Scenarios for a Post-Pandemic City: urban planning strategies and challenges of making “Milan 15-minutes city”

This Covid-19 pandemic has imposed extreme impacts on many developed world global cities, especially those with high population densities and high levels of connectivity. Many cities are therefore experiencing a moment of global rethinking. In a few decades, we have gone from an idea of extreme density and the gentrification of cities to completely different proposals, such as the ‘the 15-minutes city’ concept where all services can be reached in a short distance. Within this context, the current paper aims to provide an overview of this concept and its application in the case of Milan by conducting desk research and analysing the official reports and documents. This paper discusses that the core idea of the 15-minute city is not new; the strategies can be traced back to different approaches to neighbourhood planning in the past century. In Milan, the municipality’s ‘2020 Adaptation Strategy’ proposed guidelines for sustainable transportation and self-sufficient neighbourhoods.