Critical Issues in Operationalizing the x-minute City

The COVID-19 pandemic made evident the need for a minimum set of proximity-based services accessible by active travel. Since then, the concept of the x-minute city has received increasing attention in planning practices and academic literature. In many respects, the x-minute city can be traced back to previous planning concepts such as the neighbourhood unit, the pedestrian pocket, the superblock etc. However, many theoretical and methodological questions for its implementation are still to be solved. The chapter presents a methodology to operationalize the x-minute city concept, intending to show which parts of the city and what percentage of its population can walk to a location of a given service within three-time thresholds (5, 10 and 15 min). The Italian city of Turin is used as a case study to test this methodology. The results show that at least in dense cities such as the case study, the “classic” 15-min threshold is not necessarily the most appropriate target, as it is already attained for many services by the majority of the population. Moreover, the accessibility levels to services are significantly determined by the number and spatial distribution of the locations of these services. Finally, operational research on accessibility measures and indicators developed in the field of regional sciences from the second half of the last century can help to complexify the operationalization of the x-minute city concept.