Spatial proximity and accessibility patterns of X-minute cities

Abstract

The 15-minute city concept has gained prominence in urban planning as a framework linking proximity, mobility, and quality of life at the intra-urban scale. An open question is whether this concept remains meaningful when applied to spatially connected urban regions or national urban systems. To address this issue, the new X-minute city concept allows proximity thresholds to vary with spatial context, mobility conditions, and service distribution. This paper develops an operational framework with the aim to examine and highlight spatial accessibility patterns from an X-minute city perspective, using the relatively urbanized area of the Netherlands as a national-scale case study. Accessibility is analyzed at the building level using OpenStreetMap data and a combination of object-based k-nearest-neighbor measures, distance-decay functions, inequality metrics, Average Nearest Neighbor analysis, and quantile regression. Concepts from central place theory are employed as an interpretive lens to understand service clustering and accessibility patterns, rather than as a formal model to be tested. The results show pronounced spatial disparities in accessibility between urban and rural areas, as well as substantial variation within cities. Major urban centers such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht exhibit high accessibility levels due to dense service provision, while peripheral and rural areas face systematically lower accessibility. Next accessibility outcomes also differ sharply across population groups. Elderly residents and groups reliant on walking experience the highest levels of inequality, with accessibility distributions remaining highly uneven at short-distance thresholds. Cycling expands the range of effective activity spaces and reduces inequality, but does not offset structural disadvantages in areas with sparse service provision. The findings point to the limits of uniform proximity targets and reveal the need for context-sensitive accessibility planning that explicitly accounts for service distribution, mobility constraints, and population heterogeneity within national urban systems.