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Mobility planning is a process that must inherently involve the community. For the Viareggio Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP), we chose to put this principle into practice by moving beyond traditional meeting rooms and taking the discussion directly to the city’s streets.
The second participatory SUMP forum was held over a single day, engaging citizens with an innovative format: urban walks as a tool for dialogue and facilitation.
The urban walk method is more than a simple excursion; it’s a tool for participatory planning with deep roots in the philosophy of Jane Jacobs. The renowned urbanist argued that a city’s true intelligence resides in its inhabitants, who live and understand its every daily dynamic. Jacobs believed that plans based on technical data alone ignored the richness of human interactions that animate neighborhoods. For her, resident knowledge was not optional, but crucial information for successful planning.
Urban walks are born from this very philosophy: they are guided conversations that invite citizens to become explorers and storytellers of their own community. This dynamic and active approach transforms proposals from an abstraction on a map into a tangible reality.
To ensure widespread participation, the event was held in two distinct locations on June 27th. The first walk covered the center of Viareggio, while the second focused on the Torre del Lago area.
After institutional greetings and a brief introduction, participants were guided by our planners along a route that passed through areas relevant to the Plan’s actions. The discussions centered on crucial topics such as the management of public space, road safety, traffic congestion, and parking saturation.
The success of this methodology was evident: the dialogue wasn’t limited to a theoretical discussion but was based on a concrete experience, allowing everyone to better understand the Plan’s challenges and opportunities. Walking together through the affected areas stimulated debate on real issues, such as the safety of a pedestrian crossing, the livability of a public square, or the discontinuity of a bicycle path.
The forum provided an opportunity to demonstrate how the SUMP can define short- and long-term solutions for a more livable city. By adopting the urban walk model, we aimed to put Jacobs’s principles into practice: placing people and their direct experience at the center to collaboratively build a more livable, human-scaled, and, above all, truly sustainable city.
