Hyperlocal 15-min cities and Location Intelligence

What is a 15-min city ?

‘The 15-minute city’ has become a buzz word in the urban planning domain since the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo made it her re-election agenda. A coalition of 96 mayors/elected city representatives, known as C40 cities, pitched for implementation of a ‘15-minute city’ concept as part of a large Covid-19 economic recovery plan. The list of the C40 Cities includes five Indian cities Delhi, Jaipur, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Chennai. The features of a 15-min city is as follows:

• Residents of every neighbourhood have easy access to goods and services, particularly groceries, fresh food and healthcare through hyperlocal retail systems.
• Every neighbourhood has a variety of housing types, of different sizes and levels of affordability, to accommodate many types of households and enable more people to live closer to where they work.
• Residents of every neighbourhood are able to breathe clean air, free of harmful air pollutants, there are green spaces for everyone to enjoy.
• More people can work close to home or remotely, due to the presence of smaller-scale offices, retail and hospitality, and co-working spaces.

While reducing a city’s carbon footprint is one goal of the 15-minute city, it’s one of many benefits that it can bring to an area.

How can Location Intelligence help building 15-minute cities?

In this article, we demonstrate how Location Intelligence could be put to use in one of the C40 cities — Bengaluru. The entire city could be divided into 650+ 15 minute cities.

1. Catchment analysis of every 15-min city

Location intelligence can help analyse every 15-minute city at a very granular level and pin-point where to place new city amenities in order to make the 15-min city self sufficient. With the data for supermarkets, grocery stores, entertainment centers, housing societies, restaurants, banking facilities and other essential facilities, we used our Location Intelligence platform Khoj.ai to visualize and analyse each 15min city in Bengaluru at a granular level. We can find out:

• What facilities are missing in the ‘15-min’ area.
• Predict demand for every new facility based on the area demographic.
• Pinpoint where to place the new amenity.

Various amenities and their distance from the 15-min city centre

Let us analyse and visualise one of these 15-minute city:

Supermarkets in the vicinity of this 15-minute city.

Restaurants in this 15-min city

Housing societies around the 15-min city.

On analysis we see that even though facilities like restaurants, supermarkets, atms, pharmacies etc. are in abundance, this city lacks residential facilities with only 6 housing societies in the entire area.

2. Helping Hyperlocal Retail systems

In order to transcend the Indian cities into self-reliant ones, inducing walkability and accessibility in the planning process at the granular level becomes vital. This is the idea behind a hyper-local retail system. Hyperlocal businesses are the one where one wants to build a local ecosystem that enables customers to buy anything from their neighborhood stores.

Market Potential Score

Using data like footfall, population, proximity to retail stores etc. we have calculated a market potential index, lying between 0–4, for every 15-min city in Bengaluru.

Market Potential of every 15-minute city

The yellow areas indicate small retail stores in that area will have a high demand if they choose to go hyperlocal.

In the coming decade, when the cities will require a dynamic rearrangement, Location intelligence can help us overcome several strategic hurdles that the 15-min city architecture will pose. We can harness the potential of LI, to create a more sustainable, cleaner and inclusive future for one and all.