Neighbourhood governance, citizen initiatives and media application: Investigating community group buying during Shanghai's COVID lockdown

Academic debates highlight bureaucratic steering of crisis governance in authoritarian China. Nonetheless, the crisis response from the bottom up has been less represented. To address this lacuna, we explore how citizens initiate the crisis response in the neighbourhood by investigating Community Group Buying (CGB) during the 2022 pandemic lockdown in Shanghai. We qualitatively analyze the narratives of Chinese stakeholders, to get insight into the dynamics, components and implications of CGB. This study indicates that facing urgent needs and the failure of institutional response system, community residents leveraged social media to bond together to purchase essentials in bulk during the lockdown. The components of CGB involve: constructing online interactive spaces, creating community conventions, forming leadership, optimizing CGB procedures, legitimizing CGB by social media promotion. CGB favoured neighbourhood ties and advanced civic participation and increased the reciprocal interaction of the state and society and the responsiveness of policy practitioners to public demands during crises. However, local disagreements eroded volunteerism and citizens' initiatives in neighbourhood governance to some extent. Our study will not only deepen global audiences' understanding of spontaneous neighbourhood governance in authoritarian China, but also contribute neighbourhood-level solutions for responding to the future crises globally.

Biodiversity, Urban Quality Life and Air Quality Indices for Hotspot Detection of Transformation Opportunities in Cities: A Case Study in Barcelona

Half of the world's population lives in cities, where usually there are few little green space and there are also high levels of air pollution. Moreover, the traditional urbanization of cities contributes to climate change, promotes the loss of global biodiversity and induces serious health problems for citizens. Both climate change and the loss of biodiversity affect negatively to the ecosystems and therefore human health, as they are responsible for providing clean air, food, fresh water, medicines, renewable resources. . . This deterioration increases significantly the risk of human-borne infectious diseases such as coronavirus or HIV. The ability we have to re-naturalize anthropogenic spaces and learn to generate spaces for coexistence will be key for the future of our society. The research presented in this paper aims to do a step forward to achieve that ability by working in three schools of the city of Barcelona and their surroundings. Among other actions, in this project, a diagnosis of neighborhood has been carried out. The diagnosis includes the identification and quantification of relevant indicators regarding neighborhood's biodiversity and also the quality of daily life and the analysis of pollutants (NO2 and PM10) near the schools during the 2021-2022 school year. All these information has been merged in a single geographic data base and relevant hotspots where to act have been identified. The information has been shared with city council and citizens. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Development of a Web-Portal Health Information System for Barangay

In the Philippines, a barangay is the smallest administrative unit serving as suburban neighborhoods' first line of defense. According to Bautista, barangays conduct a manual file-based process of storing the community's health information. Therefore, the need for a single platform enables a small government unit to manage its resources while being transparent to its community. The study aims to develop a web- based barangay health information system portal for Barangay 69 District 1 in Tondo Manila. The system would be a reference tool for barangays as their platform provides inventory management, the barangay's health programs, and a dashboard for data visualization inventory management, tracking of Covid cases, administration of health activities, and a dashboard for data visualization. As a result, the web portal is functional, and different test scenarios show above-average results. The study concludes that the system provided a platform for the barangay and its residents. It also concludes that it is user-friendly and efficiently disseminates the barangay's health programs and activities. © 2023 IEEE.

Physical to virtual: challenges and opportunities for a neighbourhood-based employment support initiative

PurposeThis paper aims to explore challenges and opportunities of shifting from physical to virtual employment support delivery prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. It investigates associated changes in the nature and balance of support and implications for beneficiary engagement with programmes and job search.Design/methodology/approachThe study draws on longitudinal interviews conducted with beneficiaries and delivery providers from a neighbourhood-based employment support initiative in an English region with a strong manufacturing heritage between 2019 and 2021. The initiative established prior to the Covid-19 pandemic involved a strong physical presence locally but switched to virtual delivery during Covid-19 lockdowns.FindingsMoving long-term to an entirely virtual model would likely benefit some beneficiaries closer to or already in employment. Conversely, others, particularly lone parents, those further from employment, some older people and those without computer/Internet access and/or digital skills are likely to struggle to navigate virtual systems. The study emphasises the importance of blending the benefits of virtual delivery with aspects of place-based physical support.Originality/valuePrevious studies of neighbourhood-based employment policies indicate the benefits of localised face-to-face support for transforming communities. These were conducted prior to the Covid-19 pandemic and the more widespread growth of virtual employment support. This study fills a gap regarding understanding the challenges and opportunities for different groups of beneficiaries when opportunities for physical encounters decline abruptly and support moves virtually.

