Fine Networks: a New Approach to Sustainable Urban Mobility

Pedestrian movements are at the base of the concept of mobility, understood as the agent’s relationship with the context in which it moves. Mobility means creating a relationship with the environment and experiencing its effects while going from A to B. This is always the case, however, the act of walking inevitably exposes us the most, and renders us a more active part of our surroundings. This is one of the reasons why the history of walking is the most complex of all, even in our contemporary cities.

Actually, it’s even more complex in contexts that are not generally ready to embrace and promote it. Clarification is also required here: often cities that are currently unable to assure pedestrians a high quality connected network, did so in the past. Examples like Milan, whose historical centre and old urban fabric outside the Spanish walls, consisting of internal courtyards traversed by walkways, offered the pedestrian a completely different reading of the road grid. Or, looking abroad to the clearly car-centred city of Moscow, where city blocks seemingly beyond human scale concealed an additional level of walkways and interior spaces, positioned halfway between the public and private; a series of courtyards which, before being transformed into fairly legitimate parking spaces as a result of an explosion in car ownership in the early nineties, supplied highly granular connections to those pedestrians who wanted to challenge the climate and the distances typical of the Russian capital.

These networks, which could be defined as “fine” in so far as they are free from heavy infrastructural features, are based, rather, on functional synergies between the elements of the urban context. They are now being rediscovered: re-emerging where already existing in some way, and generated, or sought out, where absent.

The concept of fine networks, with reference to the world of transport planning, can be enriched with new possibilities by reinterpreting the discipline with the fresh eyes of those who want to pursue a truly holistic and multimodal approach to designing solutions for future mobility.

That said, the possibility of working directly on some elements of the road network, such as traffic light systems, opens important scenarios for mobility specialists, bringing the matter literally and figuratively to a level that is already an integral part of the urban context—that is, the road—but endeavouring to reconfigure it based on multiple users, whose flows must be managed and optimised in a balanced way.

This type of intervention fosters the emergence of a new reading of the urban grid, creating “fine networks” that serve to reconnect the spaces within the sphere of pedestrian mobility to the urban scale.

The revision of traffic light phases, aimed at the recalibration of waiting times for pedestrians along specific routes, becomes the key to concretely and significantly transforming the road environment into a not only car-centred area. As a consequence of a specific distribution of functions, spaces and points of origin and destination, routes overlap and mesh by following and accommodating the desire lines of people moving within the space.

This concept emphasises an indisputable difference between the world of fine networks and that of traditional transport networks: the former act on an almost virtual level, enabling the creation of downstream relationships and connections, and the implementation of minimally invasive measures in mobility management; the latter, however, have always relied upon the creation, or modification, of infrastructures, thus passing from what is essentially a manipulation of time, to a physical alteration of space.

Acting on the space of our cities—often already dense, and even more often marred by the excessive infrastructuralisation of past decades—by working on an invisible time-based layer that avails itself of the latest technologies of our digital society, such as the incredible access to data, becomes an integral part in meeting the needs for sustainable mobility, which is the challenge for the coming years.

As an example of how the appearance of these “fine networks” is becoming more widespread, we can refer to the project carried out in collaboration with the Moscow Department of Transport, which, upholding a dynamic and innovative vision of mobility, in 2014 requested a study for the development of an urban plan to render the whole city pedestrian and bike friendly.