Abstract
Over recent years, the novel concept of the 15-minute city is gaining traction across Europe and beyond due to the numerous benefits that it can yield for local communities. Although it builds upon previous urban planning movements and ideas, repackaging them has contributed to extra attention when re-inventing the desired neighbourhood structure at this time of global resource constraints, climate change, vulnerable settlements, pandemics, and social exclusion. The concept promotes a proximity-based approach in neighbourhoods planning and design by which accessing daily needs for locals is guaranteed in a 15-minute walk/bicycle ride of their home. While the fundamentals of the concepts are promising, a prescriptive nature, like its previous counterparts, does not allow for understanding how popular it is for people and replicable across various contexts. In fact, much less is known about the applicability of this new approach with regard to diverse contexts and clients. The present research project will thus shed light on exploring the way people perceive this novel planning and design approach in various urban contexts worldwide. This research follows a case-study design, with an in-depth analysis of public perception, that is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The empirical study on context-sensitivity is conducted using predefined developed and developing cities represented by Brussels and Tehran, respectively. These findings contribute in several ways to our understanding of the 15-minute city concept and provide a basis for future applications, having multiple scientific, social, and environmental impacts on global communities in the long term.
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