Despite the growing popularity of the 15-minute city in urban planning literature, land-use planning and pedestrian-space design in many mid-sized Iranian cities—Urmia included—are still handled separately, with little regard for how they might reinforce one another. This has led to an odd outcome: neighborhoods with dense service-oriented uses often report low resident satisfaction and little interest in walking. The present study explores why this happens, using a mixed (quantitative-spatial) method. Four neighborhoods with different urban fabrics—historical, central, deteriorating intermediate, and newly built—were selected in Urmia. We applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weighting indicators, GIS-based Service Area analysis for measuring actual accessibility, and questionnaires for assessing resident perceptions.

The results show that in the historic-central neighborhoods (Bazar-Imam and Kashani), although service coverage exceeds 95% within a 15‑minute walking radius, the residents' subjective scores are significantly lower than those in less accessible neighborhoods like Seyed Javad. This discrepancy points to a non-linear relationship between mixed land use and walkability; spatial qualities such as safety, visual appeal, and sidewalk continuity appear to moderate the effect. Indeed, Seyed Javad has only 15% land-use mix, but with its wide, safe pavements (averaging 4.12 out of 5), it manages to achieve the highest satisfaction score (72 out of 100). The implication for Urmia is clear: rolling out a 15-minute city model without simultaneous attention to qualitative indicators won't necessarily improve walkability—and, in fact, might undermine it by adding to traffic congestion and visual chaos.