Improve Walkability: Design Strategies for the Psycho-Physical and Social Well-Being

In recent years, human healthiness and users’ well-being are extremely important for the development of contemporary society and urban quality. Well-being is indirectly influenced by the morphological- typological features of the places we live in, thus negatively or positively affecting the health of the population and the adoption of proper lifestyles. Considering these direct relationships between psycho-physical well-being and urban space, physical activity is identified as a protective factor for many chronic diseases. The project of urban outdoor spaces constitutes an opportunity to design walkable areas and pathways that can produce positive direct effects on environmental health and indirect consequences on the 'lifestyles'. This design vision can be implemented particularly inside small towns in which still exist important continuities and long-time relations between the human scale of public spaces and sense of place related to the historical/traditional infrastructural pathways. This proposal synthesizes the results of BikeFlu interdisciplinary research on two case studies in Ortona/Italy, between the unused infrastructures of historical Sangritana railway and the new green line of the so-called 'Costa dei Trabocchi' on the seacoast. The challenge is focused on the possible synergy between two design approaches for the outdoor space through a convergence between user-centred vision and universal vision. The synergic use of these visions enables a dual and no-scalar design pathway in which the project of urban outdoor spaces results through a technological/environmental complex framework of interactions. On one hand, these interactions can be physical, through the research of dimensional and sensorial relationships with which control consistency and appropriateness of the inputs emitted from the artefacts with the physiological structures of individuals. At the same time, the interactions are determined by the intangible relationships and material connections that can be established seeking the multiple degrees of correspondence and sensitivity to the context that the project can incorporate.