TemporalDedup: Domain-Independent Deduplication of Redundant and Errant Temporal Data

Deduplication is a key component of the data preparation process, a bottleneck in the machine learning (ML) and data mining pipeline that is very time-consuming and often relies on domain expertise and manual involvement. Further, temporal data is increasingly prevalent and is not well suited to traditional similarity and distance-based deduplication techniques. We establish a fully automated, domain-independent deduplication model for temporal data domains, known as TemporalDedup, that infers the key attribute(s), applies a base set of deduplication techniques focused on value matches for key, non-key, and elapsed time, and further detects duplicates through inference of temporal ordering requirements using Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) for records of a shared type. Using LCS, we split each record's temporal sequence into constrained and unconstrained sequences. We flag suspicious (errant) records that are non-adherent to the inferred constrained order and we flag a record as a duplicate if its unconstrained order, of sufficient length, matches that of another record. TemporalDedup was compared against a similarity-based Adaptive Sorted Neighborhood Method (ASNM) in evaluating duplicates for two disparate datasets: (1) 22,794 records from Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) trophy data, where duplication may be indicative of cheating, and (2) emergency declarations and government responses related to COVID-19 for all U.S. states and territories. TemporalDedup (F1-scores of 0.971 and 0.954) exhibited combined sensitivities above 0.9 for all duplicate classes whereas ASNM (0.705 and 0.732) exhibited combined sensitivities below 0.2 for all time and order duplicate classes. © 2023 World Scientific Publishing Company.

COVID-19 prediction with Chest X-Ray images using CNN

Coronavirus has outbreak as an epidemic disease, created a pandemic situation for the public health across the Globe. Screening for the large masses is extremely crucial to control disease for the people in a neighborhood. Real-time-PCR[18] is the general diagnostic approach for pathological examination. However, the increasing figure of false results from the test has created a way in choosing alternative procedures. COVID-19 patient's X-rays images of chest has emerged as a significant approach for screening the COVID-19 disease. However, accuracy depends on the knowledge of a radiologist. X-Ray images of lungs may be proper assistive tool for diagnosis in reducing the burden of the doctor. Deep Learning techniques, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), have been shown to be effective for classification of images in the medical field. Diagnosing the COVID-19 using the four types of Deep-CNN models because they have pre-trained weights. Model needs to pre-trained on the ImageNet database in simplifying the large datasets. CNN-based architectures were found to be ideal in diagnosing the COVID-19 disease. The model having an efficiency of 0.9835 in accuracy, precision of 0.915, sensitivity of 0.963, specificity with 0.972, 0.987 F1 Score and 0.925 ROC AUC. © 2023 IEEE.

Association between neighbourhood composition, kindergarten educator-reported distance learning barriers, and return to school concerns during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada.

Introduction: Research to date has established that the COVID-19 pandemic has not impacted everyone equitably. Whether this unequitable impact was seen educationally with regards to educator reported barriers to distance learning, concerns and mental health is less clear. Objective: The objective of this study was to explore the association between the neighbourhood composition of the school and kindergarten educator-reported barriers and concerns regarding children's learning during the first wave of COVID-19 related school closures in Ontario, Canada. Methods: In the spring of 2020, we collected data from Ontario kindergarten educators (n = 2569; 74.2% kindergarten teachers, 25.8% early childhood educators; 97.6% female) using an online survey asking them about their experiences and challenges with online learning during the first round of school closures. We linked the educator responses to 2016 Canadian Census variables based on schools' postal codes. Bivariate correlations and Poisson regression analyses were used to determine if there was an association between neighbourhood composition and educator mental health, and the number of barriers and concerns reported by kindergarten educators. Results: There were no significant findings with educator mental health and school neighbourhood characteristics. Educators who taught at schools in neighbourhoods with lower median income reported a greater number of barriers to online learning (e.g., parents/guardians not submitting assignments/providing updates on their child's learning) and concerns regarding the return to school in the fall of 2020 (e.g., students' readjustment to routines). There were no significant associations with educator reported barriers or concerns and any of the other Census neighbourhood variables (proportion of lone parent families, average household size, proportion of population that do no speak official language, proportion of population that are recent immigrants, or proportion of population ages 0-4). Conclusions: Overall, our study suggests that the neighbourhood composition of the children's school location did not exacerbate the potential negative learning experiences of kindergarten students and educators during the COVID-19 pandemic, although we did find that educators teaching in schools in lower-SES neighbourhoods reported more barriers to online learning during this time. Taken together, our study suggests that remediation efforts should be focused on individual kindergarten children and their families as opposed to school location.

