📘 Rethinking the 15-Minute City for Suburban Contexts: Toward a Meshed, Walkable, and Multimodal Urbanity
In his article for The Conversation, Giovanni Fusco, coordinator of the emc2 project, critically examines the feasibility of applying the 15-minute city model to the suburban fringes, now the dominant form of urbanization across Europe.
🔹 The traditional concept — ensuring access to housing, jobs, services, and leisure within a 15-minute walking radius — faces clear limitations in low-density, car-dependent areas. To overcome these, emc2 proposes a different strategy: a dense mesh of well-connected main streets designed as walkable, vibrant public spaces that anchor suburban centralities.
🔹 This perspective corrects two major misconceptions:
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The overemphasis on home-to-work proximity, which represents only 17% of total trips.
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The functionalist approach of simply bringing urban functions closer together, without transforming the public realm — a prerequisite for walkability.
📍 emc2 draws on fieldwork in pilot areas such as Drap (Nice metro area) and Seclin (Lille metro area) to deliver locally informed yet transferable urban recommendations. These include main street regeneration, green-blue corridor integration, and context-sensitive densification.
🎯 The ultimate goal: to develop a pragmatic and inclusive version of the 15-minute city, fit for the suburban and metropolitan peripheries of today and tomorrow.
🔗 Read in french the article:
Can we create a 15-minute city in the suburbs?