Thinking about Going on Foot

Abstract

The pedestrian mobility is only a component of mobility, a phenomenon through which a society “takes possession” of her territory. Since a long time mobility has become the synonym of traffic and circulation as well as the classic engineering subject of transport planning, while already in the Athens Charter it is considered one of the four basic functions of human settlement. In the most advanced culture, the attention is paid, from the town planning point of view, to the causes of mobility and in the engineering one it has been shifted from the mobility oriented- analysis to the accessibility-based analysis. Walking integrates the urban transport system in a crucial way. But often, not only in Italy, there is confusion about the concept of pedestrian: in the classification of urban roads there is a strict separation of the uses, while transport plans and town planning ones remain separate tools. Interesting examples, also of Italian case-studies, highlight that pursuing better conditions of life in a territory asks for attention to mobility problems together with those related to the use of space. There is a need for a study which would join competences that go also beyond transports and town planning and it is necessary to understand that there is an ecological relationship between people and places, between human society and the environment of her life.