15-minute neighbourhood accessibility: a comparison between Naples and London

The 15-minute city seems to represent a new way of looking at the city and responding to many current challenges, including climate change, aging population, and most recently Covid-19. However, if the 15-minute city idea is useful to guarantee an adequate supply of basic services, its basic principles cannot be adaptable to what we consider a city, especially to the big city. To this end, the paper considers the 15-minute city idea as an approach to be applied to the neighbourhood scale, in which the suitable supply of basic services and pedestrian paths and spaces allows to increase accessibility to places and the quality of life of the inhabitants. In this perspective, the work provides a methodology, based mainly on spatial analysis, aimed at defining 15-minute neighbourhoods by adopting a systemic approach. The methodology is tested on some suburbs located in the cities of Naples and London, whose different morphological, settlement and functional characteristics make them a significant experimentation test.

Urban accessibility in a 15-minute city: a measure in the city of Naples, Italy

Cities accessible in 15 minutes represent a new possibility for reorganizing the urban system (times, spaces and activities) to try to respond to many current challenges, including ageing populations, energy saving and, more recently, Covid-19. A renewed concept of urban accessibility, together with the redefinition of public spaces and "soft" ways of moving (pedestrian and cycle) to reach neighbourhood services, represent a starting point not only from which to face new challenges but also to rediscover the sense of community, especially at the neighbourhood scale. The 15-minute city draws its origins from the concept of the "neighbourhood unit", developed in 1923 in a competition for the city of Chicago, to define compact residential neighbourhoods where the proximity between services and homes contributed to set out the identity character of that part of the city and to create "the sense of belonging" of a community to a place. The events of the last year strongly re-propose experimentation with this approach, also following the proposal by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, aimed at giving a new face to Paris starting from the creation of extensive pedestrian green areas on the large boulevards that are now crossed by the cars and, therefore, to allow the inhabitants to reach, by walking, essential urban services within the 15-minute threshold. Other cities, such as New York and Milan, have also begun to work to make their neighbourhoods, especially peripheral ones, accessible in 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle, without neglecting the goal of transforming these neighbourhoods into attractive places for social gathering for local communities. In this perspective, the research work aims at identifying the urban characteristics that define a 15-minute city, starting from the cities that are launching this experimentation. Among the urban characteristics, the geomorphological, physical (concerning both the spaces and the paths, such as the geometry of the pedestrian and cycle networks), functional (distribution and location of services), socio-economic (of the population) and settlement ones are taken into consideration. According to the weights of the variables identified as significant, the work defines different areas accessible in 15 minutes based on users' willingness to walk and the geomorphological, physical, settlement and functional characteristics identified in each urban area. The work is carried out in selected districts of the city of Naples which, due to their demographic, morphological and settlement characteristics, make them a significant area of experimentation. © 2022 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)

Resilience as an urban strategy: a comparison of resources and interventions in the European Recovery Plans for the green transition

Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal., Review Notes, is a continuous update about emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility, and environment, thanks to a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made up of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of the TeMA Journal. In particular: the Town Planning International Rules and Legislation. Section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. The ecological transition is one of the most important missions within the recovery and resilience plans that aim towards an increasingly sustainable city model. The reference scientific literature highlights the importance of studying the relationships between energy policy and the physical-functional organization of urban systems. In this direction, the content of this review aims to define the framework of the interventions and resources in the resilience and recovery plans of two European states of Spain and Ireland. We review their ecological and green revolution/transition reforms in a comparative study with Italy and Germany. The aim is also to define the role and impacts of these reforms in future urban strategies.

