From car-oriented development to a bicycle-friendly environment. A case study in the Mugello Valley in Tuscany

In Italy, a peculiar kind of settlement, resulting from the development of road infrastructure that since the 1950s has gone hand in hand with the country's economic growth, is represented by small urban centers located along the national motorway routes, which have experienced significant development in industry, logistics, and large-scale commercial distribution without becoming a city. An emblematic case is Barberino di Mugello, a center of medieval origin with a population of 10,000 at an exit of the A1 motorway between Florence and Bologna, which has developed as a sort of archipelago of segregated monofunctional ‘islands’ in a hilly landscape, linked and separated by road infrastructure. The paper focuses on a project commissioned by the municipality of Barberino di Mugello to a research group of the University of Florence, which aims at mending the scattered urban islands by means of a bicycle network, connected to an exchange car park at the motorway exit, conceived as the new ‘urban gateway’ of Barberino. The objective of the project is twofold: promote sustainable mobility as an alternative to the car for short internal travel, and provide an opportunity to make known, through the bicycle route, the remarkable landscape resources of the area.