The ’15-minute city’ is an urban planning model that, by ensuring that all services are within citizens’ reach, aims to make cities more liveable and reduce their impact on the environment, favouring walking and cycling over driving.
Politecnico di Milano is a partner in the COMMON_ACCESS European project, which has just been launched to explore the forms and conditions for applying this model in peri-urban areas, within metropolitan contexts that do not ensure the physical proximity to services, densities and diversity of functions that are typical of dense urban areas.
The project coordinator for Politecnico di Milano is Prof. Paola Pucci from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies: “COMMON_ACCESS explores the role of accessibility as a common good and the social nature of accessibility options and measures (for both people and goods) in urban peripheries, focusing on ‘Commoning Accessibility’ practices where the role of communities in optimising resources and sharing physical and digital accessibility services is crucial”.
In the project, accessibility, understood as the possibility of accessing facilities and services that are essential for the life of every person, is reinterpreted and investigated as a common good, as a social and material resource that is co-produced by and belongs to all citizens through the concept of ‘Commoning accessibility’.
The project aims to give operational content to the ‘Commoning accessibility’ concept through the identification, mapping and analysis of ‘common/community accessibility experiments’ such as shared (e-)bikes and cargo bikes for the transport of people and goods, shared mobility and micro-mobility systems intended as accessible and affordable transport options, temporary and tactical urban planning measures for increasing local accessibility, digital platforms based on community-generated and community-managed data to improve digital connectivity.