Only a small fraction of the 10,000 cities worldwide can be considered “15-minute cities,” according to a study published in the journal .
The researchers used public data to calculate the average distance people have to walk or cycle to essential services – such as supermarkets, schools, hospitals and parks – and calculated the proportion of residents who have the necessary at hand.
“When we looked at the results, we were amazed at how uneven they were,” said Matteo Bruno, a physicist at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome and lead author of the study.
The researchers selected to explore these in detail and found that the most accessible cities were mid-sized European cities such as Zurich, Milan, Copenhagen and Dublin – all with essential services that could be accessed within 15 minutes by more than 95% among the inhabitants.
The North of the USA, the most unfriendly
At the bottom of the ranking were sprawling North American cities with a high reliance on cars, such as San Antonio, Dallas, Atlanta and Detroit, it shows.
Small cities tend to score better, but the researchers found that in some large metropolises, such as Berlin and Paris, more than 90 percent of residents live within walking distance of essential services.
The authors developed an algorithm to explore how much these cities would need to change to become more accessible. They found that Atlanta would need to relocate 80% of its facilities to achieve an even distribution per resident, while moving only 10%.
