Accessibility of urban spaces: analysis and solutions to make sustainable historical towns

The historical and cultural heritage represents important elements of interest and attractiveness both for Italian citizen and European and World citizen. For social and cultural changes the European population is getting older and it is increasing the number of people that, excluded from work processes, could travel for cultural interests and pleasure. But now, also people with disabilities use to travel, in order to have a complete life and visit different places. For these reasons cultural tourism represents an important feature of tourism in Italy. Therefore city councilors and cultural and architectural heritage administrators should give more attention to accessibility and usability issues referring to the whole fabric of the city and not merely to the buildings. In particular small and medium Italian historical cities are characterized by diffuse cultural heritage. In many Italian cities there is not a singular element of tourist attraction but the whole city centre represents the element of tourist attraction. The applied research surveyed the accessibility and usability level of paths, streets and squares in the city centre of some Italian towns. In particular the attention was focused on those spaces and building that for their cultural and historical value are the main elements for the cities. It was created a point system evaluation tool that can be objectively detected and surveyed. This evaluation method allows the subsequent determination of three different accessibility levels (high, medium, low). Concluding the research, different maps of the accessibility were developed in order to show the different levels of accessibility of the historical city centres. These thematic maps can be used for touristic information and also for defining the strategies for interventions to realize more accessible towns. In one study – case the developed research also shows some interventions of removing architectural and sensorial barriers. In the research, parameters to evaluate accessibility and usability level of urban spaces were identified. This methodology could be used not only in tourist field but also in other different fields. The checklist used to evaluate accessibility can be tested also for the mapping of architectural and sensory barriers in the city as well as a tool to define intervention priorities in order to improve accessibility and usability level.