Milan's 15-Minute City Policy: A Spatial Equity Analysis of Urban Policy Interventions Across Vulnerable Neighbourhoods

The 15-minute city model promises accessible urban living, but its success depends on the equitable distribution of infrastructure across all neighbourhoods — not just well-served ones. This working paper presents an independent spatial equity audit of Milan's 15-minute city strategy, extending the author's prior thesis research at Politecnico di Milano through a quantitative, data-driven approach. Where the thesis examined the conceptual and policy dimensions of the framework, this paper operationalises those questions empirically: using Python to programmatically collect, process, and visualise official open data from the Comune di Milano, ISTAT, and OpenStreetMap, and translating the results into an interactive public dashboard. Four core policy instruments are examined: The MI15 neighbourhood initiative, Zone 30, Biciplan, and Piazze Aperte are selected because they represent Milan's primary physical levers for 15-minute city delivery. The study maps 1,710 spatial interventions, representing an estimated €70.4 million in proxy-valued investment, across Milan's 88 Nuclei di Identità Locale (NILs). A 7-dimension Vulnerability Index and a 12-axis Neighbourhood Needs Assessment Index are constructed from census and open data sources to evaluate whether investment is reaching the neighbourhoods that need it most. The analysis reveals an unintended funding inversion: medium-vulnerability areas absorb 53% of tracked investment while high-vulnerability neighbourhoods receive only 33% of deployed capital, despite representing 64.8% of the city. Needs-match scoring using cosine similarity shows that 89.5% of NILs have investment profiles misaligned with their local need profiles, and the Budget Equity Ratio of 32.6% confirms that capital deployment is regressive relative to demonstrated need. NILs such as Muggiano (Vulnerability Index 9.1/10) and Roserio (8.1/10) receive zero programme investment despite acute deprivation. The findings are visualised through an interactive open-data dashboard published alongside this paper, offering planners and civic stakeholders a transparent, updatable tool to monitor spatial equity and guide future investment allocation. Keywords: 15-Minute City, Spatial Equity, Urban Policy, Milan, Open Data, Proxy Valuation, Vulnerability Index.