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Debates about (post)pandemic cities and neighbourhoods, and the growing interest in sustainable mobility encouraged academics to develop the proximity-based planning (PBP) concept under the recent label of the 15-Minute City (FMC). To better understand the rise and nature of the concept, a total of 287 studies were identified in Web of Science and Scopus using 21 relevant keywords. The corpus was quantitatively examined based on performance analysis and science mapping in bibliometric analysis, as well as using Exploratory Factor Analysis. The results were then visualized using VOSviewer and Gephi . The results revealed that proximity-based studies have evolved across three distinct periods, gaining traction as a consequence of COVID-19 pandemic, while new directions have also emerged. Most of the conceptual work is published by researchers from Western Europe, and such research is also more influential, as citation figures show. Besides the large number of publications on the core concepts of proximity-based planning, ‘transport’ and ‘built environment-design’ are the most popular themes, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Interestingly, publications emphasizing ‘spatial equity’ more often centre on Latin America, East Asia, and South Asia as study areas, while those with a ‘people and health’ focus tend to concentrate on Oceania. Despite the diversity in research priorities and the growing number of publications, the FMC label tends to create a common research ground that connects various domains and geographical regions. Finally, the findings not only reveal the model’s latent structure but also highlight understudied dimensions of PBP and related concepts—such as digitalization, the ‘quality’ of facilities (as opposed to their more commonly studied ‘quantity’), and public perception—offering opportunities for further refinement.
Abdi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.