Put a school, a shop, a park and a bus stop within a fifteen-minute walk of a child’s front door and you have built a 15-minute city. On paper.
Then ask the child.
CONIFER’s new report D3.1 — Report on 15mC perceptions in each civic lab does exactly that, across all six of our civic labs: Brussels, Budapest, Cologne, Ghent/Kortrijk, Matosinhos and Toruń. Its central finding is one that every urban plan built on proximity needs to absorb: proximity is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
What the report set out to do
D3.1 investigates how children and young people experience accessibility, mobility and neighbourhood quality in the context of proximity-based urban development. It is deliberately built on the gap between two things that planning documents usually treat as one: planned accessibility — what a map says is reachable — and experienced accessibility — what a young person will actually walk to, and under what conditions.
The research is mixed-methods and participatory throughout, capturing lived spatial experience through mapping, dialogue, place-based assessment and creative expression. It brings together three complementary research strands:
- Task 3.1 — Collaborative diagnostics of 15-minute accessibility, led by the International Federation of Pedestrians and KTI. A purpose-built web mapping application was used in workshops to compare computer-estimated travel times with young people’s own estimations, and to surface where the two diverge.
- Task 3.2 — Relating the sense of place to proximity-based living, led by Nicolaus Copernicus University, examining the social, environmental and behavioural factors that shape attachment to a neighbourhood.
- Task 3.3 — Collecting everyday experiences through participatory media, led by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences, working through visual methods.
Each civic lab also contributed a socio-demographic profile of its study area, so that findings can be read against local realities rather than in the abstract.
The finding that should change how plans are written
Across all six civic labs, one pattern held: lived accessibility is shaped by a far broader ecosystem than distance. Safety, environmental quality, public space design, opportunities for social interaction and the perceived attractiveness of a destination all determine whether a young person actually goes there.
A route that a routing engine calls an eight-minute walk is not an eight-minute walk if it crosses a road the child has been told never to cross alone. A park two streets away is not accessible if nothing there invites a fourteen-year-old to stay.
The report puts it plainly: there is a structural gap between policy narratives of proximity and the lived realities of children and youth.
What young people actually want, and what stops them
The consistency across six cities is itself a finding. Young people prioritise safe, green and socially vibrant environments that enable independent mobility. Active mobility infrastructure — walking and cycling — accessible schools and recreation spaces, and community-oriented public areas sit at the centre of their choices and their wellbeing.
The barriers are equally consistent:
- high traffic exposure
- unsafe crossings
- fragmented cycling infrastructure
- unequal access to services
None of these are solved by moving a destination closer.
Why ask children at all
Because they are the most sensitive instrument available.
The report makes the case directly: children’s and young people’s perspectives provide early indicators of spatial inequality, mobility barriers and design failures — actionable intelligence for planners and decision-makers, arriving earlier than it would through any other channel. A street that is hostile to a ten-year-old is usually a street that is quietly hostile to an older person, a wheelchair user or a parent with a pram; the child simply registers it first, and says so.
This is the shift CONIFER is arguing for: child-centred, experience-based urban accessibility, positioning young people not as passive users of cities but as key informants in the design of inclusive, resilient and climate-ready urban environments.
The policy message in one line
Proximity is necessary but not sufficient. Effective implementation of the 15-minute city requires integrated intervention — spatial planning, mobility governance, safety improvements and investment in high-quality public space, together rather than separately.
Read it
D3.1 — Report on 15mC perceptions in each civic lab is available now on the CONIFER publications table, together with the rest of our published deliverables:
👉 https://conifer15.eu/publications-table/
Its companion, D3.2 — Report on 15mC discourses in each civic lab, examines the same six cities from the outside in: what the press and social media say about proximity, and what that tells us about the arguments a city has to win. Read that one next.
If you are a city, a school network or a research team working on proximity and young people’s mobility, our six civic labs are always glad to compare notes. Reach us at coniferproject@hotmail.com, or follow the labs on LinkedIn and Instagram.