Crises and opportunities in the Western Balkans

The 2020s have got off to quite a rocky start globally, and especially for Europeans. The ongoing crises, beginning with the Covid-19 pandemic, and followed by the Russian aggression against Ukraine, rising inflation and the energy crisis, have created an atmosphere of continual instability and uncertainty for European citizens. The Western Balkans region, in the EU's immediate neighbourhood and geographically close to Ukraine, has also been affected by all these challenges. This article examines the current most pressing issues in the region and the possible outcomes of them. As the countries in the region (i.e. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo,1 North Macedonia and Serbia) are all aspiring EU members, this piece seeks to explore the possibility of addressing the current challenges and the role of the EU as a catalyst in this process.

Covid-19 restrictions: An opportunity to highlight the effect of neighbourhood deprivation on individuals' health-related behaviours.

RATIONALE: Neighbourhood socio-economic deprivation is strongly related to health-risk behaviours, which are predictors of overall health and mortality. During the Covid-19 pandemic, individuals have been forced to spend more time within their residential areas, which might have had an effect on health-risk behaviours. OBJECTIVE: We assess the consequences of living in a more or less deprived neighbourhood during the pandemic on individual behavioural changes in four health-related outcomes: smoking, drinking, physical activity and healthy eating. We hypothesise that the pandemic and related lock-downs had negative effects on health-related behaviours, but that this negative effect had been stronger for people living in more deprived areas. We additionally explore sex and ethnicity as sources of heterogeneity in these effects. METHODS: We use data from four nationally representative cohort studies in England. We perform longitudinal individual and neighbourhood fixed effects estimations focusing on comparing the pre-pandemic period with the first lockdown (May 2020) period and up to one year after the outbreak of the pandemic (March 2021). RESULTS: During the first lockdown, as compared to pre-pandemic levels, on average, people smoked more, drunk more and did more physical activity. However, compared to people in less deprived neighbourhoods, people living in more deprived areas showed a smaller increase in their levels of physical activity, consumed less fruit and vegetables and increased the number of cigarettes smoked. We additionally find that the combined effect of Covid-19 and area deprivation varies significantly by both sex and ethnicity. CONCLUSION: Results add to evidence on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns on health-risk behaviours, highlighting the relative contribution of the neighbourhood environment and individual characteristics. We argue that reducing levels of neighbourhood deprivation may contribute to positively influence behaviours, especially for some sub-groups of the population, leading to a reduction of social inequalities in health.

PATHWAYS OF NEIGHBOURHOOD OBESOGENIC ENVIRONMENT DURING COVID-19: IMPACTS AND WAY FORWARD

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, obesity is already a pandemic illness on its own. It has been a public health priority in developing countries especially Malaysia where the obesity rate in the country is one of the highest in South East Asia. Early studies have concurred that the presence of COVID-19 makes anatomising the obesity pandemic even more urgent as impaired metabolic health increase complications and mortality in COVID-19 patients. COVID-19 induced movement restriction orders and related policies by the Malaysia government are believed to have altered the country's food and physical activity environments. The paper expanded the original Neighbourhood Environment, Health Behaviours and BMI (NEHB-BMI Model) where the pathways of neighbourhood obesogenic environment that reflects COVID-19 induced changes to the constructs from the perspective of Malaysia is presented. Through the discussion, three key variables were added to the model: 1) government environment;2) establishment/business environment;and 3) individual psychosocial factors. Exploring the impacts of COVID-19 to the obesogenic environment constructs paves way to gauging insights by allowing associations between the presented variables to be tested in future studies, especially in the South East Asian region where such studies are very limited. © 2022 by MIP.

