15-minute neighbourhood accessibility: a comparison between Naples and London

Abstract

The 15-minute city seems to represent a new way of looking at the city and responding to many current challenges, including climate change, aging population, and most recently Covid-19. However, if the 15-minute city idea is useful to guarantee an adequate supply of basic services, its basic principles cannot be adaptable to what we consider a city, especially to the big city. To this end, the paper considers the 15-minute city idea as an approach to be applied to the neighbourhood scale, in which the suitable supply of basic services and pedestrian paths and spaces allows to increase accessibility to places and the quality of life of the inhabitants. In this perspective, the work provides a methodology, based mainly on spatial analysis, aimed at defining 15-minute neighbourhoods by adopting a systemic approach. The methodology is tested on some suburbs located in the cities of Naples and London, whose different morphological, settlement and functional characteristics make them a significant experimentation test.