The Right to the Night City: Exploring the Temporal Variability of the 15-min City in Milan and Its Implications for Nocturnal Communities

The needs of night communities and the barriers they face in accessing diverse urban amenities are underexplored in urban planning research. Focus is primarily given to the needs of cultural consumers, frequently overlooking the challenges faced by regular nighttime communities, including night workers. Through a GIS-based analysis, the aim of this research is to shed light on differences in accessibility to core urban services between day and night in the city of Milan. The spatiotemporal analysis was performed using a customized version of the 15-min City Score Toolkit, an open-source, Python-based proprietary tool developed to automate the 15 min access metric estimation. Proprietary Point-Of-Interest (POI) data that were retrieved, sorted and filtered from the Google Places API are used to simulate time-variant walkability maps based on opening hour information contained in the dataset. The research reveals significant differences in walkability potential, both in spatial and temporal terms, and highlights gaps in nighttime service availability. The work presents an innovation on the 15 min city approach that highlights the impact of 24-h urban rhythms on real walkability outcomes. The quality limitations of the Google data are extensively explored in the article, providing further insight into the replicability and scalability of the methodology for future research.