How walkable is your city? Online tool shows how major centres measure up

The push for sustainable living has given rise to the idea of a 15-minute city: one in which residents can access essential amenities on foot or by bike in 15 minutes or less. Writing in Nature Cities, Bruno et al. built an online platform to analyse how close the world’s cities come to this ideal — and how they could be redesigned to realize it (M. Bruno et al. Nature Cities 1, 633–641; 2024). The authors found that the fraction of residents who have 15-minute access to essential services in a city is closely related to the average time it takes to reach these points, suggesting that cities with poor average accessibility are also those with the highest inequality. They also devised an algorithm to assess what proportion of amenities would need to be relocated to make them accessible to everyone.

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