Gli spazi aperti delle infrastrutture ferroviarie in disuso come risorsa per la promozione dell’invecchiamento attivo e della vivibilità nelle piccole città

The world is transforming into a world of cities increasingly inhabited by elderly citizens, suffering from disabilities and/or chronic non-communicable diseases caused by sedentary lifestyles. The World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly highlighted how the increase in life expectancy is not matched by ‘healthy ageing’. However, especially for the low and middle income populations, there is a greater possibility of incurring chronic degenerative diseases due to poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle, with a resulting increase in the costs of care and assistance. Understanding “rehabilitation” (as defined by the WHO) as an action necessary to recover the physiological or anatomical deficit, which explicitly invests the environment, the actual physical context, with an enabling or, on the contrary, disabling role in the process of development of the person towards his highest potential; the research investigates the correlations between the characteristics of urban spaces/equipment and the rehabilitation/health opportunities of the users, especially the elderly. On the one hand, these interactions can be physical, through the search for dimensional and sensory relationships with which to control the coherence and appropriateness of the inputs emitted by the artefacts with the physiological structures of the individuals. On the other hand, they can be filtered by highly technological devices capable of weighting these inputs to the individual characteristics of possible users. This prosthetic vision of urban space can be implemented above all in small inhabited centres, where there are still important continui- ties and long-lasting relationships between the human scale of open public spaces and the sense of place linked to historical/traditional infrastructural routes. Especially in small and medium-sized cities, the upgrade of digitalization (Ai, ICT, smart devices) can improve user-designed systems-environment interactions. Starting from these considerations, the paper returns part of the results of a research on minor abandoned railway lines that connect the inner areas of the Abruzzo region, to the Mediterranean coast, as an opportunity to direct the regeneration of these infrastructures towards cycle-pedestrian path according to a technological-environmental strategy.