HEALTHY CITIES: THE VALUE OF AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PLANNING APPROACH IN WELFARE SERVICES

Research on town facilities planning, starting from the already existing literature on this topic can lead to interesting debates among the various disciplines such as economics and healthcare management. The carried out research proposed an interdisciplinary approach to better understand what a family in a middle-sized city needs for its welfare. This means putting together knowledge related to offer and demand of facilities and families located within the city, i.e. different neighborhood characteristics and needs. This goal opens to connections between specific knowledge new instruments and analysis of the problem set in a transversal way. In Italy the analysis of facility services is a particularly important subject strictly connected to town planning. In 2001 in Region Lombardy, the facilities planning became mandatory at the local level (Piano dei Servizi L. R. 1/2001; L.R. 12/2005). Such care seems to be unique in the Italian situation where planning instruments both strategical and operational do not sufficiently highlight, through a standardized procedure, the dynamics between demand and supply in services to the citizen. The Local facilities plan try to forecast population needs, but most of the existing plans still lack updating of the existing public facilities. Analysis completeness and reference to the private sphere is an essential element to understand the social dynimics linked to facilities. The overall general knowledge on the existing facilities location and on their status is a fundamental starting point for planning and it finds its completeness in the proposed methodology. It integrates public and private healthcare services offer together with their potential demand in residential areas according to specific characteristics of the population (age of people, family needs, ecc.). Transferable information and methods could be useful to the expert administrations, to operators, to all operational services and citizens. The paper shows the work done by the “town planning team” in evaluating the private and public offer of welfare services in Brescia (about 190.000 inhabitants). The goal of the research is to prompt innovation in the organization and furnishing of services so as to optimize municipal resources and to better wellbeing for individuals and families. The project aims to investigate the quality and accessibility of welfare services in Brescia as a mean to encourage organizational innovation and improve resource allocation efficiency. The analysis integrates different levels of observation and dataset to offer a systematic overview of the quality and distribution of welfare services, including those relevant for the weakest users (elderly, children, disabled). The census on services is integrated with data on urban and transportation infrastructures, household composition and structure and economic fragility indicators. As a matter of fact, the quality of the offer does not rely exclusively on the organization and territorial features, but also, and most of all, on the level of spatial and temporal accessibility. The concept of accessibility refers to the easiness with which a facility can be reached considering the various possibilities of transport (on foot, by bike, using a bus, or a car). Improving accessibility has an impact both on environmental sustainability (Himanen et al., 1994; Rolli and Bruschi, 2005), and on road safety (Godefrooij and Schepel, 2010), besides assuring accessibility to all kinds of users, with particular attention to week users. The facilities are taken into consideration in the research deal with children, elderly and disabled people. The methodology of the proposed analysis was set-up and tested to investigate facilities for children and then extended the other two categories. The investigation on disabled facilities was integrated investigating the specific accessibility problems from a visual, motor, auditive point of view. The methodology and the results achieved and the next research steps are presented in the present paper.