15-minute city, noun: ‘a city that is designed so that everyone who lives there can reach everything they need within 15 minutes on foot or by bike’

Cities define the lives of all those who call them home: where they go, how they get there, how they spend their time. But what if we structured the way we live in our cities differently? What if we travelled differently? What if we could get back the time we would have spent commuting and make it our own?

In this carefully researched and readily accessible book, Natalie Whittle interrogates the notion of the 15-minute city: its pros, its cons and its potential to revolutionise modern living. With global warming at crisis point and Covid-19 responses bringing a previously unimaginable decline in commuting, Whittle’s timely book serves as a call to reflect on the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of how we live our lives. Building her study around consideration of space and time, Whittle traverses both to collect models from ancient Athens to modern Paris and demonstrate how one idea could change our daily lives – and the world – for good.