Remote Working and Using the Services of the 15-Minute City. An Analytical Model Based on Data Collected in Milan

Giampaolo Nuvolati; Anne-Iris Romens

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/20720

Authors

Giampaolo Nuvolati Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6403-3456

Giampaolo Nuvolati is Full Professor of Sociology of Environment and Territory at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy), where he teaches Urban Sociology. At the same University, he was President of the Master’s Course in Sociology, and in October 2015 he was elected director of the Department of Sociology and Social Research. He has directed several studies on the quality of urban life, working in particular at the University of Mannheim–MZES from 1994 to 1996 with a fellowship of the European Community, and successively participating in various international research projects concerning the development of social indicators and urban requalification. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of ISQOLS (The International Society for the Quality-of-Life Studies), where he holds the position of Vice-President for Academic Affairs and is the coordinator of the scientific committee of AIQUAV (Italian Association of Studies on the Quality of Life). He is a member of the Editorial Board of several national and international journals, including: Social Indicators Research and Applied Research in Quality of Life. His main themes of interest concern the quality of urban life, housing, conflicts between metropolitan and non-resident populations, flânerie as a method for urban exploration, and sociological research.
Anne-Iris Romens Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Milano-Bicocca https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0860-4875

Anne-Iris Romens (PhD) is a Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy). She holds a PhD in Social Sciences (University of Padua, Italy), a European Master’s degree in Human Rights (E.Ma at the EIUC in Venice, Italy), and a Master’s degree in Political Sciences (Sciences Po Strasbourg, France). She has four years of experience as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Italian academia and over three years of professional experience as a Research Assistant at the Council of Europe. She has also worked and volunteered for institutions and NGOs in Italy, Colombia, France, and Brazil. Her research interests regard migration, care, ageing, labour, industrial relations, and remote work, analysed from an intersectional and decolonial perspective.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/20720

Keywords:

15-Minute City, convenience services, neighbourhood, proximity, remote work

Abstract

The essay aims to explore the extent to which remote work fosters the 15-Minute City by increasing the use of local services. It proposes a model of analysis to study the impact of remote work on the use of services that focuses on two variables: a) the use of services in the neighbourhood; and b) the frequency with which workers perform their job remotely. Then, the contribution tests the model by referring to empirical data collected in the Milan area that consisted of a Survey developed in 2022, after the pandemic, with 285 remote workers of the quaternary sector. Our analysis highlights that remote work is mainly being performed at home and fosters the use of supply and leisure services in the neighbourhood, which ultimately encourages the development of the 15-Minute City. Although a high frequency of remote work relates to a higher propensity to use neighbourhood services, a significant group of full-time remote workers do not use services closer to their homes, which underlines the need to take into account other variables to understand the choice to use proximity services or not.

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Remote Working and Using the Services of the 15-Minute City. An Analytical Model Based on Data Collected in Milan

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