The 15-minute city has emerged as a significant approach in urban planning literature for reconfiguring the relationship between time, space, and access to everyday needs. This study aims to identify and reinterpret the components of the 15-minute city within the spatial and functional context of dense metropolitan areas. The research adopts a qualitative methodology based on an exploratory literature review, thematic and conceptual refinement, analytical screening, and thematic analysis. In the initial stage, more than 200 scholarly and policy-oriented articles, reports, and documents were examined. Following several stages of refinement, 15 studies were selected for in-depth analysis and thematic extraction. These studies were not treated as a statistical sample of the overall body of literature; rather, they constituted the analytical corpus of the research. The findings indicate that human-scale design, carbon reduction, proximity, and walkability are among the most frequently identified components in the selected studies, whereas components such as digitalization, smart transportation, and local and extra-local connectivity receive comparatively limited attention. The analysis demonstrates that the realization of the 15-minute city cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of proximity or the temporal distance to services. Instead, the quality of accessibility, social conditions, the performance of mobility networks, and the relationship between the local scale and the broader urban structure must also be taken into consideration. Accordingly, this study proposes reconceptualizing the 15-minute city from a predominantly distance-based model into an approach for organizing feasible, multiscalar accessibility in dense metropolitan areas—an approach in which local accessibility is preserved while being considered in conjunction with the wider urban network and complementary mechanisms of access, including digital and transportation capacities.