Planning and Designing Walkable Cities: A Smart Approach

Abstract

Walking may be considered one of the most sustainable and democratic ways of travelling within a city, thus providing benefits not only to pedestrians but also to the urban environment. Beside, walking is also one of the means of transport most likely subjected to factors outside an individual's control, like social or physical abilities to walk and the presence of comfortable and safe street infrastructures and services. Therefore improving urban conditions provided to pedestrians has positive impacts on walkability. At the same time technological solutions and innovations have the power to encourage and support people to walk by overcoming immaterial barriers due to a lack of information or boring travel and to gain data to understand how and where people travel. Merging these two dimension into a unique approach can drastically improve accessibility, attractiveness, safety, comfort and security of urban spaces. In this context, this paper aims to draw a more multifaceted context for walkability, where new technologies assume a key role for introducing new approaches to pedestrian paths planning and design and thus for enhancing this mode of transport. Indeed, by combining more traditional spatial-based and perceptual analysis of the urban environment with technological applications and social media exploitation there will be room to better support the decision on and to enhance satisfaction of walking as well as to easier plan and design more walkable cities.

Investigating learning and diffusion strategies for sustainable mobility

“…This would create a learning mechanism that could positively influence sustainability policy implementation. This is in line with the idea of Smart Cities (Conticelli et al, 2018) and sustainable urban development. The authors suggest that Smart Cities should further be evaluated by whether 3 Investigating learning and diffusion strategies they pay attention to social capital, by aiming to achieve social inclusion and utilize their infrastructure to improve their development by facing public issues raised by its people through information technology and cooperation of its citizens.…”

Smart Pedestrian Network: An Integrated Conceptual Model for Improving Walkability

“…Densities are usually analysed by developing ratios and indexes. Diversity expresses the degree to which there is a mix of land uses within an area [46]. Mixed land use is found to be one of the most correlated characteristics with utilitarian walking [42,45].…”

From urban planning techniques to 15-minute neighbourhoods. A theoretical framework and GIS-based analysis of pedestrian accessibility to public services

“…Similarly, the issue of analysing pedestrian characteristics of a neighbourhood or, more generally, of an urban area can refer to established studies that allow sophisticated analysis of walkability levels. Several walkability indices and measures are available in the literature, generally based on urban form characteristics such as density, land use mix and road connectivity (Conticelli et al, 2018;Garau et al, 2020). These analyses are mainly based on assessments made through GIS applications and geoprocessing tools that process different data sets, allowing the evaluation of spatial conditions of walkability along the pedestrian network (Rossetti et al, 2020;Carpentieri et al, 2019;Gargiulo et al, 2021;Mezoued et al, 2021).…”