The new 15-minute sustainable city model combines urban agriculture, solar power, and electric vehicle delivery to create food-secure neighbourhoods with minimal environmental impact.
Imagine walking down your street to pick up fresh lettuce and tomatoes grown on your neighbour’s rooftop, delivered by an electric vehicle powered by solar panels built right into the sidewalk. Researchers at Concordia University here in Montreal just proved this vision could actually work.
Their new study shows that neighbourhoods can become completely self-sufficient in vegetables while cutting carbon emissions by 98 percent. The model requires dedicating just small portions of existing spaces: 13.8 percent of rooftops, 10 percent of building walls, and 15 percent of unused lots for growing food.
Published in the journal Sustainability, the research combines four major ideas into one system. It takes the 15-minute sustainable city concept, where everything you need sits within walking distance, and adds rooftop gardens, solar-powered electric delivery vehicles, and local food markets. The result is a neighbourhood that grows its own vegetables and relies little on gas-guzzling trucks to bring food from far away.
Caroline Hachem-Vermette leads the research team in Concordia’s Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering. She explains that the goal centers on integrating energy, mobility, land use and social functions to bring daily needs closer to residents. This approach helps people reduce the number of trips they need to take that consume fossil fuels.
The team tested their Food Production and Transportation Framework on West 5, a real neighbourhood in London, Ontario. This community already serves as a testing ground for Concordia’s Volt-Age electrification research program. The researchers calculated exact numbers for how much food different spaces could produce, how far people would need to walk to farmers’ markets, and how much solar power would be needed to run delivery vehicles.
The financial side looks promising, too. The solar-powered delivery system pays for itself in less than three years. After the initial investment period, the neighbourhood produces clean electricity at around 92 cents per kilowatt hour. For every 0.19 units of locally grown food, one unit of carbon dioxide emissions is eliminated.
Lead researcher Faisal Kabir, a master’s student, designed the model to be straightforward and transparent. He emphasizes that community members are important participants when implementing mixed-use neighbourhoods, so the framework needs to remain accessible and easy to understand.
The system works by converting spaces we already have but often waste. Flat rooftops become vegetable gardens instead of empty expanses of tar and gravel. Building facades can support vertical growing systems. Empty lots between houses transform into community garden plots. Solar panels embedded into sidewalks generate electricity while people walk over them.
Electric vehicles collect the harvested vegetables and bring them to grocery stores and farmers’ markets within one kilometer of most homes. Everything stays local, which means produce arrives fresher and the neighbourhood doesn’t depend on long supply chains that can break down during emergencies.
The framework relies on multiple variables to measure neighbourhood sustainability. Researchers factored in rooftop, facade and lot areas for cultivation, walking distances between residences and local amenities, crop yields and per capita food demand. They also calculated solar panel efficiency, electric vehicle battery capacity and carbon dioxide reduction rates. Economic factors such as energy costs and payback periods guide feasibility.
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The team introduced a decision-making metric to help planners quantify how different design strategies perform across various neighbourhood configurations. This metric provides policymakers with an easy-to-interpret tool for comparing scenarios when planning a 15-minute sustainable city.
Hachem-Vermette points out benefits beyond just environmental gains. Growing food and sharing it with neighbours fosters real bonds between people. As community members get to know each other, they begin helping one another, which builds a basic element of resilience. Beyond food and carbon reduction, this approach creates a genuine sense of community.
The research builds on nearly ten years of work studying how mixed-use, solar-powered neighbourhoods function. Since 2015, Hachem-Vermette’s group has explored how energy, mobility, land use and social factors can be integrated at the neighbourhood scale. The team plans to expand their model to include workplaces, schools, health centers, and recreation facilities. Their broader goal is to design interconnected neighbourhood clusters that share food, energy and amenities, creating a balanced, adaptive urban network.
As more cities seek ways to reduce their environmental impact while improving quality of life, this research shows that the 15-minute sustainable city concept can integrate food security, renewable energy, and community building into a practical framework. The model is scalable and adaptable, which means neighbourhoods of different sizes and configurations can implement similar strategies. Future stages of the research will extend this approach to create cities designed as interconnected networks of mixed-use, resource-sharing neighbourhoods.
