Can a 15-minute city be created in the suburbs?

Giovanni Fusco, June 2025

The Conversation

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It is called the ‘15-minute city’. It is an urban planning ideal that would allow city residents and users to meet most of their needs within a 15-minute walk. This urban model aims to make a significant contribution to strategies for transitioning to a post-carbon city by reducing the energy resources required for mobility. Above all, it helps to make our lives more pleasant and our cities more welcoming and inclusive, which are essential counterparts to any effort to reduce resource consumption.

European cities such as Paris and Barcelona have already implemented 15-minute city policies with some success. In these cities, the focus has been on transforming existing spaces in each neighbourhood to allow for a variety of uses throughout the day. This has also involved adapting public spaces to make them more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly by reducing the space allocated to cars. Paris and Barcelona have been able to benefit from the advantage of existing compact urban forms.

The challenges of peri-urban areas

However, the transition to a city of short distances is much more difficult in post-war peri-urban areas, which are dependent on cars and have urban forms that are less pedestrian-friendly. Policies that have been successfully implemented in city centres could even exacerbate tensions between gentrifying metropolitan centres, with all their attractions, and neglected suburbs or peri-urban areas, contributing to the polarisation of our societies highlighted by geographer Christophe Guilluy.

According to American economist Edward Glaeser, this would also undermine the unity and functional cohesion of urban areas, for example as a single labour market. In any case, the 15-minute city centre would remain a minority, with inner Paris accounting for only 2 million of the 11 million inhabitants of the Paris metropolitan area.

But is this duality inevitable? Not necessarily. Let us therefore try to see what could bring about greater proximity in the peri-urban areas, which remain the majority reality of contemporary urbanisation.

A more precise definition of the 15-minute city is first needed.

In general terms, it is a city that allows its inhabitants and users, wherever they are in the urban space, to benefit from immediate access on foot to as many resources as possible. It is not a car-free city, which would be inconceivable for a large 21st-century conurbation, but a multimodal city designed around the needs of pedestrians. Pedestrians must be able to use the urban space easily and, if necessary, use bicycles or public transport to travel further afield. However, particularly in peri-urban areas, some car use will remain necessary, but its role will have to be reduced and redefined. This reduction in the dominance of cars is both a prerequisite and a result of the city of short distances in peri-urban areas, requiring gradual changes.

Clearing up a misunderstanding and correcting a conceptual error

Once this definition has been established, it is necessary to first clear up a misunderstanding and then correct an error in the way its practical implementation is conceived.

The misunderstanding is to consider commuting as central to the creation of the city of short distances. Living close to one’s place of work can be encouraged in various ways, but this will never be a realistic goal for the majority of inhabitants of a 21st-century metropolis, as French urban planner Marc Wiel and, more recently, Edward Glaeser, quoted above, have already pointed out.

Furthermore, even though these journeys are often long and concentrated at peak times, commuting accounts for only 17% of journeys made by French people, according to the 2019 National Survey on Personal Mobility. In fact, the vast majority of journeys are now related to visits to shops, services and leisure activities (56%), to which can be added visits to places of study and training (9%). Since the pandemic, the increased use of teleworking may have contributed to further reducing this proportion. This means that more than four-fifths of our mobility remains where a coherent short-distance city policy can play a role in promoting walking.

The main mistake is therefore to approach the problem solely from the perspective of bringing functions closer together: housing, workplaces (with the caveat mentioned above), shops and various services. This view, which is prevalent in current practice, particularly that advocated by Carlos Moreno, overlooks a fundamental aspect. As several researchers have shown (Cyrille Genre-Grandpierre and Jean-Christophe Foltête in 2003, Sonia Lavadinho and Giuseppe Pini in 2005, Florence Huguenin-Richard in 2018 in this same journal), simply bringing functions closer together is not enough to bring about a change in behaviour towards soft modes of transport (walking, cycling) nor to guarantee the conviviality of urban space, which is essential for promoting these modes of transport.

In other words, bringing functions closer together does not encourage motorists to become pedestrians if the urban space remains hostile to walking.

