"Identification of promising interventions"

This essay deals with the process followed to determine interventions and measures, with regard to public space and city infrastructure design, on the project level, as promising for pedestrians and, possibly, not only for them. This issue is faced in one of the last steps of the comprehensive system approach to walking and sojourning structured in the COST Action 358 “Pedestrians’ Quality Needs” (PQN). Such approach covers the process of change aimed at improving the quality of the pedestrians’ environment. It is organized in 9 steps that consider the identification of needs and requirements, the evaluation of actual performances, compliance and satisfaction, the definition of goals, the identification of interventions, the assessment of the potential output of the changes and some recommendations. Since the determination of the actions to take can start only by the awareness of the presence of specific, real problems and of their urgency to be solved, the first part of the essay deals with possible methods to find out actual problems, of various order, and to prioritise them. The second part explains how to collect and devise solutions apt to face such problems; how the solutions can be evaluated for defining their consistency and appropriateness, and thence their success, both from the scientific and community viewpoint; how the solutions and the connected measures can be structured and chosen. All the methods suggested for the management of the design process at urban scale are based on the requirement/performance meeting approach and on the critical evaluation of the solutions as design alternatives. The third part describes briefly possible alternative solutions, organized in measures. They constitute different options among which to choose and concern various aspects of the analysed system: the pedestrians themselves, the social environment, the transport network and the physical environment in which pedestrians travel and sojourn. The propositions are above all at tactical and operational level, but the application of some measures could, in time, influence some choice at strategic level, for example the choice of transport mode, i.e. walking. Most of the described strategies and technical measures are innovative for their environmental and social side. The methodologies to determine prior areas of intervention, more appropriate fields of action, the hierarchy system of solutions and measures derive from the experiences that the author had in various European researches she was partner in, such as PROMPT, SIZE, ASI. The methods and tools outlined in the essay are useful to people with different professional expertise who, in their different roles and positions, in the public administration or as consultants, are involved in the improvement of pedestrians’ walking and sojourning conditions in the outdoor public urban spaces.