All-round walkability conditions to primary school in Milan

Abstract

As part of the wider debate on social justice and the right to the city, the research addresses the fundamental and everyday issue of accessibility to services, through slow mobility, for the most vulnerable populations, and highlights how certain inequalities take shape in public space. Therefore, an analysis of the accessibility of a specific and prototypical service, primary schools, is proposed in three exemplary cases located in different districts of the city of Milan, studying the accessibility at different scales and for different user profiles (in particular, a comparison was made between vulnerable and able-bodied people).

In fact, the research has chosen as privileged subjects those who have been excluded for a long time from a type of planning that mainly takes into account the needs of healthy male adults, namely people with disabilities, without excluding other types of users such as children, the elderly or pregnant women. In the urban environment, the ability to move around and enjoy public space is a right that must be guaranteed to all, by intervening in the pedestrian infrastructure, which in some cases can be restrictive due to its spatial configuration. Not only can it prevent some people from reaching places, services and social events, but it can also have a negative impact on the pure enjoyment of urban space. On the other hand, the school service, in addition to being a place of education and the first service in which a person experiences inclusion, increasingly continues to carry out "community" activities typical of a city centre, often becoming a place of sociability.

Firstly, the accessibility of the schools was analysed at the urban scale through a characterization of the pedestrian graph by a series of specific indicators, which made it possible to identify the relative 'catchment areas' within a 5, 10, 15 minute walk (highlighting how these are considerably reduced for the most vulnerable people). Subsequently, three hypothetical home-school routes were studied in more detail and at a fine-grained scale, thanks to a selection of areas differing in morphology, date of construction and spatial conformation. 

In this way, it was possible to obtain a multi-level picture of walkability in Milan and to identify the different conditions of access to school services according to the different parts of the city. It is precisely the integration of the different scales that proves to be a useful policy tool, thanks to which we can (a) think about the quality of the spaces we cross on a daily basis, (b) define more precisely the degree of accessibility of the different services (not only school services) and (c) identify the most vulnerable areas in order to intervene.