Europe Beats The US For Walkable, Livable Cities- Study Shows.
Cities such as Zurich and Dublin found to have key services accessible within 15 minutes for more than 95% of residents.
When Luke Harris takes his daughter to the doctor, he strolls down well-kept streets with “smooth sidewalks and curb cuts [ramps] for strollers at every intersection”. If the weather looks rough or he feels a little lazy, he hops on a tram for a couple of stops.
Harris’s trips to the paediatrician are pretty unremarkable for fellow residents of Zurich, Switzerland; most Europeans are used to being able to walk from one place to another in their cities. But it will probably sound like fantasy to those living in San Antonio, Texas. That’s because, according to new research, 99.2% of Zurich residents live within a 15-minute walk of essential services such as healthcare and education, while just 2.5% of San Antonio residents do.
“Zurich feels extraordinarily walkable to me, coming from the US,” said Harris, a landscape architect from Portland, Oregon. “Most of the things you need are within walking distance – and if they’re not, it’s easy to take public transport.”
Just a tiny fraction of 10,000 cities around the world can be considered “15-minute cities”, according to a study published in the journal Nature Cities on Monday. The researchers used open data to work out the average distance people must walk or bike to reach essential services – such as supermarkets, schools, hospitals and parks – and calculated the proportion of residents who have the necessities at their fingertips.
“When we looked at the results, we were amazed by how unequal they are,” said Matteo Bruno, a physicist at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome and lead author of the study.
The researchers selected 54 cities to explore in detail and found that the most accessible cities were midsize European ones such as Zurich, Milan, Copenhagen and Dublin – all of which had essential services that could be accessed within 15 minutes by more than 95% of residents. At the bottom of the rankings were sprawling North American cities with a high dependency on cars, such as San Antonio, Dallas, Atlanta and Detroit.
Small cities tended to score better but the researchers found that in some big metropolises, such as Berlin and Paris, more than 90% of residents live within a 15-minute walk of essential services.
The authors developed an algorithm to explore how much these cities would have to change to become more accessible. They found Atlanta would have to relocate 80% of its amenities to achieve an equal distribution per resident, while Paris would need to relocate just 10%.
Hygor Piaget, a co-author of the study who grew up in São Paulo, where 32% of people live within a 15-minute walk of essential services, said the study was not a proposal to destroy cities and reallocate their services but a mathematical exercise to get people thinking. “We’re searching for ways to make the lives of most people better,” he said.
Credit: The Guardian (UK)
