Urban Accessibility and Tourist Activity: An Application to the Metropolitan City of Naples

mainly connected with the sciences of transport, economy, and urban geography. Among several definitions of accessibility, the most shared refer to the possibility that an individual has, to participate in one or a set of activities in a given place. In general, accessibility also refers to the characteristic of a service or of a resource to be easily enjoyed by a large number of users and this relies on the capacity of a city or a region to guarantee high levels of quality of life. Accessibility, thus, aims at improving the comfort of urban spaces for all users assuring the same opportunities for all. In this sense, accessibility also takes into account social aspects. Tourism, and activities linked to it, by definition, are based on at least two types of movement: a long-range movement to reach the destination from the point of origin: a close-range movement to carry out the tourist activity itself (visit, have fun, eat, reside). The issue of urban accessibility particularly relates to tourism activities if we consider that tourism requires several services which are not exclusively related to mobility. In these concerns, the study aims to define an accessibility index particularly referring to tourist services. The method pointed out in the theoretical part of the study has been tested on the metropolitan city of Naples (MCN). The results provide a potential source of information to support decision makers in pinpointing interventions to improve the accessibility of services at the metropolitan scale.