Accessibilità e coesione sociale negli spazi pubblici di transizione: il caso delle Piagge a Firenze

The Ice Age of Human Mobility experienced between 2020 and 2022 marked, on one hand, a halt to ongoing experiments in public space and, on the other, underscored the urgent need to rethink our relationship with both the city and the ways we move through it. Promoting walking and cycling is now widely recognized as a means to improve health and wellbeing while also reducing the environmental impact of everyday mobility. However, the promotion of healthy and sustainable habits must be supported by the implementation of accessible and well-integrated routes within the urban and neighborhood fabric. These interventions not only encourage sustainable travel but also foster the pleasure of dwelling and community vitality—key ingredients for developing a sense of belonging, through which space becomes place. Within this framework, the case study focuses on the co-design of a “safe” pedestrian and cycling connection between the social housing settlements in the Le Piagge neighborhood of Florence. The network proposed by the Urban Housing model (De Santis, 2023) aims to overcome the separation between housing and urban context, facilitating the transformation of social housing developments into territorial hubs that catalyze opportunities for the broader surrounding urban community, not only for their residents. Through a system of cultural and welfare services, local communities and third-sector organizations become key actors in both material and immaterial urban regeneration, reclaiming neighborhood relationships, spaces, and places of the city. This innovation in housing complements access to housing itself with a broader set of integrated services and cultural welfare, contributing to the development of urban fragments whose sustainability is shaped on a human scale—concretely experimenting with the transformation of housing from asset to service. This framework offers a heuristic lens to explore the impact of pedestrian and cycling infrastructure on daily life, and how the “relational qualities” of such spaces may foster community cohesion, sense of belonging, and well-being. It thus invites reflection on how to understand and make tangible the lived experience of space, creating environments that generate inclusion, interaction, and a genuine sense of place.