Livable and just public space - Conceptual approach to urban walkability on the case of Ljubljana, Slovenia

The research addresses the issue of urban livability through the (un)supportiveness of the built environments for walking. It claims that urban environments must be pedestrian-friendly if the community’s quality of life is to be achieved. It goes further and relates urban walkability to the urban justice issues. It gives a comprehensive review of the literature on walkability and the different aspects of urban justice embedded within it in terms of social, environmental, health, transportation and economic conditions. This review sets the scene for a case study of Ljubljana, the capital and biggest city of Slovenia, which has gone through a major socio-economic transformation from socialist to capitalist system in the last three decades. The case study shows how urban walkability was tackled by two distinctive urban planning approaches: the socialist in the 1945-1990 period and the contemporary neoliberal which started in 1991 and is ongoing. It discusses how the two different conceptual approaches to urban walkability affect the urban livability and urban justice on concrete examples in the city. It reveals how the walkability assets of the city have been (dis)encouraged in accordance with the respective socio-economic system and how this affected people’s right to use the city, and how it changed the livability of the neighbourhoods. It gives special attention to the contemporary measures as they reflect the realities of a city traversing from a socialist to a capitalist model while more or less successfully retaining the ideals of a just city via investments into the walkable public spaces. This focus brings some lessons learnt for other similar contexts around the globe where the welfare state is decreasing and the accumulation of the capital is becoming the paramount ideology. The research aims to point out the power and responsibility of urban planning as a discipline in providing the urban walkability conditions within the just city agendas. It points out the need for the planners in the transitional socio-economic contexts to develop new skills and competences to assure social and spatial cohesion as a precondition for the truly livable places.