Camminabilità, perché e come misurarla: un modello e uno studio empirico di validazione della misura

Abstract

This work deals with the pedestrians’ accessibility issues, especially how the walkability is a matter of justice and how it can be measured and modeled. It is possible to divide the research product into three main areas: The first area, an introduction, deals with the pedestrian accessibility implications for the urban justice. In this sense, one of the possible points of view, whereby a walkable city is a right, is justified by the right to the city and by the capability approach. The second area, based on bibliographic research, provides an overview of the measurement methods of accessibility, with regard to its definition in respect to the justice and equity. As a justice measure, the accessibility is affected by the definition of equity, spatial equity and accessibility. Each different definition of these concepts brings to a different measurement method, formally place-based or people-based. Differently to the literature, this work has the merit to implement characteristics of both the approaches. The third area is composed of two empirical tests, to define and validate the classification model. It also integrates a wide bibliographic collection of similar studies and a series of test on the models. The main result of the experiments allows one to define the space features perceived as important in the evaluation of urban environment and what is their weight in the judgment. Starting from results of the regression model some data mining classifiers are tested. Neural Network method seems to be the best one to be affected as a walkability evaluation tool