Questioning Proximity in a Fragmented, Disorderly, and Complex Urban Region. The Limits of the 15-Min City Discourse and Frame for a More Realistic Understanding

Abstract Conditions of accessibility by proximity are the extensions of variegated and metropolitan-scale residential, labor, and other functional geographies of move- ment. Notwithstanding its high density according to traditional metrics, the urban region of Milan is of great interest in this regard because its functional, morpholog- ical, and social variegation is very high. The presence of residential areas originally developed out of rural towns, sites characterized by still active or decommissioned industrial legacies in close proximity to residential settlements, local contexts marked by a variety of urban materials, and the lack of organized centralities well repre- sent how the terms for achieving conditions of accessibility by proximity change profoundly if com-pared to more central and denser urban areas. The contribution addresses these issues by presenting and discussing some of the results of a three-year teaching and research project aimed at critically repositioning current discourses on the 15-min city/accessibility by proximity in relation to the variegated conditions of existing urban regions. We describe the methodology employed, the set of criteria for analysis and intervention elaborated in that context, and then draw some conclusions on the structural challenges faced by policies for accessibility by proximity in less dense contexts and on the need to focus on a variety of entry points—and not only accessibility by proximity—for re-localization strategies in these contexts.