The impact of covid-19 restrictions on complaints of noise made to a local authority in Northern Ireland - a case study

The covid pandemic with national lockdowns and restrictions profoundly affected people's lives in many ways including the experience of neighbourhood noise. Initial research indicated a rise in noise complaints at the start of restrictions (Tong, 2021) supported by CIEH, 2022 finding a 54% increase in noise complaints in 2020/21. Analysis of complaints received in 2020 and 2021 at one local authority in Northern Ireland indicates a different experience. Total number of complaints did not see statistically significant increases when compared to 5-year averages. While there were increases in some categories, comparison with 5-year averages were not statistically significant. The only category of noise with a statistically significant increase in 2020 related to retail, returning to a more typical pattern in 2021. It may be explained by increased demand in essential food retail as well as social distancing requirements, limitations to customers inside, etc., as the sector adapted in 2020 followed by people becoming used to changes and a return to some behaviours more akin to those pre-covid. A wider study involving local authorities across Northern Ireland, the UK and countries that experienced lockdown measures may reveal a more accurate picture of the impact of neighbourhood noise experienced during the covid pandemic. © 2022 Internoise 2022 - 51st International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering. All rights reserved.

CRITERIA AND ATTRIBUTES FOR THE 20-MINUTE CITY CONCEPT (KP20M) IN BALIK PULAU, PULAU PINANG

This article reports on the progress of a community project that involves Universiti Sains Malaysia, PLANMalaysia, Penang Disaster Management Committee and local community organisations. The purpose of this project is to measure the suitability of this neighbourhood in Balik Pulau that qualifies to be considered as a pilot project that is able to achieve a level comparable to the pilot project in Melbourne, Australia. This 20-Minute City project aims to assess the attributes and criteria, examine the study area's preparedness to address disaster based on the assessed attributes and criteria, and strengthen the resilience of the study area via practising locally mould 20-Minute City attributes and criteria. This is done by looking at the use of space (spatial) and capacity (public facilities, infrastructure, buildings & other land use categories) based on the needs of existing communities. 20-Minute City Concept was initially brought forward to promote the idea of living locally – people can meet most of their needs within a 20-minute walk from home. COVID-19 has abruptly tweaked living locally into living sustainably, where the profound COVID-19 destructive effect has accelerated the necessity of developing a community that is resilient to risk. The study area technically has 20-Minute City's attributes and criteria;however, they are yet to be fully assessed on its readiness aspect. This study is appropriately done now to see this concept potentially incorporated in some Malaysia development policies, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic since this new city concept has become a new trend of new neighbourhood norm. Understanding the feasibility of these attributes and criteria will help in planning an effective disaster management plan which then creates a resilient and competitive community towards understanding distances and features as being practised in the 20-minute neighbourhoods in Australia. © 2022 by MIP.

Neighbourhood cohesion, loneliness and perceived social isolation prior and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Longitudinal evidence from the German Ageing Survey.

PURPOSE: To investigate the longitudinal association between neighbourhood cohesion and loneliness as well as perceived social isolation prior and during the COVID-19 pandemic (stratified by sex). METHODS: Longitudinal data were taken from a nationally representative sample (German Ageing Survey) of inhabitants aged 40 years and over in Germany prior (wave 6: year 2017) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (wave 8: November 2020 until February 2021; n = 6688 observations, mean age was 67.4 years). The De Jong Gierveld tool was used to measure loneliness and the Bude and Lantermann tool was used to measure perceived social isolation. Neighbourhood cohesion was assessed based on different items. RESULTS: FE regressions showed that decreases in closeness of contact with neighbours were associated with increases in loneliness and perceived social isolation levels among men, but not women. In contrast, decreases in different indicators of involvement in neighbourhood activities were associated with increases in loneliness and perceived social isolation levels among women, but not men. CONCLUSION: Changes in neighbourhood factors are differently associated with loneliness and perceived social isolation among middle-aged and older women and men. Gender-specific efforts to avoid loneliness and social isolation are, therefore, needed.

Application of "Behind the Barriers" Model at Neighbourhood Scale to Improve Water Management under Multi-Risks Scenarios: A Case Study in Lyon, France.

