Walking City, Automobile City, and Sustainable City: Urban Structures and Mobility Patterns for Reuse of the Spaces of the Automobile Era

During the last century, the planning of the modern city favored the automobile infrastructure, thinking of its functioning in efficiency, technique, and speed terms. Today, due to the climate and health crises, sustainability issues are drafting new mobility models based on nonmotorized travel, not so different from those that characterized the cities in the past. Furthermore, the pandemic revealed a renewed awareness of the citizens’ importance in urban life. This approach to the phenomenon obligates planning to deal with the rhythms with which the population lives and uses urban spaces because mobility describes the time-space variability of city practices and with it the urban transformations. Starting from these preconditions and the identifications of a strong relationship between the urban shape to mobility, the chapter gives an evolutionary interpretation of Italian case studies capable of linking the different components of the city, made up of space dimensions, represented by the urban structures, and temporal characters, identified in mobility patterns. Starting from the walking city model, which can be covered an average time of half an hour, the historic city, the rationalist one of the automobile cities, and the emerging polycentric structures are investigated to trace examples of design that can still be valid today and understand the possibilities to reuse of automobile age legacies. The proposed investigation aims to define characteristics and criteria useful for the design of urban environments that can be covered in 30 minutes, polycentric structures identified in medium-sized cities that characterize a large part of the Italian territory.