The accessibility of public urban spaces: walkability and ergonomic aspects

Pedestrians can be ergonomically considered as workers into the socio-technical system of public urban space. Pedestrian targets can be defined as operations: the accessibility to a place characterized by services, commercial activities, enjoyment of leisure. Public space is a "universal" tool (differently from the ergonomic one), but it serves different user categories and enables different targets (movement, parking, social integration, etc..). The organization of public space should basically allow to perform users’ activities, but it has often been divided into a spatial and thematic compartments. From the twentieth century it was subservient to the dominion of the car, which strongly influences its spatial organization. The proposed study examines the public space, where users move using its organization, as a tool of accessibility to urban resources. The analysis of the urban mobility system is performed by collecting descriptive data like their dynamic load, the urban location and context information, the travel time, the climatic conditions, the physical safety, the physical environment (sound, lighting, air quality, signals, etc.). The categories of operations and their analysis allow to identify where the corrective and/or elaborative efforts should be addressed with the aim of improving accessibility, also through a GIS platform