Walkability in residential neighbourhoods: Themes and principles revisited

Abstract

The article sets to examine broader theoretical scope of walkability, and research efforts dealing with measurement of walkable environments, with a specific aim to distil and translate walkability as a measure to walkability as a design principles toolbox of interventions and items. Overarching walkability themes are in due course branched out into more operational walkability principles and broken into further constituents of implementable interventions and items, derived from research and theoretical contributions of numerous authors. The focus lies on newly designed residential neighbourhoods, which we also demonstrate and extensively illustrate on an example of a proposed neighbourhood. Emphasis is placed on an integrative approach, where the holistic aspects of walkability - dealing with all of them at once - and its multidimensionality - intertwinement and co-dependency - are integral parts and built into the design, implementation, and use.