The 15-minute city or quarter-hour city is an urban planning concept that proposes that most of the needs and services of citizens (such as work, shopping, education, health centers or leisure) They should be within walking or cycling distances of less than 15 minutes from any point in the city.

The term was created by Carlos Moreno and popularized by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. Within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle from their home, city residents can access most of their essential needs.3456 and has been described as a «return to a local way of life.

 The 15-minute city concept builds on American planner Clarence Perry’s earlier work in the 1900s on the role of the neighborhood. A better-known proponent was Jane Jacobs, who recounts it in her book «The Death and Life of Great American Cities». The Franco-Colombian scientist Carlos Moreno has given new impetus and content to the concept.

The crisis of the coronavirus pandemic COVID-19 has accelerated the desire to live in functional, human-sized cities, towns and neighborhoods. This urban proposal was adopted, in May 2020, by the C40 Climate Leadership Group, in response to the climate crisis and the urban effects of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis.

The 15-minute city is a vision of a polycentric city , where density allows a critical mass and gives meaning to the proximity of life and its social intensity. It is a city where inhabitants can respond to their needs organized in six categories: live, work, get supplies, take care of themselves, educate themselves, rest .

It is guided by three major ideas: (1) Chrono-urbanism, to give a new rhythm to the city; (2) chronotopia, to give different functions to a place dependent on temporality, and (3) topophily, literally «the love of place», to reinforce people’s attachment to their neighborhood.

Regarding this last idea, Yi-Fu Tuan considers that there are two ways of understanding the relationship between spaces and their inhabitants, topophilia and civitio. The first is the feeling of belonging to a place or territory and the second is the feeling of community identity. Both concepts are usually presented so united that they can be confused, but one is geographical and the other social.