The five-minute city: inside Denmark’s revolutionary neighbourhood

While ambitious urban planners try to make 15-minute cities a reality, the Nordhavn district of Copenhagen has gone one better. What’s life like when everything you need is just a stroll away?

The Nordavn District of Copenhagen. This is what city-making looks like when you get everything right.

It’s not often that the worlds of town planning and traffic management become mired in controversy, but in recent years the innocuous concept of the “15-minute city” has sparked outrage in online forums, among cynical politicians and on the streets of European cities. 

The originator of the concept, urban planner Carlos Moreno, has even received death threats. All of this has hinged on the spurious conspiracy theory that 15-minute cities were part of some shady global population-control agenda, rather than a desire to simply create more pleasant neighbourhoods.