Over the past few months, between March and May 2026, the European project Social and Environmental Justice in 15 Minutes —JiM— has developed an intense agenda of activities focused on the study of daily accessibility, mobility, and social justice within the framework of the 15-minute city. In this context, the GEMOTT team has actively contributed to the project through participatory research activities, international collaboration, and methodological development.
Within the framework of the project’s Work Package 3, the different partner teams are applying the same participatory methodology across various study regions. This approach will allow for a comparative perspective on how accessibility and justice in daily mobility are experienced in different European urban contexts.
Here in Catalonia, researchers Monika Maciejewska and Verónica Mejía have led a series of participatory workshops in Sabadell, one of the project’s study cities. Between March and April, four discussion groups were organized with diverse local communities. The sessions took place in venues such as the Antic Mercat de Sant Joan, the UAB Sabadell Campus, and in collaboration with Espai Dones Nouvingudes de Sabadell, a municipal program aimed at newly arrived migrant women.
The workshops allowed participants to explore how residents experience accessibility in their daily lives: which spaces they use, what distances they travel, how they move, and to what extent urban services meet their daily needs. Through participatory mapping exercises and collective debates, participants highlighted that physical proximity does not necessarily guarantee accessibility. Daily routines, care responsibilities, public transport availability, safety, available time, and social support networks profoundly influence how people access city services and spaces.
Among the first emerging results from the workshops in Sabadell, it is observed that perceptions of accessibility and mobility vary significantly according to social groups and life contexts. This complexity is especially visible in the case of migrant women, whose experiences show how daily mobility is strongly conditioned by care responsibilities, time constraints, and community networks. Their movements often combine various functions and are organized around neighborhood life, where even short distances can be perceived as demanding depending on the effort required, safety, or the need to travel with children.
Public transport, especially buses, emerges as a key element for daily autonomy, although it also presents difficulties related to long, fragmented, or inefficient routes. At the same time, contributions from other participating groups point to broader structural issues, such as inequalities in connectivity between neighborhoods, the importance of service quality and familiarity, and the role of walkable, safe, and pleasant public spaces in shaping mobility practices. For older people, accessibility is particularly linked to autonomy, proximity, and the ability to maintain daily routines and social life.
Overall, these initial results show that accessibility is not just a physical or distance-related issue, but also social, emotional, and linguistic, and that it is deeply linked to daily practices, living environments, and the diverse needs of the urban population.
In parallel, during April, GEMOTT hosted a seminar by Dr. Paolo Chevalier, titled Mapping 15-minute city accessibility across European cities: From data pipelines to interactive maps. In his presentation, Chevalier outlined the methodological approach being developed and implemented in the different JiM project cities to map accessibility to daily services for various social groups, with a special focus on sustainable transport modes. The seminar demonstrated how GIS methods, open data, and collaborative workflows combine to produce interactive tools that facilitate comparative analysis between urban contexts.
Finally, from April 19 to 21, the UAB campus hosted a Work Package 3 meeting with the participation of JiM project partners from across Europe. The meeting allowed for sharing emerging results and reflecting on common research challenges, such as comparing accessibility between different cities and national contexts within the project framework. The program also included a field visit to Sabadell and a study tour of Barcelona, linking discussions on social and environmental justice with concrete urban interventions and daily mobility practices.
With these activities, GEMOTT continues to contribute to the objectives of the JiM project, aimed at better understanding accessibility within the framework of the 15-minute city. The preliminary results reinforce the need to address accessibility not only based on distance to services, but also from lived experiences, daily practices, and the inequalities that condition the mobility of different population groups.
GEMOTT’s work within the project Social and Environmental Justice in 15 Minutes —JiM— is funded by the Spanish State Research Agency —AEI— within the framework of the Driving Urban Transitions Partnership —DUT—.
