Thessaloniki is the city where you can “fly” everywhere for your basic needs walking at most 15′? Researchers at the Transport Engineering Laboratory of the Department of Civil Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki have decided positively for many areas of the urban complex.

The study was carried out in 2023 in order for the scientists to decide whether Thessaloniki responds to the idea of ​​”15′ cities”, a new urban planning concept, based on which most daily needs and services can be reached within 15 minutes on foot or the bicycle. This is the concept called “ville du quart d’heure” by its originator, the French-Colombian urban planner Carlos Moreno, who was honored in 2021 for the creation of the concept, with the Obel international award for architectural achievement.

“Our research arose internally, it was done at the Transportation Engineering Laboratory, it was not funded by any project but it is an activity that concerns our fields, that is, the visualization and dynamics of space”, the head of the Transportation Engineering Laboratory of the AUTH explains to APE-MPE, associate professor Dr. Ioannis Politis, who prepared the research with Alexandros Sdoukopoulos and Efthymi Papadopoulos and Eleni Verani. Their methodology includes the use of open source data, which can be applied to any region of the world, and the development of an index that ranks the city’s prospect of becoming a 15′ city.

“We looked in the international literature for what we should introduce as parameters to define the city of 15′, with categories such as entertainment, everyday life (supermarkets, bakeries), health services, open spaces, transportation (bus stops), issues concerning schools and welfare services against the elderly. In other words, we examined, throughout the urban complex of Thessaloniki, whether someone of this type can satisfy the needs, moving from his house on foot, at a walking speed of approximately 5 km/h and at a distance of 15′. says Mr. Politis. In the index the researchers developed for the 15′ city, the values ​​range from 0 to 1—where 1 means the city is well suited to satisfy the 15′ perspective, and 0 means it has no perspective at all.

“In Thessaloniki, we achieved an index of 0.85, which is quite satisfactory because in the city of many problems, we have mixed land uses, that is, in a very small area we can find restaurants, schools and banks, which helps a lot for Thessaloniki to develop the vision of 15′”Mr. Politis points out.

Analyzing different areas of the urban complex, he reveals that Panorama does not show a good index of the 15′ city – it is close to 0 – because too many activities cannot be done within the defined distance, just like Filiro and Pefka. On the contrary, in Kalamaria, the center of Thessaloniki, Charilaou and Toumba, in Ampelokipi and Evosmos, the index approaches unity because all the activities included in the survey can be satisfied to a good degree.

“That is, as long as we move away from the dense urban fabric and go to peri-urban areas, the 15′ issue is not satisfied”, clarifies Mr. Politis, adding that each municipality could see its weaknesses, identify the activities that are missing and develop the corresponding infrastructures to be accessible to citizens by walking only 15′!