EMC2

The 15-minute city (15mC) has strong prerequisites in terms of urban form and spatial organisation of the physical city, which should be integrated in any transition strategy for suburbs and car-dependent outskirts. With these demands in consideration, the project proposes a new model of the 15mC for the loose structural networks of peripheral locations: the Evolutive Meshed Compact City (EMC2). The EMC2 model envisages compact urban forms as corridor developments based on existing main roads, forming a meshed structure across the metropolitan area. Redesigned for pedestrians, these interconnected roads will be turned into vibrant and inclusive main streets, living spaces that offer a high quality of stay, a wide variety of high-frequency mixed uses (services, retail, and even productive activities) and connections to wider-range mobility options (streetcars, bus rapid transit, bicycle paths). Integrating car flows through traffic calming techniques is a challenge in itself. The network of main streets interacts with metropolitan ecosystem green and blue corridors, according to operational modalities that must be determined. Delimited by the main streets, the existing suburban forms will require only marginal improvements, namely through fine-grained pedestrian and bicycle interconnections. The project will assess the EMC2 model at different scales in six geographically very different European case studies (Nice, Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing, Vienne, Gothenburg, Florence and Pisa-Lucca-Viareggio), through a triangulated research methodology including: innovative geospatial and network modelling (configurational space syntax, morphometrics of the network streetscapes, agent-based models for the multi-modal mobility and of people behaviour in public space); observational usage analyses (ethnographic surveys of human activities, public/private interface analysis, urban parterre modeling) ; comparative morpho-functional analyses among case studies. The main goal of the project is a detailed specification of the EMC2 model, to successfully implement the 15mC in car-dependent outskirts and reduce the risk that 15mC policies limited to urban cores exacerbate the underlying tensions between gentrifying centres and left-behind peripheral areas. More specifically, the project will produce: a transferable, multi-scale method to assess EMC2 potential in European suburban areas, as well as guidelines for this assessment and for EMC2 implementation, including examples and obstacles. The consortium will disseminate results both in academia and among urban stakeholders.