Local Governance for Sustainable Urban Futures: Comparing 15-Minute City Models in Milan and Bologna

The 15-minute city (15MC) has emerged as a global paradigm promoting proximity-based urban planning for sustainability, liveability, and inclusion. While widely debated in planning discourse, little attention has been paid to how this model is framed and operationalised in specific governance contexts, especially in Italy, where the concept has entered local agendas only recently. This paper investigates how two Italian cities, Milan and Bologna, adopt and interpret the 15MC paradigm through their official strategies and narratives. Using a comparative case study design, we conduct a framing analysis of municipal policy documents (2021–2025) and complement it with four semi-structured interviews with local officials. We identify how proximity is framed not only as a spatial or technical goal but as a strategic device embedded in broader urban visions. The findings show that Milan explicitly mobilises the 15MC as a governance and branding tool, combining investment schemes and symbolic narratives to promote neighbourhood revitalisation and economic innovation. Bologna, in contrast, embeds proximity within wider ecological and social justice agendas, using it as a latent framework to structure participatory and sustainability-driven policies. Rather than a standardised planning model, the 15MC emerges as a flexible and performative frame, locally adapted and incrementally implemented through diverse policy tools. This study contributes to urban studies and planning literature by demonstrating how framing analysis can reveal the strategic and discursive dimensions of policy translation, showing how global paradigms are differentially interpreted, legitimised, and operationalised in local governance ecosystems.