Abstract
Cities occupy only about 3% of the Earth’s surface area, but half of the global population lives in them. The high population density in urban areas requires special actions to make these areas develop sustainably. One of the greatest challenges of the modern world is to organize urban spaces in a way to make them attractive, safe and friendly to people living in cities. This can be managed with the help of a number of indicators, one of which is walkability. Of course, the most complete analyses are based on spatial data, and the easiest way to implement them is using GIS tools. Therefore, the goal of the paper is to present a new approach for measuring walkability, which is based on density maps of specific urban functions and networks of generally accessible pavements and paths. The method is implemented using open-source data. Density values are interpolated from point data (urban objects featuring specific functions) and polygons (pedestrian infrastructure) using Kernel Density and Line Density tools in GIS. The obtained values allow the calculation of a synthetic indicator taking into account the access by means of pedestrian infrastructure to public transport stops, parks and recreation areas, various attractions, shops and services. The proposed method was applied to calculate the walkability for Kraków (the second largest city in Poland). The greatest value of walkability was obtained for the Main Square (central part of the Old Town). The least accessible to pedestrians are, on the other hand, areas located on the outskirts of the city, which are intended for extensive industrial areas, single-family housing or large green areas.
Highlights
Sustainable development combines three basic dimensions, namely social, economic and environmental sustainability, and has been generally defined in the seminal Brundtland Report as the kind of development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [1]
According to UN forecasts, 60% of people globally will live in urban areas by 2030, and the urban population will reach over 6 billion by 2045 [2,3], creating great challenges for and barriers to sustainable development
Walkability research methods, especially in the context of city design, can be divided into four groups: (i) methods based on surveys, interviews and questionnaires; (ii) direct audit tools or stock-taking, which are most often conducted by appropriately trained observers [30,31]; (iii) GIS tools [13,32]; and (iv) mixed methods, which are a combination of information from surveys or inventory with data obtained from direct measurements or from secondary data sources [18]
Summary
Sustainable development combines three basic dimensions, namely social, economic and environmental sustainability, and has been generally defined in the seminal Brundtland Report as the kind of development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” [1]. One of them was developed during the URBAN 21 conference, which describes it as “a process leading to the improvement of the quality of life in the city, including ecological, cultural, political, institutional, social and economic elements, without burdening future generations. This burden is the result of a decrease in the stock of natural capital and an increasing local public debt” [5]. Keiner [6] focuses on the local community and its needs, creating a definition of a sustainable society, and explains that sustainable urban development implies a balance between the needs of the population and the existence of specific resources, while limiting the negative impact on the environment
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