Dear Colleagues,

Planning and design for walkable living environments represent important, useful and feasible challenges for cities and regions.

Walkable living environments are important to enable everyone—first and foremost, disadvantaged populations—to have a good quality of life.

They are also important for individual and public health, because they decrease traffic, pollution, and noise and promote healthier lifestyles.

They are important for people’s safety and security because they make urban destinations and the opportunities they present easily accessible and protected from traffic and the risk of crime. They also improve the quality of the built environment, making urban streets more livable, comfortable, pleasant and vibrant; in other words, making them an attractive component of the system of public spaces of cities.    

Walking is useful for a number of reasons: it enables individuals to effectively use the city, fulfil their needs and be independent and self-reliant; it also encourages people to interact.

Making built environments walkable is possible and feasible by means of small, low-cost interventions with immediate effects on everyday life.

When walking extends beyond the boundaries of a compact city, it allows people to experience a new relationship with the surrounding landscape and acts as a driver for the rediscovery and regeneration of marginal areas.

To reap these benefits and to enable many other direct and indirect effects to take place, the implementation of urban policies and projects fostering walkability represents an effective opportunity for liveability to be improved in cities.

This Special Issue regarding walkable cities and territories is directed to researchers and practitioners from different disciplines and domains interested in advancing knowledge and action around the incorporation of walkability concerns in urban planning and design practice. It aims to promote a cross-sectorial exchange on how urban environments can effectively be made more liveable, sustainable, healthy and equitable.

Scholars are invited to discuss the multiple opportunities an approach oriented towards “active accessibility” can bring about to improve the urban quality of life in terms of the physical improvement of public space, the activation and strengthening of links, functionalities and social relationships between urban elements and people, the extension of people’s independence in “using” the city as well as in terms of benefits to individual and collective well-being.

This debate on walkable cities is intended also as a place to systematise technical knowledge together with experiences in practice. The recognition of the multiple dimensions and operational applications of walkability can, on the one hand, support scholars and practitioners in the revision of methods for the evaluation of the quality of life in cities from the point of view of pedestrians, and can, on the other hand, provide support in the formulation of urban policies and projects tailored to pedestrian needs and behaviours, making planning and decision-making processes more effective.

Prof. Dr. Beniamino Murgante
Prof. Dr. Ivan Blecic
Dr. Tanja Congiu
Guest Editors

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• multiple facets and operational applications of walkability concept in integrated land use and transport planning
• walkability, urban capabilities and quality of life
• urban walkability and public health
• use of walkability measures and evaluation methods as decision-making support systems
• “smart” innovations in the acquisition of data and use of intelligent systems for the extraction and organization of structured set of information
• shared protocols for the comparison of different urban walkability measures
• the objective and subjective dimensions of urban walkability
• walkability over the boundaries of the compact city
• walkability of spatial settings with diverse gradient of urbanization