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Guadalupe, a twenty-minute city
Only one in four people has all seven essential services within 15 minutes.
Guadalupe, a twenty-minute city
The median person in Guadalupe walks 20.5 minutes to have a daycare, a school, a clinic, a pharmacy and food shopping; only 26% of the population has all of them within 15 minutes. And people are leaving precisely where access is best: between 2010 and 2020 those areas lost 13% of their residents.
Read the technical noteThe first two pages, online. The full note is sent by email on request.
The problem
A 15-minute city is one where what people need every day is within walking distance. In Guadalupe almost everyone has a store around the corner, but very few also have the daycare, the secondary school and the clinic: measuring how many minutes it takes to walk to all of them shows what is missing and where.
Having many shops nearby is not having it all. Counting the minutes to the farthest of the services used every day shows what is really missing and where bringing it closer pays off most.
What we found
Guadalupe is a twenty-minute city, not a fifteen-minute one
The person at the middle of the distribution walks 20.5 minutes to reach all seven essential services; only 26% of the population has all of them within 15 minutes.
Daycare is what lies farthest away
For 62% of the population, daycare is the farthest of the seven services. 27,881 children aged 0 to 5 (65%) live more than a 15-minute walk from one.
The highest and lowest socioeconomic levels have the fewest services nearby
In the highest socioeconomic quintile only 15% have all seven services within 15 minutes; in the lowest, 24%. The middle quintiles reach up to 31%.
The areas with the best walking access are emptying
Between 2010 and 2020, AGEBs where the person at the middle of the distribution has all seven services within 15 minutes lost 13% of their population; where more than half an hour is needed, it held steady.
Households without a car live slightly closer to services
Where most homes have no car (189,900 people), 28% have all seven essential services within a 15-minute walk; where most do have one, 25%.
Part of what can be reached from Guadalupe lies in other municipalities
Of what can be reached from Guadalupe within 15 minutes by bicycle, 17% is in another municipality; within 8 minutes by car, 23%.
Almost the whole city is losing population and only a few new areas are growing
165 of the 218 comparable AGEBs lost population between 2010 and 2020; the seven new AGEBs on the periphery total 12,563 residents.
See it on the map
What we recommend
Open public daycares where the most children live more than 15 minutes from one, and steer new housing toward the AGEBs that already have all seven services on foot and are losing population.
The proximity Guadalupe has already built is running out of residents; what it lacks is, above all, daycare.
Modeling of walking trips, analysis of equity and population loss, and cartographic storytelling · Guadalupe, Nuevo León · 2026
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