Cities worldwide are increasingly embracing the idea of the “15-minute city” as a pathway to more liveable, equitable and climate-responsive urban environments. This vision emphasizes walkable access to daily services, local resilience, and low-carbon lifestyles – features that have proven valuable in managing urban pressures and supporting recovery during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In China, rapid urbanization and growing challenges such as air pollution, mobility congestion and widening social disparities have intensified the need for people-oriented, energy-efficient urban development. Responding to this, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources issued the Spatial Planning Guidance for Community Life Units (2021), which provides a standardized framework for planning 15-minute walkable living areas and outlines spatial assessment methods for essential public service facilities. Building upon this framework, this study conducts a comprehensive, data-driven evaluation of 13 categories of urban–rural public services across 170 cities within China’s 11 national urban agglomerations. Using high-resolution POI datasets and GIS-based network analysis, we measure and visualize the 15-minute walkable service coverage of each facility type, generating a comparative landscape across cities, across agglomerations, and within each urban agglomeration. The analysis reveals spatial disparities in service provision, diverse facility configuration patterns, and distinctive intra-agglomeration hierarchies. The resulting visual “coverage mode maps” provide an intuitive tool for identifying local deficiencies and strengths, offering actionable insights for planners and policymakers seeking to promote climate-adaptive, resilient and low-carbon urban futures.
Jiajie Yang (Thu,) studied this question.