United-and-Close: An interactive visual platform for assessing urban segregation within the 15-minutes paradigm

The ‘15-minute city’ paradigm is an urban model based on the concept of ‘hyper-proximity’: citizens should be able to access fundamental services and facilities (such as schools, shops, parks, doctors, and markets) within 15-20 minutes on foot, by bicycle or by public transport. Compliance with the ‘15-minute city’ paradigm is supposed to reduce pollution and social inequalities. It is supposed to bring the psychological fragility of the citizen back to the center of the urban redevelopment debate. Although the concept has gained great attention and interest from policymakers and urban designers, we still lack tools that can help to validate, on a data-driven basis, the assumption that hyper-proximity is eventually correlated with lower urban segregation, which is one of the driving forces that lead to social inequalities. We aim to define a data-driven methodology to analyze the urban areas where services should be accessible within 15 minutes; network analysis is exploited to estimate services proximity as well as the connectivity of different urban areas with each other, in order to gather signals of the general resilience or exposure to urban segregation. We also aim to compute a set of city-agnostic metrics that will include user-specified parameters and personalized weights for each Point of Interest’s category. United-and-Close is the resulting Web platform designed to be accessible to citizens, policy and decision-makers, and investors, but also for researchers involved in disciplines such as urban informatics that need support to better assess the 15-minute paradigm and its actual impact on our cities.