Accessibility and Mobility in Public Spaces: a sustainable challenge

Mobility and accessibility are - in different forms and meanings - strictly connected to achieve sustainability of new project interventions. At neighborhood scale, the design of public space can contribute to the sustainable mobility, creating places of quality in which slow mobility is favored. Accordingly, the research titled "Public spaces. From principles to good practice" was carried out by the author in the framework of both "Urban Maestro. New Governance Strategies for Urban Design" Horizon 2020 research project and the INU Community "Public Space", the latter coordinated by the author. The Urban Maestro Project looks at the ways European cities are being designed and financed, focusing on innovative ways of generating and implementing urban spatial quality. Among the objectives, this project has the comparison of the experiences in Europe to international practices. The Community Public Space has the objective to collect best practices of public space in Italy, starting from the Charter of Public Space, adopted during the second Biennial of Public Space held in Rome in 2013. To these ends, 30 Italian case studies were collected to identify best practices and verify the validity of the Charter. Starting from these premises, the methodology and main results of this research will be illustrated. To collect the data of the case studies the QPS-D@taC - Quality Public Space D@ta Collection - method was created. The illustration of Piazza Goldoni in Trieste, the Bike path along the Nera river in Narni, and the Railway Station square in Padova, which resolve in different way the topics of both sustainable mobility and accessibility, will complete the paper.