The 15-minute city

At the time of COP26, the issue of Climate Change is more pressing than ever and needs to be addressed at all levels of society. In particular, the cities, whose traditional industrial development paradigm was very resources consuming, need to take actions to mitigate the environmental damages. They must embrace more sustainable development models which ought to combine both an ecological transition and a social development, improving in particular the quality of life of their residents and their opportunities to fulfil well-being. The 15-minute city is an emerging model of sustainable urban development. Proximity-oriented, it focuses on enhancing local opportunities at the neighbourhood scale and curbing car-dependency in cities. On paper, it seems to solve the impossible equation between social and environmental development. Then, the main objective of this research is to explain whether or not proximity in the built environment have on the subjective well-being of urban dwellers, through the analysis of several dimensions of proximity such as accessibility to resources, walkability and promotion of soft active mobility modes and enhancement of social local ties at a neighbourhood level. Mediating variables about the life experiences of a resident (social life, leisure, perception of a local environment to name but a few) were introduced to better apprehend the pathways that link the physical built world to a subjective and perceived well-being. A quantitative analysis was conducted on three case studies, corresponding to three European cities often considered as prototypes of a 15-minute city : Paris, Barcelona and Milan. To assess the drivers of well-being, two types of regression were run over the data : linear regressions to identify the relationships between potential predictors and subjective well-being dimensions, as well as, when possible, multinominal logistic regression as a verification of the linear regressions’ outcomes. Because of constraints during data collection, only conclusions from the Paris case study could be generalised. Some conclusions could be drawn from that analysis. Proximity was shown to have a direct light impact on subjective well-being through accessibility, as well as an indirect one through local social links. Proximity oriented-development can then be an enhancer of opportunities for urban dwellers, developing local potential in neighbourhoods but should simultaneously link neighbourhoods together in a polycentric system, not to become dead-ends and impede the effects of proximity over subjective well-being.