Three graduate students from the University of Iowa’s planning department — Roman Kiefer, Robert Lee, and Emily Aust — authored “Complete Neighborhoods: A Guidebook” as their capstone project, detailing strategies for Cedar Rapids to embrace the 15-minute city concept.

This urban planning model aims to create communities where essential destinations like workplaces, schools, and grocery stores are all within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.

To promote this structure, the guidebook recommends incentivizing mixed-use redevelopment of underutilized parking lots, supporting adaptive reuse of vacant properties, and using zoning regulations to create walkable, pedestrian-friendly spaces.

Kiefer said the 15-minute city concept grew in popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People don’t want to be reliant on their car, and they’re not able to get to the grocery store or get to the schools,” Kiefer said. “Nationwide, cities are starting to see that and reconcile that.”

Kiefer said while the 15-minute city concept is especially popular in Europe, this project — conducted in collaboration with the Corridor Metropolitan Planning Organization, the City of Cedar Rapids, and the Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities — focused on how the model can be adapted for North American cities.

“A lot of cities in Europe are hundreds, if not thousands of years old, and they were made before the car,” Kiefer said. “And a lot of the cities in the United States were made after cars, so the entire built infrastructure is very different between the two.”

Kiefer said the group intentionally titled their guidebook “Complete Neighborhoods” in an effort to create distance from the term “15-minute city.” While both terms describe the same concept, Kiefer explained that “15-minute city” has been misused in conspiracy theories in recent years.

According to a report from NPR, these conspiracy theories falsely claim the concept is not about enhancing walkability and convenience but rather a means for global elites to confine people to specific neighborhoods.

“Conspiracy theorists have gone very far with the term, saying that [15-minute cities are] open-air prisons,” Kiefer said.

However, Steven Spears, a professor in the School of Planning and Public Affairs who supervised the project, emphasized that the concept of a 15-minute city is fundamentally about helping neighborhoods reconnect with their roots, fostering accessibility and community-centered living.

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“The concept basically is pre-urban planning. When we didn’t have cars, people had to walk, bike, take some sort of a transit vehicle to where they needed to get to,” Spears said. “Since cars became dominant, we started to build cities around the car. So, everything expanded. It got farther apart, and it was within driving distance but not within walking distance.”

Spears said enhancing walkability plays a crucial role in fostering stronger, more connected communities beyond improving accessibility for those without cars or the ability to drive.

“One of the bigger things to me about this concept is getting people more contact with their neighbors,” Spears said. “To have more of a sense of community than just getting in your car and driving.”

Adam Lindenlaub, assistant director for the Community Development and Planning Department of the City of Cedar Rapids, wrote in an email statement to The Daily Iowan the 15-minute city or complete neighborhood concept is included in the city’s Community Climate Action Plan.

“As you see in the Complete Neighborhoods Guidebook, numerous actions are required to make a neighborhood complete,” Lindenlaub wrote. “Cedar Rapids has been implementing some of these for quite some time.”

He pointed to Cedar Rapids’ 2019 zoning code update — which expanded bicycle and trail systems and established a network of community bikes and scooters — as a key example of enhancing accessibility. He also acknowledged the City of Cedar Rapids’ role in the creation of the guidebook.

“The city worked with the student team to provide guidance and encouraged the incorporation of implementation examples in the Guidebook,” Lindenlaub wrote. “The city is currently reviewing these examples and other cities’ policies and practices to understand the impacts these had to see what will work best in Cedar Rapids.”