The 15-minute city: Territorial justice, technological innovation, and epistemic plurality in urban transformation

Background: This article critically examines the 15-minute city model through a transdisciplinary lens integrating complex thinking, relational urbanism, and territorial justice, drawing on the cases of Medellín, Paris, Curitiba, and Copenhagen, and engaging recent scholarship on tactical urbanism and active mobility. Objective: To analyze how urban proximity, understood as a right to time, equitable access, neighborhood multifunctionality, and everyday sustainability, can operate as a device for territorial transformation across diverse contexts. Method: An integrative qualitative review with an interpretive-comparative approach was conducted using systematic search and selection procedures; recent academic and institutional sources were analyzed, and four urban cases (Medellín, Paris, Curitiba, and Copenhagen) were contrasted. Results: Findings suggest that, under situated and critical criteria, the model can foster community cohesion, activate local care ecologies, and strengthen resilience to structural crises. At the same time, it entails risks of segmentation linked to covert gentrification, exclusionary digitalization, and technocratic capture of proximity discourse. Tactical interventions emerge as mediations for experimentation and public learning at the neighborhood scale, while active mobility and micromobility appear as operational conditions for restoring temporal autonomy and dignifying everyday journeys. Conclusions: The model is not a transferable technical recipe but a strategy whose enabling conditions lie in the articulation of binding participation, redistributive criteria, and transparent governance, so that proximity operates as a redistribution of capacities rather than selective place upgrading. Accordingly, its applicability requires situated reinterpretations, particularly in Global South contexts, where comparative evidence indicates that outcomes depend more on institutional and community mediations than on the formal adoption of the model’s label.