The COVID phenomenon and the resulting confinements have increased the desire among individuals to live in functional and self-sufficient cities, neighbourhoods and towns where basic and essential services are available in close proximity, with an associated supposed improvement in quality of life and an increase in work-life balance.
Although the concept of the "Ville du Quart d'heure" or 15-minute city has been developing chronologically over the last century, it was not until the second decade of the 21st century that the scientist and urban planner Carlos Moreno firmly proposed the term and what it entails, being included in the political agenda of the City of Paris by the Parisian Mayor Anne Hidalgo in March 2020, being extended in May 2020 to the group of cities that make up the C40 Climate Leadership.
Despite its inclusion in political agendas, with the common good as the main objective, this substitution of metric distance for temporal distance is at an early stage of development, not yet successfully implemented in the real world and still lacking practical implementation methods. It therefore requires scientific examination and validation based on qualitative and quantitative indicators and metrics.
Although all previous urban planning models along the same lines are based on equitable resource distribution, decentralisation, and infrastructure decongestion, it can be empirically confirmed that all of them have failed and ultimately contributed to negative gentrification, population segregation and urban fracture. This leads us to believe that this paradigm may repeat itself, which is why a large number of groups of opponents and detractors have come to the fore.
In order to obtain a complete picture from the historical origins to the contemporary application of the thought, both scientific and non-conventional literature has been used, given the relevance of the latter in the field and the lack of existence of the former as it is a relatively new idea.
For all of the above reasons, a scientific study of the cities that have begun to implement the model has been carried out in order to confirm that the theoretical concept proposed is feasible and complies with all the theoretical concepts.
