Walkability and soft mobility propensity: a research on two Italian urban neighbourhoods

ABSTRACT

The article explores the concept of walkability in urban neighborhoods, providing a way to calculate an objective walkability index (WI), based on five constructs related to the urban environment (such as population density, land use mix, connectivity, proximity to services and greenness) and a subjective soft mobility index (SMI), based on survey methods. The study has been conducted analyzing two neighborhoods of the city of Milan, with strong socio-spatial differences. A logistic regression has been run to explore the association among WI index, controlled by sociodemographic variables, and the SMI index. The outcomes show on the one hand different levels of WI and SMI, as hypothesized, but the association among the indexes seem to be very weak; on the other hand the effect provided by sociodemographic variables appears stronger, such as the length of residency.

KEYWORDS:

• Walkability
• soft mobility
• travel behavior
• urban environment
• milan

Declarations of interest

none

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The optimal option would have been that of surveying the local population to build a data-based evaluation of the level of relevance of services, as done by (Perchoux et al. 2019) but such a study was not possible in our case due to lack of resources.

2. For example some services where considered as rarely accessed (like sports activities)

3. Giving lower relevance to high level services like hospitals and universities allow not to have biased measured due to the presence of rare activities.

4. We must specify that even if more detailed than the Corine dataset, the DUSAF archive cannot distinguish those contexts in which uses are mixed. This is the case in which local shops are located at the base floor of the residential buildings. The lack of available data on such a detailed information forced us to consider a rougher level of distinction.