Figure 1- The One minute city and the 30 minute city variants

Figure 1- The One minute city and the 30 minute city variants (Source: As specified in the images)

accepted notion of time budget (Newman, 2015) described by Marchetti’s constant5 which transport planners use for accessibility planning at metropolitan and regional levels. (Levinson, 2019)

The concept was adopted in Sydney Regional development plan as an overarching agenda in ‘the Pulse of the greater Sydney 2020’ annual report in the wake of 15 minute city (Beekmans Jeroen, 2021), However, instead of focusing on ‘hyperlocal planning’ as suggested by Moreno, the Greater Sydney commission is focussing on enhancing the connectivity between its regional centres Eastern harbour city ; Central river city and Western parkland city. Aligning with the recommendation by Levinson, the utility of this concept lies in making metropolitan citizens reach these regional job clusters within 30 minutes by combination of public transport and walk. Thus, the city is investing added funds to increase the frequency of public transport, connections in the metropolitan region. (GSC, 2019)

At this point, its important to clarify and acknowledge a common pattern. All these concepts define the cities in a ‘time metric’ with a common concern to increase sustainable forms of mobility. A literal linguistic translation of which implies the question of, how all these differently sized cities, with different respective forms and street networks be commuted across their diameters/ diagonals by walk/bike in the given amount of time. However, its only after reading the description, the concepts’ urban citizen’ based perspective of time and their individualised definition of a city comes to foreground. Rather than claiming that a city is walkable withing 1 minutes, 15 or 30 minutes, the titles try to instil a dialogue about what an urban citizen get in allocated time of 1/15/20/ 30 minutes.

The 1-minute city puts forward a clear agenda of adapting neighbourhood street as urban space through community participation, while the 30 minute city is focused on accessibility through public transit. These two differ from the 15/20-minute cities which focus on accessibility through proximity which entails putting functions close to residents instead of providing means of transport to access the functions. (Solá & Vilhelmson, 2018)

5 Marchetti’s constant is the average time spent by an individual spent per day in commuting. The Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, people eventually adjust their lives (including their work-home commute) in a way that the average daily time spent in commuting remains 1 hour i.e. 30 minutes one way trip to work. Source: Marchetti, C. (1994). Anthropological invariants in travel behavior, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 47 (1) 88. DOI: 10.1016/0040-1625(94)90041-8)