Accessibility and Walkability represent, today, some of the most striking challenges contemporary cities are facing, particularly in light of the goals from UN Agenda 2030, aimed at a sustainable city, and particularly in terms of a livable, healthy and inclusive city. This can be also performed thanks to a set of high quality public services and a set of important and central services and infrastructures. These principles, however, are constrained by an overall, general fragmentation affecting many urban areas, particularly as an outcome of the vehicular accessibility needs. Scholars have debated through the years on the nature of cities and on the preference for centrality of services compared to the distribution of services towards dispersed neighborhood units. Recently, a need for a wider, minimum set of services that is easily reachable to most citizens is filling the scholars and city mayors’ agendas in order to improve urban performances. This is also coupled with a huge surge in the heritage of abandoned urban items coming from previous periods of time and alternative uses. The aim of this research is to evaluate the role of abandoned urban assets—particularly big-size buildings and compounds and their areas—to facilitate the implementation of the concept of a 15-minute city, a city that is capable of granting a wider social equality and access to main urban services to citizens and city users. To do this, we developed a set of indexes, capable of detecting porosity, crossing and attractiveness. This latter index in particular represents a combined index that can be used to improve the accessibility of pedestrians in urban central locations. In the present research, we decided to limit the analysis to a subset of disused public buildings in the historic center of a sample city, as Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy). This was done in order to understand if and in which terms they can contribute, after their redevelopment, to the development of the 15-minute city, as well as reducing the “enclave–effect: they are, at present, playing in the historic urban fabric.

Spatial planning and territorial promotion can benefit largely from the application of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) at different scales. From knowledge acquisition to management and planning, their role in building an image of the territory, and constantly updating it to the benefit of users and planners, is of paramount importance. Institutional channels, together with social networks, are the means by which both a local community and a wider community of users share experiences and perceptions. ICTs are therefore strategic in supporting and promoting a sustainable tourism development of territories. Data and information aggregators as dashboards represent examples of decision support systems where digital data are organized and processed to produce an information output. The present paper is part of a wider research, related to the valorization of a former mining area in the Sulcis-Iglesiente area (Sardinia, Italy), where the extraction activity has left the place to abandonment, and only recently to tourism, stressing the concept of slow tourism. Such new opportunity has been launched with the Santa Barbara Walk (SBW), an ancient mining route currently trying to consolidate as a tourism attraction area. Such a territory is in constant transition with unique characters of anthropic and naturalistic characterization, setting itself as a green infrastructure, capable also of attracting a wide community of regional and extra-regional users. However, its digital network—consisting of intangible infrastructure and flows—is fragmented in terms of policies and contents. Additionally, a state of disorganization in slow tourism promotion activities can be observed. To implement the SBW capabilities, the present paper aims to develop a proposal for the framework of a circular dashboard applied to the SBW. In particular, we implement a set of indicators of performance of the SBW for the organization of information on the walk’s main characters, to facilitate a shared governance and an effective tourism promotion. The SBW is recognized as a network connecting the main points of interest preferred by the slow tourism (This paper is based on the Research project TSULKI—Tourism and Sustainability in the Sulcis (Sardinia-Italy)—and on the agreement protocol between DICAAR Department of Cagliari University and Foundation of the Santa Barbara Walk, signed in December 2018).

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Accessibility and urban walkability are the cornerstones of urban policies for the contemporary city, which needs to be oriented towards sustainable development principles and models. Such aims are included in the objectives of the 2030 Agenda, as well as in the ambitious objectives of the ‘European Green Deal’. These concepts are closely linked to the paradigm of a sustainable city—livable, healthy and inclusive—based on a system of high-quality public spaces and on a network of services and infrastructures, both tangible and intangible, capable of strengthening and building new social, economic and environmental relationships. It is necessary to recognize potential opportunities for connection and permeability in consolidated urban environments. These are very often fragmented and are characterized by enclaves of very different kinds. Ghettoes and gated communities, old industrial plants and military installations and facilities, to cite a few, represent examples of cases where closures on urban fabrics are realized, impeding full walkability and accessibility. Within such a framework, the present research is aimed at focusing on a particular set of enclaves, such as those represented by the military sites being reconfigured to civilian use, a phenomenon that characterizes many urban areas in the world; in Europe; and in Italy, in particular, given the recent history and the Cold War infrastructure heritage. In such a sense, the city of Cagliari (Sardinia Island, Italy) represents an interesting case study as it is characterized by the presence of a series of military complexes; real ‘enclaves’ influencing the proximity connections; and, more generally, walkability. Building on previous research and analysis of policies and projects aimed at reintroducing, even partially, this military asset into civilian life (Green Barracks Project (GBP)-2019), this paper proposes and applies a methodology to evaluate the effects of urban regeneration on walkability in a flexible network logic, oriented to the ‘15 min city’ model or, more generally, to the renewed, inclusive, safe “city of proximity”, resilient and sustainable.

The paper addresses the issue of the concurrent use of coastal areas for military training and civil activities, namely tourism. In the paper, starting from the consideration of publicly owned assets as ‘semi-commons’, we propose a method based on the comparison of planning instruments related to the different uses, and try to model them in a grid, where different weights and degrees of evaluation can be considered, in order to promote, rather than blocking, possible activities, compatible with concurrent use. The military areas in Sardinia (region and island, Italy) are around 234 km2, which constitutes 60% of the national surface affected by military easements. This situation is due to its geographic position, considered centrality in the Mediterranean for strategic reasons. This contribution evaluates the performance of the Local Coastline Plan (LCP) and the Site management plan of Community Interest (SCI) in conditions of military constraint. The case study is the municipality of Villaputzu South Sardinia, Italy), where an important coastal military easement and the use of the coast for recreational tourism purposes coexist together through specific planning, a consequence of institutional agreements between the Municipal Administration of Villaputzu and the Ministry of Defense. The idea is considering the concurrent possible land uses guaranteed by the different planning instruments, instead of focusing, as it is generally the rule, on the sum of constraints provided by the laws. The local coastline plan has been identified as the ideal planning tool, which addresses the co-existence of apparently opposite land uses and interests, as those expressed by the local municipal planning and those expressed by the military. An evaluation of the congruence of the specific objectives of the LCP and SCI shows how their combined action favors the environmental enhancement of Sardinia, contributing to the formation of ecosystem services, even in particular conditions arising from military easements. These are sites that evolve from ‘anticommons’ to ‘semicommons’. In fact, the military release process in Sardinia, together with the promiscuous military and civil use, activates unique governance policies of their kind that find a significant field of application in Sardinia to guarantee sustainable renewal of economic development of the ‘semi-commons’ awaiting to become ‘commons’.