The Active City Perspective

The emergent Active Cities approach has been firstly promoted by the public health sector, and investigated through town planning, socio-educational, and physical activity perspectives. According to our interdisciplinary approach and other studies, a merging of interests is encompassed in the Active City perspective; new urban challenges are emerging and need to be tackled in integrated manners from multiple disciplines, the principal being urban planning and design. The world experiences great urbanization trends: population's progressive aging; globalization; migratory flows and other demographic, socio-economic and geopolitical transformations; modified behaviors and more sedentary lifestyles, mechanization and industrialization processes. Such trends are deeply changing not only the social context as well as people's habits and health conditions, but also the very structure of cities. The aforementioned framework represents an important health care, social and political dare, but also and especially a great urban challenge. Thus, the promotion of walkable and, more broadly, physical-activity-friendly urban environments and active lifestyles reaches several requirements: to fight the escalation of NCDs, prolonging people healthy fitness; to plan and build more sociable and livable districts; to promote walkability, active commuting and sustainable mobility; to allow children to play; to make physical activity and sport practicable within the urban public realm. The Active City model should be able to guide the practice of urban planning and design and urban regeneration towards more integrated and effective approaches, drawing within the legislation and the urbanism disciplines topics such as active and sustainable mobility; public health; urban safety and accessibility; sustainability and social inclusion. Also, certain Active City planning criteria are emerging: a revised classification of sport and physical activity infrastructures (IMPALA EU-funded project), their availability, proximity, and accessibility; an awareness of the concepts of tight and loose spaces, space and place, adaptability and flexibility, porosity, ‘egoistic’ and ‘altruistic’ physical activity; the role of citizens’ participation. The overall purpose of the various researches and design interventions that our interdisciplinary team has been developing is to better investigate the past and present connections between the fields of urbanism, public health, and PA in order to rely on a better defined framework for addressing the health epidemics and disparities of urban populations also from an Urbanism perspective, and trough a planning and design approach. In order to drive such a process, while approaching the matter with a proactive and more operative-oriented gaze, also new instruments and methodologies are being conceived and tested, trying to overcome the paradoxical lack of planning and design-oriented instruments as well as professional contributions within the Active City field: one above all, the Active City Chart.