15-minute city

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 1 km (0.6 mi) 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.