Active accessibility, or making it easy for people to access essential services and opportunities, is a key goal in today's sustainable urban development plans. The concept of the "15-minute city" has become a popular way to highlight the importance of having everything you need close to where you live. In this paper, we look at two ways to measure accessibility for pedestrians: cumulative opportunities (the total number of places a person can reach) and variety (how many different types of places a person can access), all within a 15-minute walk.
We studied a sample of European cities with populations of 100,000 or more to see how accessible they are on foot and how evenly this accessibility is distributed both within and between cities. To measure inequality, we used a calculation similar to the Gini coefficient, which is often used to measure income inequality.
Our results show that most European cities are not fully "15-minute cities" yet. There is also significant inequality in access to services within cities, although cities with a higher variety of services tend to have less inequality. When comparing different cities, we found that as cities grow denser, there are diminishing returns in both the number of accessible places and the variety of places people can reach.
Overall, our findings suggest that European cities can improve pedestrian access and reduce internal inequalities by increasing the variety of services and opportunities that are reachable on foot, alongside investing in better pedestrian infrastructure.
Vale, D., Lopes, A.S. (2023) Accessibility inequality across Europe: a comparison of 15-minute pedestrian accessibility in cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants. npj Urban Sustain 3, 55. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-023-00133-w
