Mapping walkability. A subjective value theory approach

Abstract

The analysis of urban walkability has been extensively explored in the last decades. Despite this growing attention, there is a lack of studies attentive on how citizens' values, individual abilities and urban environment favour or hinder the propensity to walk. Hence, there is a need to explore how preferences and values of citizens vary in space in order to design walkability policies able to improve the capability set of citizens. In this perspective, the design of spatial decision tools aimed to planning public policies for the development of walkable cities needs further investigation. We propose a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method aimed to elaborate walkability decision maps for different groups of citizens that reflect their capability to walk in the urban environment. We tested the method in the city of Alghero (Italy). First, we analysed walkability under a normative model named CAWS; then we made a survey with 358 participants in order to study the driving values that influence their choice to walk and finalised to build an evaluation model attentive to individual differences. Cluster analysis was employed to group citizens into 11 groups based on their sociodemographic characteristics and preferences on spatial criteria of walkability. Finally, by integrating the GIS with the MCDA we built a set of decision maps representative of the walkability of the different groups of citizens. Results highlight the importance of citizens' values for policy design, allow the interpersonal comparison among individuals and group preferences and give new suggestions for the formulation of walkability oriented urban policies. Moreover, the results confirm the usability of the general method as a decision support tool supporting the design of urban policies.

Street walking quality of the ‘Centro’ district, Madrid

“…Pavement width plays an important role in accessibility values (Table 2), so higher accessibility values are found for major axes and lower values in the interior network. Intersection distance contributes to this effect, as this interior Fancello et al, 2020) or from geo data, such as GPS routes (e.g. Dean et al, 2020).…”

Conceptualizing Walking and Walkability in the Smart City through a Model Composite w2 Smart City Utility Index

“…While walking and walkability are frequently used concepts in academic and popular debates [39][40][41], it is important to carefully dwell on their meaning to understand what precisely is at stake and in which ways walking and walkability should be considered as imperatives in the processes of managing and governing cities. The inroads of ICT in the city space, and the gradual transformation of cities into smart cities, make this understanding even more relevant.…”

“…With regards to walkability, it needs to be stressed that the very focus on "walkability" is an outcome of a return of the urban planners' community, including developers and designers who already voiced that "cities are for walking" in the 70s imperative [35,39,40]. Indeed, rather than focusing on transportation, the key city planning imperative today is "to plan for humans, not for vehicles" [52,53,[56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71].…”

Evaluating Walkability through a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Approach: A Lisbon Case Study

“…The study of [42] presents a subjective value theory approach to map walkability. The researchers proposed an MCDA method to design walkability decision maps for different groups of pedestrians.…”