A little over a decade ago, the French urban planner Carlos Moreno coined the concept of the ’15-minute city’. Under this name, Moreno proposed the creation of urban environments where the daily needs of citizens can be satisfied within a radius of just 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle, or in other words, 1,200 meters walking distance and 2,400 meters by bike.
Within this radius of distance you must be able to access certain services that are normally grouped into six areas or divisions. These categories are supply, health, work, quality of life, leisure and education.
This innovative perspective has become a roadmap for the sustainable development of our cities. Today, municipalities around the world are reconfiguring their urban landscapes and mobility policies to realize this vision of a more accessible and healthy life in harmony with the environment.
To find out if ours is a 15-minute city, the Deyde DataCentric website has created an interactive map that details accessibility to essential services and facilities within a radius of a quarter of an hour on foot or by bicycle. The tool allows citizens to effectively assess the proximity and availability of services, encouraging the creation of more accessible and sustainable urban communities.
To access the information provided by the website, you must enter the address in the magnifying glass at the bottom left of the map. The search engine gives the option to mark all the categories or only those that interest us and depending on the color that the map adopts we will know if the chosen point meets the 15 minute walk (light green), the 15 minute bike ride (dark green) or does not comply as a 15-minute city (red).
Deyde DataCentric highlights that 46% of the population of Spain has all the services considered basic on foot and 15.1% can reach them in 15 minutes by bicycle. However, 38.9% of the citizens of our country cannot access the services studied either on foot or by bike.
The communities with the greatest accessibility to services are Madrid and Catalunya, where the highest percentage of their citizens live within a 15-minute walk. In Aragon and the Basque Country, more than half of the population also lives within 15 minutes of the city. On the other hand, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura are the regions with the least accessibility.
In large Spanish cities, 96% of the population has the services analyzed within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle. Barcelona is postulated as a 100% city of 15 minutes walking and Bilbao is 100% city of 15 minutes by bike. In terms of proximity in time, Barcelona, ??Valencia and Madrid have the highest percentage of their population within a 15-minute walk.
In the metropolitan area of ??the 10 most populated cities in Spain, 75% of its inhabitants live within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle from the set of services analyzed. The municipalities surrounding and surrounding Barcelona have greater accessibility to all services than any other large city. They are Cornellà de Llobregat, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Mataró, Badalona, ??Granollers, Manresa, El Prat de Llobregat and Mollet del Vallès.
On the other side of the scale, the city of Murcia lags behind compared to other large Spanish cities. It has the lowest percentage of population within 15 minutes, especially to access education, leisure services (hospitality, sports facilities, auditoriums) and quality of life (green areas and official organizations).
Only 12% of the inhabitants of the municipalities with 30,000 inhabitants and provinces most affected by depopulation, what is known as emptied Spain, live within 15 minutes walk or by bike of all the services analyzed. They represent almost 5 million people in total. The categories with the most room for improvement for its citizens are entertainment, quality of life and work.
Curiously, there are five municipalities in emptied Spain in which 100% of the population would live a city 15 minutes away. They would be Béjar (Salamanca), Burela (Lugo), Jaca (Huesca), La Seu d’Urgell (Lleida) and Solsona (Lleida).