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Advanced urban and transport planning activities are shifting towards sustainable urban mobility solutions and walkability (Buhrmann, Wefering and Rupprecht, 2019), namely referring to how friendly the urban environment is for walking in terms of proximity service availability (i.e.,15-min city), street connectivity, comfort of public spaces, and road safety. Although traditional approaches tend to focus on the spatial dimension, individual characteristics of city users are found to have a significant impact on the perceived level of walkability. In particular, the measures currently in place do not sufficiently consider population groups in vulnerable situations (i.e.,SDG 11.2-Sustainable Transport for All) (United Nations, 2016), including women. The research project ‘STEP UP - Walkability for Women in Milan' (awarded by Fondazione Cariplo under the call “INEQUALITIES RESEARCH” - Grant No. 2022-1643, focuses on the needs and expectations of women while walking. As highlighted by Golan et al. (2019), women experience the city differently than men, in part because they are more concerned with security issues related to aggression and harassment. These constraints take the form of precautionary or avoidance behaviors due to fear of violence, perception of risk, and sense of vulnerability, as a major inhibitor of mobility for women in public spaces especially at nighttime. STEP UP aims to assess the level of walkability for women focusing on the case study of Milan, Italy. First, a thematic literature review will be conducted on the most relevant scientific contributions and policy guidelines about this topic. The results of the literature review will be exploited to select a series of relevant geolocated datasets, which will be retrieved, sorted, and filtered from open data repositories and geoportals. Data regarding the perceived level of safety of women while walking will be collected through ‘Wher' - a route planner application operated by Walk21 Foundation. All these gender-disaggregated data sets will be analyzed through GIS-Geographic Information Systems to design a multi-layer map of Milan focused on several walkability criteria, which will be then validated through survey questionnaires and focus groups. The results of the project will help to identify challenging areas or neighborhoods in the city of Milan, which can serve as samples of analysis to develop a set of policy recommendations aimed at enhancing the level of walkability for women in cities. References Buhrmann, S., Wefering, F., Rupprecht, S. (2019).Guidelines for Developing and implementing a sustainable urban mobility plan – 2nd edition. Rupprecht Consult-Forschung und Beratung GmbH. Available at:https://www.eltis.org/mobility-plans/sump-guidelines Golan, Y., Wilkinson, N., Henderson, J.M., and Weverka, A. (2019). Gendered walkability: Building a daytime walkability index for women.Journal of Transport and Land Use, 12(1).https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.2019.1472 United Nations (2016).Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. United Nations Secretariat. Available at:https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

In the Milan experience, Covid-19 emergency crucial issues were already hidden weaknesses of the city and its region: the limited capacity of transit transport, roads and public spaces, with crowding problems for both work and leisure. The challenge is to regenerate the competitive “human measure” of Milan, based on its unique relationship between public spaces and mobility, overcoming its health risk. The report raises a question on the established transit-oriented development approach, focusing on spaces “in between” and not only on nodes and networks. The traditional “invariants” welcome changes: the spatial structure of the public realm becomes a platform for ever-changing mobility and services, providing quality of life for communities, users and tourists. With this respect, streets represent by far the most strategic asset of the urban public realm. They can be reshaped in resilient infrastructure capable to respond to new forms of mobility based on a renewed Mobility-as-A-Service paradigm, as final result of different travel behaviors of the post pandemic scenario, among which an expected reduction of the overall “mobility consumption” (space) and new temporal urban rhythms (time). To this end, short-term and responsive planning becomes a crucial opportunity to enable rapidly deployed responses, through an extensive use of new analytical tools based on Open and Big data analytics and computer-based simulations., TeMA - Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2020: Special Issue. Covid-19 vs City-20

Urbanization represents a huge opportunity for computer applications enabling cities to be managed more efficiently while, at the same time, improving the life quality of their citizens. One of the potential application of this kind of systems is a bottom-up evaluation of the level of walkability of the city (namely the level of usefulness, comfort, safety and attractiveness of an urban area for walking). This is based on the usage of data from social media for the computation of structured indicators describing the actual usage of areas by pedestrians. This paper will present an experimentation of analysis of data about the city of Milano (Italy) acquired from Flickr and Foursquare. The over 500 thousand points, which represent the photos and the POIs collected from the above mentioned social meda, were clustered through an iterative approach based on the DBSCAN algorithm, in order to achieve homogeneous areas defined by the actual activity of inhabitants and tourists rather than by a top down administrative procedure and to supply useful indications on the level of walkability of the city of Milan., Pre-print of a paper presented at the 12th International Conference on Traffic and Granular Flow - TGF 2017, 19-22 July 2017, Washington DC, USA (2017)

The dynamics of agent-based systems provide a framework to face the complexity of pedestrian-vehicle interactions in future cities, in which the compliance to traffic norms plays a fundamental role. The data of an observation performed at a non-signalized intersection are presented to provide useful insights for supporting the future development of agent-based models. Results focus on drivers' compliance to crossing pedestrians, describing potentially conflictual interactions among heterogeneous agents. The discussion closes with the potential applications of the collected data set for modelling the phenomenon., Pre-print of a paper presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Agent-based modelling of urban systems - ABMUS 2017, at the 16th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - AAMAS 2017, 8-12 May 2017, Sao Paulo, Brazil (in press, 2017)

