Potential Pedestrian Accessibility in a 20-Minute Neighborhood: A GIS-Based Case Study of a High-Density Area in Alexandria, Egypt

Worldwide, the 20-minute neighborhood has gained popularity as a promising urban planning paradigm, emphasizing active mobility and proximity for residents to access essential urban services within a short distance. This concept aims to create a utopian quality of life by reducing daily commutes. It is important to understand appropriate location-based travel time to urban services across the neighborhood/city for evaluating the accessibility and allocation of essential services. Furthermore, proponents of the concepts acknowledged that the 20-minute city paradigm should be targeted at high-density areas and low- to middle-income neighborhoods. This paper aims to explore the theme of 20-minute cities through a GIS-based methodology to evaluate pedestrian accessibility to neighborhood services based on home–service pedestrian travel times and to identify urban areas with poor services. This study assesses one component of that concept: potential pedestrian proximity to selected services in a high-density neighborhood. A GIS network-based service-area and location-allocation workflow was applied to 19 service categories using four planar distance buffers (400, 600, 800, and 1000 m) and four network walking-time thresholds (5, 10, 15, and 20 minutes). Residential-building centroids were used as unweighted origin proxies; therefore, the analysis does not estimate population-weighted accessibility. The findings identify uneven potential coverage, particularly for police stations, gyms, green open spaces, gas stations, churches, kindergartens, major bus stations, sports services, and hospitals. The paper’s contribution is to show how service-specific GIS proximity analysis, interpreted alongside observed route barriers, can support cautious and differentiated interventions in a high-density Egyptian context.