IMAGINE THE perfect urban neighbourhood. Residential streets are peppered with shops and cafés. Schools, museums and theatres can all be reached on foot. Green spaces offer a quiet escape. Some cities, such as Copenhagen, Paris and Tokyo, already function this way. These “walkable” cities—sometimes called “15-minute cities”—offer everything that locals need within a small radius. A study published recently in Nature Cities, a journal, shows which places do this best.
Matteo Bruno and his colleagues at the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome calculated the walkability of more than 10,000 cities around the world. They first mapped how long it would take residents in various urban neighbourhoods to reach “key amenities”, such as schools, hospitals, restaurants and shops, on foot. They then calculated an average for the whole city.
Not surprisingly, European cities were the most pedestrian-friendly. In a ranking of big cities (those with more than half a million people), 45 of the top 50 spots were in Europe. Milan came first. The average Milanese needs to walk for only around seven minutes to reach amenities, and 98% of the city’s population live in 15-minute neighbourhoods. In Asia Kyoto, in Japan, and Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, were among the most walkable cities.
North American cities were notably absent from the top 50. Many of them are designed around cars, with residential neighbourhoods sprawling out far from central amenities. Vancouverites had the shortest strolls in the region, but their city ranked only 53rd in the world. Manhattan was ranked as highly walkable, but other districts of New York City dragged the average down.
The researchers also wanted to identify how places could be made more walkable. Paris, for example, already ranks well: it takes most Parisians just eight minutes, on average, to reach key amenities on foot, and 93% of them live in 15-minute neighbourhoods. But the authors developed an algorithm to determine how the city’s current amenities could be moved in order to further improve its walkability (see map). They found that, with a bit of urban reshuffling, two minutes could be shaved off the average walking time, and 97% of people could live in 15-minute neighbourhoods. This shows how urban planning could improve walkability, not whether it would make economic sense: coaxing shops and restaurants to quieter neighbourhoods might require government incentives.
The researchers did the same for 53 more cities (see chart). Of these, 34 were already 15-minute cities for most residents, but another ten had the potential to be. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, services are clustered around coastal neighbourhoods. Moving some of these services inland could cut the average walking time for residents from 25 minutes to 15. Similarly, roughly half of Melbourne’s population live in 15-minute neighbourhoods, but the researchers calculated that this could increase to around 90% if its amenities were better spread.
Alas, some cities are unlikely to ever become a pedestrian paradise. In places with a large suburban sprawl, achieving the 15-minute status would require a lot of new amenities. For Atlanta to become as walkable as a densely populated city like Berlin, for example, would require roughly twelve times as many key amenities as it has now. But small changes might still pay off: plenty of research has shown that more walkable cities have healthier residents and cleaner air. And increased foot traffic also helps local shops and cafés, too. ■