Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailoring the 15-Minute City for Levelling Up Through Multi-Scale Mobility Insights

The 15-minute city (15mC) concept, aimed at fulfilling residents' daily needs through local trips, resonates with sustainable mobility and reducing disparity in Levelling Up (L-UP). Significant challenges remain, however, particularly in adapting the concept to diverse urban settings. Furthermore, the scalability of these local efforts remains ambiguous, affecting its broader implications for L-UP.

Recently, advances in fine-granularity urban mobility data offer chances to tailor 15mC to more context-sensitive, equitable planning.

The proposed project combines human mobility, urban planning and network science to co-create a transdisciplinary framework for context-sensitive implementation of 15mC in enhancing local L-UP initiatives across the UK. The project concentrates on three main tasks:

1. Develop taxonomies of neighbourhoods based on multi-modal mobility patterns to identify essential local amenities and to reduce long trips.

2. Evaluate impacts of 15mC as local L-UP strategies on travel behaviours, accounting for socio-spatial variations in local contexts. 3. Create a predictive model to estimate multi-scale social and mobility outcomes for future L-UP projects.

The project will analyse mobility data across diverse UK cities, generating context-sensitive insights for policymaking. Findings will guide practitioners in retrofitting diverse areas into inclusive places for daily needs and active travel, effectively reducing city-wide disparities.