Environmental, demographical and psychological factors have a demonstrated impact on risky crossing behaviour. In this work we focus on the potential influence of social factors on the considered phenomenon (i.e. group crossing decision). We present the results of a video-recorded observation about the crossing behaviour of singles and dyads at non-signalized intersections. Results showed that crossing behaviour is characterized by three distinct phases: (i) approaching, (ii) appraising (decision making) and (iii) crossing. Dyads walk slower than single pedestrians in all phases. The crossing behaviour of dyads is characterized by the emergence of a leader who takes the decision to cross first, followed by the companion. However, there is no difference between the accepted safety gap of singles and dyads. Understanding factors influencing the crossing decision of social groups represents an important result supporting the development of agent-based simulations of pedestrian-vehicle interactions., Pre-print of a paper presented at the 12th International Conference on Traffic and Granular Flow - TGF 2017, 19-22 July 2017, Washington DC, USA (2017)

The calibration and validation of pedestrian simulations require the acquisition of empirical evidences of human behaviour. The current work presents the results of an experiment focused on the potentially combined effect of counter flow and grouping on pedestrian dynamics. In particular, we focused on: (i) four different configurations of flow ratio (the rate between the minor flow and the total flow in bidirectional scenarios); (ii) dyads, as the most frequently observed and basic social groups of crowds. Results showed that the increase of flow ratio negatively impacted the speed of pedestrians. Dyads walked significantly slower than singletons, due to the difficulty in movement coordination among group members (proxemics) in case of counter flow. The collected results represent an useful contribution towards the validation of pedestrian simulations., Comment: Pre-print of a paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED2016), Hefei, China - Oct 17-21, 2016

Recent crowd disasters highlight the importance of properly planning and designing large urban events and public spaces to enhance the safety of people in a crowd during evacuations. Pedestrian crowd dynamics are empirically investigated with an interdisciplinary approach (i.e., social sciences, computer science, and traffic engineering) focusing on the effect of groups and their proxemic behavior and interactions while walking. Empirical evidence achieved from urban in-field observations and laboratory experiments are presented and compared. Results indicate that the proxemic behavior of walking groups has a negative effect on walking speed when flow is irregular (primarily because of the need for members to maintain spatial cohesion during locomotion). These results have important implications for the design of common metrics to characterize spatial interactions among pedestrians and for the validation of models to replicate crowd dynamics that consider the effects of groups under normal and emergency conditions

New generations of computer-based simulations of pedestrian crowd dynamics are aimed at improving both scientific knowledge about such complex social phenomena and practical use of the results for more efficient, safer management of pedestrian circulation dynamics in urban scenarios. Within this twofold framework, the validation of the developed models with field data plays a central role, and the acquisition of empirical evidence about human behavior during locomotion is mandatory. An empirical investigation of pedestrian personal space (i.e., the area surrounding an individual while walking and into which strangers cannot intrude without causing discomfort) is reported. The investigation was developed in an ad hoc experimental setting to collect meaningful data (e.g., measurements of the front zone of personal space under static and moving conditions). The main results are presented to illustrate both the adopted experimental setting and the related data-collection method. These results represent an innovative contribution toward defining a metric for the characterization of spatial interactions among pedestrians and allowing the validation of simulation models dedicated to the study of the dynamic behavior of pedestrian crowd phenomena

This work analyzes gendered processes by a methodology based on clustering factors with influence in the decision-making process of women as users or employees of the transport system. Considering gender as a social construction which changes over time and space, this study is based on the concept of a woman as a person who adopts this role in society. This paper performs a deep analysis of those factors women consider as needs and barriers to use or work in the transport system in four scenarios: railway public transport infrastructures, automated vehicles, bicycle sharing, and jobholders. A literature review and focus group discussions were performed under the consideration that the definition of woman includes the addition of several personal characteristics (age, sexual orientation, family responsibilities, and culture). The data analysis allowed the identification of fairness characteristics (FCs) that affect the interaction of women with the transport system for each scenario. A methodology for clustering the fairness characteristics identified the main areas of action to improve the inclusion of women within each use case. Further studies will be focused on the quantification and prioritization of the FCs through mathematical methods and the suggestion of inclusive measures by an interdisciplinary panel.

Pedestrian flows are characterised by the preponderant presence of groups, with particular reference to dyads. The paper presents a research focused on group and age-driven pedestrian behaviour in an urban crowded scenario. Data analysis was performed by using an open source tracker tool. Results showed that in situation of irregular flows (LOS B) dyads walked 30 % slower than singles, and that elderly walked 40 % slower than adults. The achieved results have been used towards the validation of the simulation platform ELIAS 38, with reference to the representation of the granulometric distribution of groups and heterogeneous speed profiles.