Methods of planning accessibility and safety of the urban environment. The case of the city of Pisa.

The issue of the control, monitoring and overcoming of the so-called “architectural barriers” at urban scale is certainly one of the central themes in the context of social integration policies. Moreover, in a city with a strong tourist value, guaranteeing a network of services, opportunities and hospitable urban spaces to all users (in all the conditions that, naturally, each individual goes through during his or her life season) means increasing the economic capacity of the city itself. The contribution illustrates the activities carried out in the context of overcoming architectural barriers carried out by the municipal administration of the city of Pisa. The municipal administration has implemented an accessibility plan that has indicated the critical issues, priorities and types of intervention needed to solve or mitigate the problems identified. The plan was implemented in a participatory way with the contribution of associations of the disabled, the functional sectors of municipal housing, urban planning and tourism coordinated by the provincial "Health Society". The paper describes the work phases, the collection methods, the evaluation methods and the planning methods of the interventions, the tools used to manage the data, from the survey phase to their use to define information databases for citizens and tourists. The plan was managed at the administrative level by a working group that followed, during more than 6 years of activity, the implementation of the works to overcome or mitigate the problems identified. As indicated in the plan, the works concerned both the open spaces (streets, squares, parks), the buildings (museums, administrative buildings, schools) and the services (transport, information systems) with the objective of guaranteeing a homogeneous network of services and equipment accessible and usable in safety.