Rome’s GRAB—Great Bicycle Ring Route—As Complex Landscape Infrastructure

This paper aims to describe the design strategy adopted in Rome to support and enhance sustainable mobility. It is a strategy aimed at promoting new green infrastructures for urban accessibility, daily sports practice and social inclusion in a historic city, stratified and not very inclined to change. Therefore, the dissemination of this experience is useful for planning a sustainable future for heritage cities that ensures an appropriate and equitable balance between conservation and development. Sustainable mobility is now considered one of the most important challenges for metropolitan areas and large conurbations. In these terms, Rome is a weak city. The city’s great bicycle ring route (GRAB), an integral part of the Extraordinary Tourism Mobility Plan 2017-22, is a key infrastructure for increasing more sustainable and healthier modes of travel, even on a local scale. The GRAB project, whose complex infrastructure provides multiple services, differs from a simple cycle path network. Its complexity refers to an ability to attract different types of users in different types of urban contexts—historical settings, monuments, newer neighborhoods and areas of contemporary urbanization. The project results can be measured first in relation to its progress (already funded, in the executive planning phase, with the approval of the first construction sites expected by 2022). A second important result is the participation of institutional bodies and citizens’ associations, which will oversee the construction and maintenance work as well as infuse into the project a constant vitality, in a true civic ecology perspective. Third, the results are important for enhancing metropolitan area accessibility and the environmental and social re-activation of the areas crossed, achieved directly and through the project’s realization. The GRAB strategy belongs to the new generation of landscape projects that have radically changed the priorities and hierarchies of intervention in the contexts of contemporary urbanization. These projects are based on the ecological analysis of the context but are located close to the fluctuating dynamics of contemporary metropolises and the problems of exclusion and marginality—both spatial and social—linked to the very rapid ecological, economic and demographic transformations.