Urban Aspirations and Sustainable Mobility Transitions: Proximity-Based Urban Imaginaries in Ibero-America

Source abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented collective reflection on everyday urban life, reshaping how citizens perceived proximity, mobility patterns, and the sustainability of everyday transport systems. This article examines whether these pandemic-induced reflections resonated with the core principles of the 15-Minute City, understood not as a policy blueprint but as an emergent social imaginary. Drawing on a large-scale comparative survey conducted during the strictest lockdown phase in April–May 2020 (n = 9575), the study analyses survey respondents’ desires and expectations regarding post-pandemic urban change across nine Ibero-American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, and Spain. Using one-way ANOVA and Tukey post hoc tests, the results reveal a strong and widely shared normative orientation toward greener, more walkable, and more localized urban environments, all of which are key dimensions of sustainable urban mobility transitions, including reduced car dependence and a greater reliance on active transport modes such as walking and cycling. However, these aspirations are consistently accompanied by significantly lower expectations of implementation, resulting in a pronounced desire–expectation gap across all countries. This gap displays clear geographical variation and appears closely associated with perceived governance capacity and institutional trust, with European countries showing greater alignment between aspiration and expectation than their Latin American counterparts. The findings suggest that, even in the absence of explicit policy discourse, respondents expressed aspirational urban imaginaries displaying affinities with principles commonly associated with the 15-Minute City framework. By empirically capturing these bottom-up imaginaries, the study contributes to debates on sustainable urban transport and mobility transitions by highlighting the social foundations and governance constraints of proximity-based planning across diverse institutional contexts.