Research Plan · Regenerative Infrastructure · 2024–ongoing

Living15 NanoLab:
the 15-minute city as engineering problem

The 15-minute city is not a utopia. It is an engineering problem — and a research question. Living15 investigates what it would actually take to build a local ecosystem capable of sustaining modern life, producing what it needs, and regenerating what it uses.

Active · Pilot design phase
The Problem

Why cities are not yet systems

The 15-minute city concept — every daily need reachable within 15 minutes on foot or by bicycle — has been adopted as urban planning rhetoric in dozens of cities. But rhetoric and implementation are different things.

The missing element is not political will or design ambition. It is measurement. No existing framework can tell a neighbourhood whether it is genuinely self-sustaining, trending toward self-sufficiency, or merely comfortable. Without measurement, there is no feedback loop — and without a feedback loop, there is no system.

The research question: What are the minimum measurable conditions under which a defined urban area can be called a genuine 15-minute ecosystem — and how do those conditions interact with each other across the five GoHalve footprint dimensions?

The GoHalve Framework

Five footprint dimensions

Living15 is the urban implementation of the GoHalve methodology — a framework for measuring and halving humanity's footprint across five interconnected dimensions.

💨
Carbon footprint
💧
Water footprint
🌱
Land use
♻️
Material flows
⚡
Energy systems

The Living15 NanoLab applies this framework at neighbourhood scale — testing which combinations of spatial design, resource systems, and community structure are necessary and sufficient to move a defined area toward genuine local sufficiency.

Hypotheses

What we are testing

H1 — Threshold interdependence
Progress in any single GoHalve dimension below a threshold level in the other dimensions produces no systemic change — the five dimensions are interdependent in a non-linear way. A neighbourhood that excels in energy but ignores water will not become a 15-minute ecosystem regardless of energy investment.
H2 — Social infrastructure as prerequisite
Physical infrastructure changes (transit, land use, energy systems) are necessary but not sufficient for 15-minute ecosystem formation. Social infrastructure — the density and quality of local relationships and community institutions — is a structural prerequisite that physical design alone cannot substitute.
H3 — Measurement changes behaviour
Neighbourhoods with access to real-time GoHalve footprint data will show measurably different resource use patterns than comparable areas without such data — independent of any other intervention. Transparency is itself a systemic intervention.
Methodology

The NanoLab approach

Budapest VII. pilot
Equora Spaces (Barcsay utca, Budapest VII.) serves as the physical anchor of the first Living15 NanoLab. The surrounding neighbourhood provides the research context — a dense, mixed-use urban area with existing community infrastructure and measurable resource flows.
GoHalve measurement protocol
The HALVE framework defines the measurement methodology: role-based certification, five footprint categories, and a scoring system that can be applied at individual, household, and neighbourhood level. IoT sensing via EquoraVault provides the real-time data layer.
Comparative case design
The pilot will be compared against at least two comparable Budapest neighbourhoods without the Living15 intervention — one with similar physical characteristics, one with similar demographic characteristics. This allows isolation of the Living15 effect from pre-existing neighbourhood conditions.
Connection to EquoraVault
EquoraVault's IoT sensing network and the UNA/NOVA/EVA token mechanics provide the technical infrastructure for real-time footprint measurement. The Living15 NanoLab is the first live deployment of EquoraVault's measurement capabilities in an urban context.
Timeline

Research roadmap

2024–2025
Framework development. GoHalve methodology formalized. HALVE scoring system designed. Living15 concept developed in partnership with Paul Hawken's Regeneration framework.
2026 Q3–Q4
Pilot design. Budapest VII. NanoLab site selection and baseline measurement. GoHalve initial assessment. EquoraVault sensor deployment planning.
2027 Q1–Q2
Active measurement. 6-month pilot with real-time GoHalve data. Comparative data collection from control neighbourhoods. First interim results.
2027 Q3+
Publication and scale. Working paper on Zenodo. Methodology published as open-source toolkit for other neighbourhoods. Replication protocol developed for other European cities.
Method & Scope

How this page was produced

Trilith Method™ · Research Card
Programme status
Active · Pilot design phase
Machine contributionI
Literature discovery and synthesis, candidate identification, computational modelling, and first drafts of this page. Volume and speed are the machine's contribution; none of it is treated as verified on its own.
VerificationII
Claims traced to primary sources rather than to summaries of them. Contested claims run through assert–refute–adjudicate across independent model families. Errors found after publication are corrected on this page with their date.
Human governanceIII
Problem selection, the evidentiary bar, and the decision to publish rest with Pölö (László Papp), EQUORA Institute, who holds editorial responsibility for this page.
Evidence basis
Stated in the Methodology section, per component. Where a source is a preprint, a pilot study, a single trial or a modelled estimate, the page says so at the point of use.
Version
v1.0 · 2026-06-27
Method
Trilith Method™ framework · how the method is being tested
What this page is

This is a research plan rather than a result. It sets out what the programme intends to test, on what basis, and what would count as failure. Parts of it will turn out to be wrong; where that happens, the correction is recorded here with its date instead of being quietly removed.

Work by third parties is attributed to its sources and described at the confidence its evidence supports. Nothing on this page should be read as professional advice in the programme's domain, and nothing here has been peer reviewed unless a specific publication is cited as such.

Research Lead

Principal investigator

Pölö (László Papp) — Founder, EQUORA Institute. The Living15 NanoLab is developed in collaboration with the GoHalve methodology team. Neighbourhoods, municipalities, or organisations interested in participating in the research or replicating the NanoLab approach: lpapp@equora.institute