Environmental Regeneration Integrating Soft Mobility and Green Street Networks: A Case Study in the Metropolitan Periphery of Naples

Abstract

Public space and street networks form a significant and central determinant of urban quality. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has focused their crucial importance in the reorganisation of places that are “safe” because they allow movement through cities with minimal risk of contagion. While addressing the need for social distancing, open air exercise, and mobility without use of public transport, these measures resulted in other environmental and social benefits. Living with the coronavirus pandemic has produced a series of adaptative actions, such as barring or limiting automobile traffic, thereby expanding street space for pedestrians and bicyclists, whose impact is, as yet, difficult to fathom because of their contingent, temporary nature. In this context, this case study proposes a sustainable bicycle network to inform the future, permanent street redesign. Based on topographic, morphologic, and climatic data, it evaluates a series of contiguous road sections, defining redesign capacities and critical conditions to implement sustainable interventions to manage urban runoff, mitigate of extreme heat events, expand pedestrian paths and provide a bicycle network. This holistic approach to sustainable urban design evaluation, supported by reproducible data and parameters, serves as a replicable model for the sustainable redesign of roads in other urban settings. The extent, integration, and complexity of the study engaged an interdisciplinary framework, facilitating detailed planning and design and quantified assessments of environmental outcomes.