In modern urban areas, water management highly depends on the socio-ecological urban water cycle (UWC) that heavily relies on water infrastructures. However, increasing water-related hazards, natural and/or human-based, makes it difficult to balance water resources in the socio-ecological UWC. In the last decade, urban infrastructure resilience has rapidly become a popular topic in disaster risk management and inspired many studies and operational approaches. Among these theories and methods, the "Behind the Barriers" model (BB model), developed by Barroca and Serre in 2013, is considered a theory that allows effective and comprehensive analysis of urban infrastructure resilience through cognitive, functional, correlative, and organisational dimensions. Moreover, this analysis can be a reference to develop actions that improve infrastructure resilience under critical scenarios. Therefore, this study aims to study resilience design actions based on the BB model to achieve socio-ecological water balance and assess the performance of these actions. The study focuses on water management on a neighbourhood scale, which is considered the essential urban unit to study and improve the resilience of critical infrastructures, such as water services. The Part-Dieu neighbourhood in Lyon, France is selected as a case study, and it highlights the need to develop indicators to assess the performance of implemented actions in a structural and global resilience framework, to understand urban systems as complex and dynamic systems to provide decision support, and to strengthen crisis prevention and management perspectives in a dynamic approach.

Developing a solution algorithm for the autonomous electric vehicle routing problem considering the mixed fleet

In recent years, some phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic have caused the autonomous vehicle (AV) to attract much attention in theoretical and applied research. This paper addresses the optimization problem of a heterogeneous fleet that consists of autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) and conventional vehicles (CVs) in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) distribution system. The absence of the driver in AEVs results in the necessity of studying two factors in modeling the problem, namely time windows in the routing plan and different compartments in the loading space of AEVs. The arrival and departure times of the AEV at the customer’s location must be pre-planned, because, the AEV is not able to decide what to do if the customer is late at this point. Also, due to increasing the security of the loads inside the AEVs and the lack of control of the driver during the delivery of the goods, each customer should only have access to his/her orders. Therefore, the compartmentation of the AEV’s loading area has been proposed in its conceptual model. We developed a mathematical model based on these properties and proposed a hybrid algorithm, including variable neighborhood search (VNS) via neighborhood structure of large neighborhood search (LNS), namely the VLNS algorithm. The numerical results shed light on the proficiency of the algorithm in terms of solution time and solution quality. In addition, employing AEVs in the mixed fleet is considered to be desirable based on the operational cost of the fleet. Author

The urban impact of COVID-19: six neighbourhoods, three cities and three countries in social network data

The COVID-19 health emergency has impacted multiple dimensions of the complex physical, social, functional and economic structure of cities. This research encompasses a comparative diagnosis of some of the changes and transformations that have occurred in the urban environment due to the crisis and are reflected in geolocalised social network data. For this purpose, data from Google Places and Twitter are adopted as the main source of information. A mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology is proposed to analyse the increase and loss of economic activity (Google Places) and human presence (Twitter) in two periods: pre-and post-pandemic. As a case study, two areas with very different socio-economic conditions are analysed in three cities located in countries that adopted different pandemic restrictions measures -Valencia in Spain, Mexico City in Mexico and Gothenburg in Sweden. The diagnosis reported by these social networks is of great use in formulating useful strategies both for identifying the changes that have been taking place and for dealing with future disruptive scenarios.

'No one size fits all' - community trust-building as a strategy to reduce COVID-19-related health disparities.

BACKGROUND: Citizens with low levels of social capital and social status, and relative poverty, seem to have been disproportionally exposed to COVID-19 and are at greater risk of experiencing poor health. Notably, the incidence of COVID-19 was nearly three times higher among citizens living in socially vulnerable areas. Experiences from the African Ebola epidemic show that in an environment based on trust, community partners can help to improve understanding of disease control without compromising safety. Such an approach is often driven by the civil society and local lay health promoters. However, little is known about the role of lay health promoters during a pandemic with communicable diseases in the European Union. This study had its point of departure in an already established Community Based Participatory Research health promotion programme in a socially disadvantaged area in southern Sweden. The aim of this study was to explore how citizens and local lay health promoters living in vulnerable neighbourhoods responded to the COVID-19 pandemic a year from the start of the pandemic.  METHOD: In-depth interviews with the 5 lay health promoters and focus group discussions with 34 citizens from the neighbourhood who were involved in the activities within the programme were conducted in autumn 2020. The interviews and focus group discussions were transcribed verbatim and analysed using qualitative content analysis following an inductive approach.  RESULTS: Four themes emerged including, 'balancing between different kinds of information', 'balancing between place-based activities and activities on social media', 'bridging between local authorities and the communities and community members', and 'balancing ambivalence through participatory dialogues'. CONCLUSION: The study highlights that a Community Based Participatory Research programme with lay health promoters as community trust builders had a potential to work with communicable diseases during the pandemic. The lay health promoters played a key role in promoting health during the pandemic by deepening the knowledge and understanding of the role that marginalised citizens have in building resilience and sustainability in their community in preparation for future crises. Public health authorities need to take the local context into consideration within their pandemic strategies to reach out to vulnerable groups.

