RETHINKING PUBLIC SPACES: ACCESSIBILITY FOR ALL AS A DRIVER TO INTEGRATE MOBILITY, HEALTH AND ECOLOGICAL ISSUES

The ageing of European urban population, the increase of social and economic disparities, and the demand for maintenance of public spaces and welfare equipment foster deeper reflection on the material assets supporting citizens’ health and autonomous mobility. Recognizing the largest number of people the capability to actively contribute to their own well-being is also a matter of spatial organization of cities. In this view, taking accessibility for all as a right of citizenship helps set the reflection on sensorial/cognitive/motor (stable or temporary) disabilities within a broader frame, covering many fields of EU and UN Urban Agendas. Today, these issues become even more strategic in the light of post COVID-19 pandemic quarantine measures, stressing the importance of re-equipping urban spaces to make them walkable and usable to the largest extent of urban populations. The research PROACTIVE CITY, in progress at the University of Trieste (IT), offers inputs to this debate. In line with an approach based on testing and disseminating good practices, since 2019 its core step has been the identification of urban pilot contexts in the Italian region Friuli Venezia Giulia. Trieste and Grado were chosen as case studies, and as the locations of participatory design workshops organized with the local Municipalities and the main associations of people with disabilities. Both workshops clearly showed the need to design without barriers from the very beginning, and to adopt this as an ordinary and essential approach while conceiving any urban transformation. By taking the perspective of the most fragile people, the key issue is turning the conflicts among different mobility modes and capabilities into an opportunity to try out innovative design solutions, planning strategies and tools, addressed to integrate slow mobility with a framework of green/health/sports equipment.