15-Minute City Focus at Pedestrian Space

My experience of the 15-minute city started off as ‘lived experience’. My family and I were living a 15-minute city lifestyle when I first heard about the concept in Spring 2020. Lockdowns were being enforced all around the world but living in Sweden at the time, we did not experience a lockdown. We did however see many effects of the pandemic and restrictions to urban life and use of public space over the ensuing months.

I quickly became interested in the concept from an advocacy standpoint -centering issues of spatial equity as critical within cities and proximity planning and models such as the 15-minute city.

Today I am in the 3rd year of my 4 year PhD program and my dissertation papers are based on a fieldwork approach I conducted in Warsaw from late 2022 to early 2024- a community-engaged urban lab process focused on documenting best practices and barriers of walkable urbanism via a 15-minute city lens through the experience of residents.

I really valued this process and am currently in a phase of ‘unpacking’ all the survey results and workshop data for research output. I look forward to sharing this research and also to continuing to do 15-minute city-focused workshops with residents in other cities.

Behind the scenes, I am also busy shaping a call with a UK-based urbanism-themed journal for a Special Issue on the 15-minute city. If you are researching and working with this topic, from a constructive and solutions-based approach (how it can adapt to your local context, identifying barriers to implement & ideating solutions etc), stay tuned for the call in March.

On a personal note, for about 2 years now in Poland’s capital city, my family and I have been living a largely 5-10-minute neighborhood lifestyle. For me, efficient but also vibrant local neighborhood life is the essence of great, well-planned urbanism. Our current neighborhood lacks some key ‘public good’ amenities but is an interesting case of contemporary transformation from a business district to more residential life. It’s in the research, stay tuned- especially if you are also interested in the challenges of transformation of CBD’s.

I often like to mix my own ‘lived experience’ when I post about my research because that’s how I prefer to engage people on my work and in mutual dialogue. Also, ‘lived experience’ is quite literally one of my research outputs and all I can say for now is that I’m really excited about what’s been documented via my urban lab approach here in Poland’s capital. More to come!

Have you ever experienced a 5-minute neighborhood lifestyle or 15/20 minute city lifestyle?