Streetscape for healthy life

The road as a meeting place for public life seemed to have ended in oblivion. The urban culture had decreed its death, first with the apodictic proclamations of Le Corbusier, who in fact only thought to separate the pedestrian and vehicular flows and to create roads inside buildings and buildings in the form of streets. Then, in the cybernetic age and in the era of the celebration of "non-places", contemporary life seemed destined to remain confined in virtual squares animated by social networks or in the shopping centers. In reality, the road is still today a meeting and experimentation place, the theater of everyday life and the setting for cultural events, which has also been called back in vogue to recover sustainable and healthy lifestyles. The road continues to offer spaces for people and food for thought for urban studies so that recent research, conferences and exhibitions return to reflect on this fundamental element of the structure of the city. One of the themes at the center of the debate on contemporary public space concerns the role that it can have in influencing our spontaneous behavior, inducing an active life to produce positive effects on health, introducing physical activity as part of our daily movements. Among the lines of action identified by the administrations, pedestrianism is in first place. The incentive to a less sedentary life and to the daily practice of movement can not be encouraged only through warnings or prohibitions. The regular physical movement implies systematic strategies able to constitute networks of journeys, which support recurrent movements (home-work-services). Going back to thinking about the structure of the road, or as we say with a more fashionable Anglo-Saxon term, the streetscape, means thinking about how architecture, green areas, open spaces, the property regime, accessibility and permeability shape the urban space and how the inhabitants live it and make it vital.