SmartUrbanity: From Accessibility to Digital Planning in the 15-Minute City – State of the Art, Measurement Frameworks and Tool Requirements for Passenger Mobility and Urban Logistics

This report as Deliverable 2.1 of the SmartUrbanity project provides the conceptual, methodological, and practical foundation for the SmartUrbanity project, which develops citizen-centric digital tools to assess and improve urban accessibility in five European pilot cities: Rome, Karlsruhe, Izmir, the Lyon Metropolitan Area, and the Greater Zurich Area. The 15-Minute City (15mC), structured around the principles of proximity, diversity, density, and digitalisation, serves as the guiding framework. The report reviews its theoretical foundations, real-world implementations, and key limitations—particularly the risk of reinforcing spatial inequalities and the tendency to overlook freight transport as an integral component of urban mobility planning. A central methodological contribution is the distinction between objective and perceived accessibility. While objective measures capture spatial and network-based proximity to everyday services, perceived accessibility is shaped by qualitative factors such as safety, comfort, and service reliability—and frequently diverges from calculated indicators. This distinction is grounded not only in the literature but also in interviews conducted with individuals facing everyday mobility constraints and with experts from academia, planning, and transit operations, which revealed recurring barriers such as last-mile gaps, inconsistent physical infrastructure, and safety perceptions that diverge from formally calculated accessibility. ... mehrBoth dimensions must be considered to reliably assess urban proximity and its real-life implications. A comparative review of existing accessibility tools and agent-based models identifies key methodological gaps, most notably the systematic underrepresentation of subjective accessibility, which the SmartUrbanity toolkit is designed to address. The project’s digital tools—Access Together (mobile data collection) and Access Lab (GIS-based analysis and participatory web platform), including the Access Atlas, the Atlas Hub, and the Decision Support System (DSS)—form an integrated ecosystem linking citizen-generated data to evidence-based planning. Stakeholder workshops across all pilot cities and a structured user experience research process identified ease of use, transparent feedback mechanisms, inclusive design, and data quality as the critical requirements for tool adoption. These findings are consolidated into a set of methodological guidelines to guide the further development and implementation of the toolkit.