Pedestrian Isochrones Facilities Overlapping with Openrouteservice. An Easy, Fast and Opensource Indicator in Novara, Italy

The concept of proximity in planning requires the attention of scholars and decision-makers to the issue of accessibility to services within a walking distance, as part of the more general effort to make cities more resilient, sustainable, and healthy. From an operational side, rethinking cities according to the paradigm of proximity and accessibility to services on foot implies the need for time-based methodologies that can identify the areas that can be reached within a given time interval. These methodologies often use GIS network analy-sis tools, but can require long analysis times and high financial costs for software. This contribution proposes an indicator of walking accessibility to facilities that is simple, quick to compute, and built using free and open-source tools such as QGIS and Openrouteservice, in order to allow its broad replicability on different contexts. The indicator was successfully tested in the city of Novara, Italy, using the 5-, 10- and 15-min isochrones, identifying the areas from which all the selected facilities can be reached within this time interval.