Urban Accessibility and Social Equity in Covid-19 Era: A Spatial Analysis in Two Neighbourhoods of the City of Naples

The academic debate has been turn the attention on pedestrian accessibility to urban services, as walking allow to solve several issues ranging from social and health problems also accentuated by the ongoing pandemic. The innovation in geospatial field has encouraged the development of accessibility and walkability measures and indicators oriented to measure the main physical and functional characteristics of the built environment related to the accessibility of urban services at the neighbourhood scale. According to these premises, this research work, aimed at improving pedestrian accessibility and guaranteeing equal access to neighbourhood-scale services, proposes a seven-steps GIS method based on an Accessibility Indicator that integrates the main aspects of walkability indexes relating to connectivity, sense of security, geometry and amenity of urban built environment. This Accessibility Indicator defines the areas of easy accessibility to the local essential services, by referring to two different maximum distances: the first relates to the distance of 700 m defined in the literature as the distance that a user is willing to walk to use a neighborhood service and the second relates to the regulatory restrictions adopted in the most difficult periods of the pandemic (500 m). © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Resilience as an urban strategy: The role of green interventions in recovery plans

Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is a continuous update about emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility and environment thanks to a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made up of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of the TeMA Journal. In particular: the Town Planning International Rules and Legislation Overview section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. The issue of the current recovery and resilience plans and the related reforms envisaged in them aim to give impetus to new forms of organization of urban systems and all its components. In this direction, the content of this review describes the reforms envisaged in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Italy and Germany with a focus on the due mission based on the green revolution and ecological transition. Furthermore, this review aims to define the role of these plans for future urban strategies to face the great challenges to which cities are called to respond such as climate change, energy efficiency while also respecting the principles of environmental sustainability.

Strategies and guidelines for urban sustainability: The impacts of the Covid-19 on energy systems

Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is a continuous update about emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility and environment thanks to a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made up of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of the TeMA Journal. In particular: The Town Planning International Rules and Legislation Overview section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. The Covid-19 pandemic is causing a major impact on energy systems. Improving the energy efficiency of urban areas is now the cornerstone of scientific community and the European Commission discussions. Thus, the content of this review note aims at carrying out an analysis of the latest documents of the European Commission before and during the slow recovery from Covid-19 with the aim of identifying the priorities and areas on which to intervene to reduce energy consumption in different territorial contexts.

Strategies and guidelines for urban sustainability: the explosion of micromobility from Covid-19

Starting from the relationship between urban planning and mobility management, TeMA has gradually expanded the view of the covered topics, always following a rigorous scientific in-depth analysis. This section of the Journal, Review Notes, is the expression of a continuous updating of emerging topics concerning relationships among urban planning, mobility and environment, through a collection of short scientific papers written by young researchers. The Review Notes are made of five parts. Each section examines a specific aspect of the broader information storage within the main interests of TeMA Journal. In particular: the Town Planning International Rules and Legislation Overview section aims at presenting the latest updates in the territorial and urban legislative sphere. Urban patterns and their intrinsic relationships have completely changed since Covid-19. In particular, the mobility subsystem has undergone a significant change, inducing users to use "soft" such as micromobility. Micromobility is now on the rise, especially in large cities, but at the same time the lack of dedicated routes pushes researchers and technicians in the area to find solutions capable of providing rules to users. This section examines the legislative decrees issued by the Italian government to promote a sustainable mode of travel for cities such as micromobility.

The role of the urban settlement system in the spread of Covid-19 pandemic. The Italian case

The paper proposes a focus on three main aspects related to the spread of the new coronavirus in our country: the correlations that have been established between the spread of the Covid-19 virus and the settlement system of our country;the urban and territorial phenomena that can be associated, positively or negatively, with the diffusion of the virus;and, finally, the correspondence between homogeneous clusters of Italian provinces (due to the current most significant urban phenomena) and the intensity and spread of the infection. The research is divided in four steps: the identification of the scientific and disciplinary approach, the definition of territorial areas and their descriptive variables, the choice of computational models, and the evaluation of the results. The main findings of the study highlight that significant correlations are not always identifiable between settlement characteristics and the spread of the infection. The diffusion of the new coronavirus is closely related to some of the main features of the demographic (e.g. people aged 65 years and above) and socio-economic (e.g. GDP for inhabitant) structure of the urban population.