Search Results (5)

This paper delves into the rapidly progressing 15-Minute City concept, an innovative urban planning model that envisions a city where residents can access essential services and amenities within a 15-min walk or bike ride from their homes. Endorsed by UN-Habitat as a critical strategy for sustainable urban regeneration, this concept has gained considerable worldwide recognition since its introduction in 2016. The 15-Minute City framework aims to enhance accessibility, sustainability, and social cohesion by emphasizing mixed-use development, compact urban design, and efficient transportation systems. Nevertheless, the swift expansion of this concept has surpassed the production of academic literature on the topic, leading to a knowledge gap that calls for alternative research methodologies. To address this gap, our paper adopts a mixed-method approach, systematically analyzing the scholarly literature, gray literature, media articles, and policy documents to offer a holistic understanding of the 15-Minute City concept, its real-world application, and the primary principles embraced by policymakers. By investigating the various manifestations of the 15-Minute City model and its potential advantages, challenges, and implications for urban planning and policy, this paper contributes to the ongoing conversation on sustainable urban development and planning. Through this study, we aim to inform policymakers, urban planners, and researchers about the current state of the 15-Minute City movement and its possible future trajectory. Full article

Conventional and emerging paradigms of urbanism require new responses under the current circumstances, especially in relation to the integration of sustainability dimensions and technology advances. The escalating rate of urbanization, coupled with the climate emergency, fundamentally indeed disrupt the challenges that urbanism research and practice deal with, calling for adopting more innovative approaches to urban planning and design. With cities contributing around 65% of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and experiencing an unprecedented growth of population, contemporary urban policy needs to be redefined and re-assessed accordingly. While numerous urban models, such as the Compact City, the Eco-City, the Sustainable City, and the Smart City, have emerged in response to the challenges of sustainability and urbanization, the 15-Minute City has recently gained a steep popularity. This paper explores the theoretical, practical, and technological foundations of the 15-Minute City, with a particular focus on the proximity dimension of mixed land-use and its environmental, social, and economic benefits of sustainability as supported by smart technologies. We argue that this evolving model of urbanism has the potential to gain more expansion and success in regard to building more sustainable, efficient, resilient, equitable, and inclusive cities in line with the global agendas of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, as it adds a strategic value to the amalgam of the prevailing and emerging paradigms of urbanism and their synergies with respect to increasing the benefits of sustainability while emphasizing its environmental dimension. Full article

The concept of smart cities peaked in 2015, bringing an increased influx of ‘smart’ devices in the form of the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensors in cities. As a result, interest in smart urban governance has become more prevalent in administrative, organisational, and political circles. This is sustained by both local and global demands for an increased contribution to the goals of sustainability through urban governance processes in response to climate change urgencies. Cities generate up to 70% of global emissions, and in light of societal pressures for more inclusivity and democratic processes, the need for sound urban governance is merited. Further knowledge on the theme of smart urban governance is required to better understand the trends and knowledge structures and better assist policy design. Therefore, this study was undertaken to understand and map the evolution of the concept of smart urban governance through a bibliometric analysis and science mapping techniques using VOSviewer. In total, 1897 articles were retrieved from the Web of Science database over 5 decades, from 1968 to 2021, and divided into three subperiods, namely 1978 to 2015, 2016 to 2019, and 2020 to early 2022. Results indicate that the overall emerging themes across the three periods highlight the need for citizen participation in urban policies, especially in relation to smart cities, and for sustained innovation for e-participation, e-governance, and policy frameworks. The results of this study can aid both researchers exploring the concept of urban governance and policy makers rendering more inclusive urban policies, especially those hosting technological and digital domains. Full article

The ‘15-minute city’ concept is emerging as a potent urban regeneration model in post-pandemic cities, offering new vantage points on liveability and urban health. While the concept is primarily geared towards rethinking urban morphologies, it can be furthered via the adoption of Smart Cities network technologies to provide tailored pathways to respond to contextualised challenges through the advent of data mining and processing to better inform urban decision-making processes. We argue that the ‘15-minute city’ concept can value-add from Smart City network technologies in particular through Digital Twins, Internet of Things (IoT), and 6G. The data gathered by these technologies, and processed via Machine Learning techniques, can unveil new patterns to understand the characteristics of urban fabrics. Collectively, those dimensions, unpacked to support the ‘15-minute city’ concept, can provide new opportunities to redefine agendas to better respond to economic and societal needs as well as align more closely with environmental commitments, including the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. This perspective paper presents new sets of opportunities for cities arguing that these new connectivities should be explored now so that appropriate protocols can be devised and so that urban agendas can be recalibrated to prepare for upcoming technology advances, opening new pathways for urban regeneration and resilience crafting. Full article

The socio-economic impacts on cities during the COVID-19 pandemic have been brutal, leading to increasing inequalities and record numbers of unemployment around the world. While cities endure lockdowns in order to ensure decent levels of health, the challenges linked to the unfolding of the pandemic have led to the need for a radical re-think of the city, leading to the re-emergence of a concept, initially proposed in 2016 by Carlos Moreno: the “15-Minute City”. The concept, offering a novel perspective of “chrono-urbanism”, adds to existing thematic of Smart Cities and the rhetoric of building more humane urban fabrics, outlined by Christopher Alexander, and that of building safer, more resilient, sustainable and inclusive cities, as depicted in the Sustainable Development Goal 11 of the United Nations. With the concept gaining ground in popular media and its subsequent adoption at policy level in a number of cities of varying scale and geographies, the present paper sets forth to introduce the concept, its origins, intent and future directions. Full article