential needs of individuals include such things as grocery stores, health care facilities, cultural attractions, transit stops, educational facilities and leisure activities. Individuals living in a 15 Minute City should be able to access all these essential health, educational, retail and leisure needs within a fifteen minute walk or bike ride. 

The importance of the 15 Minute City concept has become more apparent to many people during the current global epidemic. While many people were living in lock-down and were not permitted to travel far from home, they began to realize how important it is to have essential services and facilities within easy reach.

If you want to see if you currently live in a Fifteen Minute City then you might be able to find out on the 15 Minutes City interactive map. '15 Minutes City' are visualizing how well cities around the world meet the requirements of the Fifteen Minute City. Each city map shows how near different areas within the city are to mobility, leisure, education, recreation, retail and health facilities. The individual city maps are colored to show an overall 15 minute rating for all locations in the mapped city. If you click on the map you can view an individual score for each of the different categories for that location. 

Currently the English language version of 15 Minutes City has reachability visualizations for

• New York (map)
• San Franciso (map)
• Tokyo (map)

The German version, 15 Minuten Stadt, has interactive maps for most major German towns and cities. 

If you live in the USA you can see whether you live in a Fifteen Minute City using HERE's interactive map. Enter your address or zip-code into Do you live in a “15-minute” city?  and the map 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 currently qualifies as a 15 Minute City or not

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

 

If you live in Canada then you can refer to The Globe and Mail's 15 Minute City article to discover whether you live in a 15 minute city or not. The newspaper has used Statistics Canada data to see how close people in Canada's major cities live to essential amenities, such as grocery stores, pharmacies, schools and libraries.

According to The Globe and Mail's analysis Canada's most amenity dense city is Vancouver. 72% of the residents of Vancouver live in neighborhoods which are 'amenity-dense'. At the other end of the scale less than 4% of people living in St. John's have easy access to essential amenities.