Speaker
Description
Urban areas face challenges like climate change and socioeconomic crises, necessitating innovative planning. Their inability to manage global shocks locally underscores long-term structural, organizational, and governance vulnerabilities (Pozoukidou & Plastara, 2025). At this edge, the 15-minute City (15mC) concept emerged as an innovative neighborhood-based approach for sustainable urban development. This idea is based on key urban planning principles like equitable access to services, mixed land uses, reducing commuting, increasing green spaces, and prioritizing the neighborhood as the community core (Pozoukidou & Chatziyiannaki, 2021; UN-Habitat, 2018). The 15mC approach suggests mixed land use and a compact urban form providing residents the daily needs within a short walk, bike ride, or transit stop (Moreno et al., 2021; Pozoukidou & Chatziyiannaki, 2021). This model aims to increase accessibility through geographic or digital proximity (Pozoukidou & Plastara, 2025). Proximity constitutes one of several ways for people to access spatially distributed opportunities in the urban environment. While the 15mC suggests proximity to daily needs as a solution to avoid commutes, the inflexible daily commuting to work remains an issue (Elldér, 2022; Pozoukidou and Chatziyiannaki, 2021).
In the post-COVID era, remote working has increased significantly, with 22.2% of people in the EU sometimes working from home in 2023 (Eurostat, 2024). The growing technological development combined with knowledge-intensive activities have transformed the nature of work, allowing individuals to work from anywhere. New forms of physical and virtual working locations outside of the “traditional” workspace have emerged as spatialities of RW. Building on Yu et al. (2019), there are six types of spatialities, defined by the location and nature of the working environment as New Working Spaces (NWS), these spaces allow “near working” – working closer to home (Biagetti et al., 2024). NWS such as coworking spaces (CS), third places like cafes and libraries, or neighborhood-based working hubs provide equipped and flexible spaces and can also serve additional i.e. cultural purposes (Di Marino, 2018). NWS can be a solution for individuals who are engaged in hybrid working arrangements, many of whom prefer using third places near their houses, reducing the need for long daily commuting to a traditional office (Biagetti et al., 2024). NWS can tackle the social isolation associated with work-from-home, fostering social interaction and community engagement. Locating workplaces within neighborhoods supports sustainable living and working, reduces daily commutes, and minimizes the associated environmental impact.
This paper examines whether NWS have the potential to serve as nuclei for the reorganization of the neighborhood in the 15mC framework, as they could be a solution for reducing the daily and inflexible commute to the traditional workplace. Two case studies were selected for comparative analysis, Athens and Thessaloniki, the capital and the second largest city in Greece respectively. In addition, for this analysis, only formal CSs were used from the variety of NWS.
Methodologically, spatial analysis will be conducted in GIS and open data from OSM will be used regarding the location of CS as well as the complementary land uses in a 15-minute range calculated in walking distance. The network analysis will be calculated by following the pedestrian network of each city instead of Euclidean distance from CS points.
The comparative results for the two cities are expected to i) Show the allocation of CS in the two cities and the service area that is covered by at least one CS and ii) The influence of CS on diverse amenities and services around them within the 15-minute range. The study contributes to the ongoing planning debate on emerging urban models for sustainable neighborhoods, drawing on insights from the European South.
References
Biagetti, M., Croce, G., Mariotti, I., Rossi, F., Scicchitano, S., 2024. The call of nature. Three post- pandemic scenarios about remote working in Milan. Futures. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103337
Di Marino, M., Tomaz, E., Henriques, C., Chavoshi, S.H., 2022. The 15-minute city concept and new working spaces: a planning perspective from Oslo and Lisbon. European Planning Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2022.2082837
Elldér, E., 2022. Active travel and telework in Sweden: Teleworkers walk more, but cycle less. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment 109, 103362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2022.103362
Moreno, C., Allam, Z., Chabaud, D., Gall, C., Pratlong, F., 2021. Introducing the “15-minute city”: Sustainability, resilience and place identity in future post-pandemic cities. Smart. Cities. 4, 93–111. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4010006
Pozoukidou G., Plastara D., 2025 (under publication). Reimagining City Life: Key Concepts and Features of Proximity Oriented Development. In Nijkamp P., Bouzouani L., & Kourtit K. (eds), 15-min City, Accessibility and Livability, Springer Verlag, Germany
Pozoukidou, G., Chatziyiannaki, Z., 2021. 15-Minute City: Decomposing the New Urban Planning Eutopia. Sustainability 13, 928. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020928
Yu, R., Burke, M., Raad, N., 2019. Exploring impact of future flexible working model evolution on urban environment, economy and planning. Journal of Urban Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jum.2019.05.002
| Keywords | 15-minute city; proximity; new working spaces; proximity-oriented development; spatial analysis |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
