Una piattaforma di spazi per la mobilità attiva urbana. Riflessioni sul conflitto tra pedoni e ciclisti

The conflict between pedestrians and cyclists is a key-issue for urban mobility, especially in the view of more active, healthy and sustainable cities. On this front, scientific research has mainly focused on quantitative approaches for properly sizing infrastructures as facilitators of different mobility flows. However, it does not exhaust the complexity of a matter that calls into question the very idea of public space as a place inhabited by bodies rather than vectors. This paper focuses on the relationship between infrastructure and bodies within the hyper-specialized space of the contemporary city, in order to highlight how the current paradigm of cycling often re-proposes the same mechanisms already experienced with the advent of private vehicular mobility. In such perspective, the efficiency of mobility networks cannot be detached from a reflection on the accessibility and, above all, of the citizens' permanence in the public realm. Which means not reducing the latter to a mere vicarious communication channel of specialized functions and subjective needs, but thinking of it as an expression of a community and its ways of experiencing and producing space. It is therefore worth asking whether the infrastructure, commonly understood as a specialized space channeling mobility flows, is still an entirely valid category or whether it is not more appropriate to (re)think mobility in terms of a variable “platform of spaces”, capable of absorbing conflicts by transforming them into interactions.