15min City Score Toolkit – Urban Walkability Analytics

The 15min City Score is an urban metric that gives a comprehensive overview of a city’s walkability and is widely used to assess the accessibility of cities, neighborhoods and specific places based on the availability of essential services. Nevertheless, the estimation of this metric for a city can be an intense and complex analytical process. In this article, we present the design and development architecture of the 15min City Score Toolkit, a Python-based tool for automating the metric estimation. The tool streamlines the analysis by using Open Street Map and custom data as input, allowing for flexibility and for the testing of custom-built scenarios. The toolkit has been implemented as QGIS plugin and has been tested on over 112 cities to show its effectiveness and computational efficacy, as well as its potential in supporting and analyzing the 15-minute city concept.