Designing Inclusive Mountain Landscapes for Social Sustainability: A Flow-Chain Framework and Toolkit for Alpine Ski Areas

Ensuring accessibility in alpine ski areas remains a critical challenge for social sustainability and inclusive tourism because physical, seasonal and organisational constraints interact across the visitor experience. This paper reframes accessibility as a dynamic and relational landscape attribute and proposes a flow-chain framework for assessing accessibility as a sequence of interdependent phases, from pre-trip information to arrival, lift access, slope use, rest and return. Developed within the Ski-Ability project in the ArgeAlp working community, the study draws on exploratory field observations, stakeholder engagement and co-design activities conducted across seven Alpine pilot resorts. The pilot resorts are not treated as a statistically representative sample, but as field cases used to understand current operational conditions in a context where academic literature, technical standards and regulatory guidance specific to accessible ski areas remain limited. The framework is operationalised through a qualitative toolkit based on Basic, Comfort and Plus levels, priority categories and non-compensatory decision rules. The results provide methodological validation and practical guidance rather than quantitative benchmarking. They show that accessibility in alpine ski areas depends on the continuity of routes, services, information and assistance, and on coordination among multiple actors. The paper contributes to social sustainability research by linking Universal Design, accessible tourism and mountain governance within a transferable, process-oriented assessment model.