Chapter 1. The x-minute city

In year 2020, amidst lockdown situations across the globe, many new concepts have been proposed and published related to time and the city. While the study focuses on the ‘Fifteen-minute city’, proposed by Carlos Moreno (Moreno et al., 2021) also referred as 20-minute city (Da Silva et al., 2020; Global mayors COVID-19 recovery task force, 2020; Whittle, 2020) it is imperative to briefly mention similar other floating concepts and their related agendas of 1,15/20 and 30 minute city. These time-based rhetorics emphasises different scales of city, thus can be seen to activate different set of policies from hyper local street scale at one end, to the metropolitan scale on the other. From a standpoint, these time-based rhetorics represent distinct areas of focus of these respective cities and give a clue of what cities value or aspire to be. However, a common element binding these ‘X’ minute urban geographies is the dimension of ‘proximity’, measured in temporal units rather than conventionally used spatial metrics. Perhaps, its an intended rhetoric to align to the urban citizen’s perception of proximity, who use time as a unit to schedule everyday life taking constraints of time and space in consideration. Few concepts that are gaining prominence in recent times, especially with the onset of pandemic revival are describe below.

1 minute city by Vinnova Innovation Agency, Sweden

The concept is adopted by Stockholm city in 2020, proposed by Swedish federal agency called Vinnova (Hill, 2021 as cited in O’Sullivan Feargus, 2021) . Rather than a concept of urban development, it focuses on the parklets and streets in the residential areas, to retrofit them as active public spaces. ‘Through the 1-minute city program’ the city is installing modular furniture in streets, by involving the residents living across the streets. The program was piloted across four different central areas in Stockholm, and the modules were designed with local communities including students of local schools. The proponents claim that residents spent 4 times more than the average time spent on streets. (O’Sullivan Feargus, 2021)

30-minute city by David M. Levinson

The 30-minute city by Levinson (2019) is contextualised to Sydney metropolitan region, in which the author has focused solely on public transit, its competitiveness, service delivery, intermodal connections, co-ordination of schedules and the public transit furniture. The author dedicated the title 30-minute city based on the well-established and internationally