Towards a new vision: public space as a central resource

In this context, together with my fellow urban planners Meta Berghauser Pont in Sweden, Valerio Cutini in Italy and Angelika Psenner in Austria, I am proposing a new vision through the EMC2 research project – The Evolutive Meshed Compact City, funded by the DUT programme.

We identify as the primary resource, to be located within easy reach of every place of residence or work, not a specific function, but what really makes a city and is often lacking in peri-urban areas, namely a welcoming and lively public space capable of catalysing all the functions usually associated with the 15-minute city (shops, services, etc.).

However, a large conurbation cannot function as an archipelago of autonomous urban villages structured around their central spaces. Researchers, from pioneers such as the Anglo-American architect Christopher Alexander to Bill Hillier, founder of the School of Spatial Syntax at University College London in the 1980s, show that public spaces must form an uninterrupted network capable of distributing centrality to all scales of urban space, including its peripheries and suburbs. If they remain small, isolated clusters of functions, urban centres are doomed to failure: only constant flows between them can ensure their survival and development over time. A mix of activities is also important, as the American urban planner Jane Jacobs pointed out in the 1960s, with cross-fertilisation benefiting all of them.

The role of the main street network and its adaptation to peri-urban areas

We are thus gradually seeing the emergence of the solution we recommend for the city of short distances: instead of an archipelago of small clusters, a network of main streets that is as dense as possible, concentrating services and shops, and which is friendly and welcoming to pedestrians both when they are on the move and when they stop. These streets must be connected to each other and to other public spaces (squares, gardens, parks) in order to effectively link the area. This was the model for most French and European urban centres, which was lost in the post-war period when the modernist vision of spatial separation of functions and the creation of independent clusters became dominant in urban design.

However, this network must be adapted to concrete and varied urban realities. Research shows that in traditional compact cities, main shopping streets are ideally spaced about 400 metres apart. In peri-urban areas, this grid can be expanded (1,000 to 1,500 metres) to accommodate low population and employment densities, while ensuring the economic viability of local services and shops. Although targeted densification policies around these axes are conceivable, it is crucial that today’s urban planning offers solutions adapted to low peri-urban densities. In a context of low population growth, these areas will continue to represent a significant share of European urbanisation in the coming decades.

Moving away from the vision of the urban planner as demiurge

Two important findings from recent research still need to be incorporated into this discussion

First, contrary to a certain vision of the urban planner as a demiurge, which is still present in the 15-minute city community, it is not possible to decree where urban functions will be located, particularly those that obey market logic, such as shops. We can only support their establishment, and the creation of welcoming public spaces plays a decisive role in this regard.

Secondly, it is important to emphasise that not every street can become a main shopping street (even if every street can become more pedestrian-friendly). A main street requires several specific characteristics: intrinsic properties related to the design of public space (quality of pavements, presence of a canopy of vegetation, street furniture), morphological properties of the surrounding buildings (layout of buildings, openness of facades) and, above all, characteristics resulting from the relative position of the street within the urban network (connectivity, role as a thoroughfare, etc.).

The EMC2 project: potential for the 15-minute city in European peri-urban areas

The European EMC2 project, a partnership involving the ESPACE laboratory, the Côte d’Azur Urban Planning Agency and the Lille Métropole Development and Urban Planning Agency in France, as well as partners in Austria, Italy and Sweden, is exploring this urban model in detail.

The aim is to test the capacity of the connecting roads that criss-cross European peri-urban areas to be transformed into interconnected main streets that are pedestrian-friendly and home to a wide variety of shops and services. These main streets will also need to incorporate additional features, such as access to larger-scale mobility networks and the green and blue infrastructure of metropolitan ecological corridors.

In addition, in-depth analyses are being carried out in specific workshop areas where active centralities can already be observed along these peri-urban roads, for example in Drap in the peri-urban area of Nice or in Seclin in the peri-urban area of Lille. These studies aim to understand the conditions for the success of these spaces as pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly places.

Through close collaboration with local partners, the EMC2 project will produce recommendations tailored to the specific characteristics of each study area, but generalisable enough to serve as a guide for defining 15-minute city policies in other European peri-urban areas. The ultimate goal is to identify pragmatic solutions to adapt this concept to the realities of metropolitan peri-urban areas, while taking into account the morphological, economic and social challenges specific to these territories.

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