Online Podcast Production as Co‐Creation for Intercultural Participation in Neighbourhood Development

This article describes the usage of an online podcast workshop as an arts‐based research method to reflect on intercultural participation. The podcast workshop was co‐developed by researchers, local civil society actors, and administrative employees and deployed in a research infrastructure based on real‐world labs. We show how the online podcast workshop as a research tool elicits co‐creation with agonistic as well as communicative practices. The podcast combined practices of making with socially engaged research, using digital storytelling. It aimed at enhancing intercultural dialogue and participation and was used as an opportunity for voices that are not sufficiently represented in local public discourse on neighbourhood development to become recognised and challenge marginalisation. Based on one online podcast workshop, the article addresses new possibilities for collective and collaborative action during the Covid‐19 pandemic and frames the podcast as a moderated place for exchange and reflection in the digital space. The podcast workshop intended to foster further discussion on the topic of intercultural participation and was conceived as a tool for empowerment that participants can use for further conversations and exchange in their communities. © 2022 by the author(s).

Designing a sustainable logistics network for hazardous medical waste collection a case study in COVID-19 pandemic.

The process of collecting and transporting hazardous medical waste poses a potential threat to the environment and public safety. Furthermore, the waste management system faces higher transportation costs due to the increasing human activities related to rapid population growth. The absence of an efficient and safe logistics network for the timely collection and transportation of hazardous wastes may have negative effects on the environment and public health. Therefore, more sustainable transportation of hazardous waste services is a necessity This paper attempts to design a sustainable network for hazardous medical waste collection services during the COVID-19 pandemic. An electric medical waste collection vehicle routing problem is introduced to construct optimal routes and rosters for a fleet of electric vehicles as well as cover their choice of charging technologies, times and locations. This problem allows us to minimize the health risk of hazardous medical waste while providing cost-effective, zero-emission waste management logistics. Therefore, this problem covers environmental and economic objectives to achieve sustainable development. An effective heuristic that covers adaptive large neighbourhood search and a local search is designed to deal with the complex problem. A series of extensive computational experiments is carried out using real-life benchmark instances to assess the performance of the algorithm. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to investigate the effect of multiple charger types on the cost and risk objectives. The experiment results indicate that mixed-use of different charger types can reduce the total energy cost and transport risk compared to the case of using only a single charger.

Comparative Analysis of 20‐Minute Neighbourhood Policies and Practices in Melbourne and Scotland

Twenty‐minute neighbourhoods highlight the importance of well‐connected and mixed‐used neighbourhoods and communities with proximate access to employment, essential services, public transport, and open spaces. Shorter distances together with re‐prioritised public spaces encourage more active transport choices, resulting in public health benefits and reduced environmental pollution. Higher liveability brought about by mixed‐use developments enables people to have equitable access to local facilities, amenities, and employment opportunities, promoting vibrancy, social cohesion, and intergenerational connections. The attributes of 20‐minute neighbourhoods also combine to create places, that are acknowledged as friendly for all ages, address changing needs across the life course, and provide better support for the ageing population. Furthermore, there are indications that 20‐minute neighbourhoods may be more resilient against many of the negative impacts of stringent public health protocols such as those implemented in periods of lockdown during the Covid‐19 pandemic. In this article, we evaluate and compare planning policies and practices aimed at establishing 20‐minute neighbourhoods in Melbourne (Australia) and Scotland (the UK). Using case studies, we discuss similarities and differences involved in using place‐based approaches of 20‐minute neighbourhoods to address 21st‐century challenges in key areas of health and wellbeing, equity, environmental sustainability, and community resilience. © 2022 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal).