Walkability and Rebalancing of Centralities in a City Under Reconstruction

The chapter describes a study on the redefinition of the mobility system and the settlement rebalancing of the city of L’Aquila in the final stages of reconstruction after the 2009 earthquake. In particular, it deals with the identification of the urban system’s capacity for walkability. The methodology defined divides the study into three groups of analysis on walkability: geometry/morphology, proximity, and sociality. In this chapter, the analysis process related to the geometry/morphology component will be described. The methodology applied to the study is based on the analysis of a graph of the city’s infrastructure network, composed of arcs to which the walkability parameters of the examined streets are associated. Various intrinsic characteristics of the roads were analyzed, also with the support of site surveys, to which evaluation indices were associated and reworked into a summary index. This index, associated with the geometric and morphological components of the roads, directly describes the current walkability of the roads. The objective of this information is to know the urban criticalities on active mobility and consequently, to define tools to support urban design strategies and actions to implement the pedestrian network and its performance. In the future development of the study, it is planned to conduct an analysis of the proximity and social components, the other two groups of analyses considered for walkability, which will complete the testing of the general methodology.