The proximity of the
cultural services
in Rome:
Knowing and addressing the offer in the Capital
We wanted to investigate how accessible, in terms of geographic proximity, the cultural services offered in the Eternal City are to the people who populate it: on the one hand its permanent residents, on the other hand the tourists who come to visit, even if only for a few days.
The research we conducted uses big data and data science, with an approach defined as foresight: knowing the present to shape the future.
The goal is to identify, with the help of today’s data, the most effective strategy for imagining and directing Rome’s cultural offerings in the coming years.
is the number of sites
recognized as world heritage
of humanity in 167 nations,
including 900 cultural sites,
218 natural and 39 mixed.
are only in Italy, the country that
holds the largest number
worldwide. One of these
is the historic center of Rome.
In our analysis we became interested in the cultural offerings present
within the boundaries of the Capitoline Administration, from the shores of Ostia
to the slopes of Subiaco.
What do we mean
by a cultural service?
A place that produces culture
Is a cultural service.
We narrowed the field by focusing therefore on:
theaters, museums, cinemas, archaeological sites, and then libraries,
music schools, as well as nightclubs and info-points. .
Once we identified cultural sites, we geolocated them within the street fabric of the Capitoline territory.
Then we addressed their “importance.” In fact, the use of the services offered by the city should be differentiated for tourists and citizens.
The former will have different needs and requirements from the latter, and therefore they will judge the different places listed above as more or less important to them. They will, in short, rank them differently: in a hypothetical rating on a scale of 1 to 10, a* tourist and a* resident will give services different weight.
A family on vacation will go in search of infopoints and visiting archaeological sites and museums, considering them to be of high importance in their Roman itinerary, while a citizen born and raised in the capital, in everyday life, will realistically value the availability of cinemas, theaters and libraries much more.
We have therefore assigned each service a different weight according to its “attractiveness” for l* tourist and l* resident.
Pesi – Metodologia
INTEREST
0 >>> 5 >>> 10
What do we mean
by proximity?
By proximity we mean
how close a service is
with respect to its end user.
The research followed in the wake
already traced by the analyses of
IZILab focused on the principle
of the 15-minute city.
In calculating cultural proximity, we therefore took as a reference point the reachability of the individual service in less than 1,250 meters: the distance that can be walked in 15 minutes.
Still following the same principle and still taking the city of Rome as our reference point, we also looked at the digital divide and urban green in two other research.
Research on Rome’s 15 minutes
The citizen’s point of view
On average, a Roman citizen accesses 2-3 types of cultural services in less than 15 minutes. The distribution of services is polarized: concentration is by far prevalent within the perimeter circumscribed by the railway ring.
This highlights a strong disparity between different parts of the city.
Where residents stay
The more areas are colored dark red, the higher the population density.
Where are the cultural services
The more areas are colored dark purple, the higher the concentration of cultural services.
On average, the services that Roman citizens can access, in less than 15 minutes, most easily are nightclubs and archaeological sites.
%
of the city area is provided with all cultural services within 15 minutes.
%
areas that provide access to a nightclub within 15 minutes.
%
areas that allow to reach archaeological sites within 15 minutes.
The least accessible ones, on the other hand, are museums and music schools.
%
.The proximity of museums to the citizen does not even reach 20%
%
Proximity of music schools to the citizen.
Comparison of neighborhoods.
While the city center has a low population density that is accompanied by a very high supply of services, the Centocelle neighborhood, for example, has a high number of residents who, however, can access a limited number of cultural offerings in that area.
Tuscolano represents a virtuous model for the distribution of culture among citizens even in the suburbs: high population density is accompanied by a wide range of services.
Monte Spaccato, on the other hand, represents a real desert of services. The population, though sparse, is not guaranteed any accessibility to cultural services.
The comparison with the tourist
The indicator most widely distributed in the city turns out to be that of the tourist, which maintains good levels even outside the center, expanding even beyond the highway that surrounds Rome, called “Grande Raccordo Anulare”, unlike that of the resident.
Despite significant differences in terms of proximity between the center and the suburbs, tourists can count on greater proximity to cultural services in each area.
The relationship with receptive services
Once it was established that cultural services for tourists also extend to suburban areas, we asked whether Rome was equipped in terms of accommodation facilities outside the center.
We found that the distribution of hotels, vacation homes and other facilities remains strongly anchored to the city center, without expanding beyond the GRA.
New trends and the cities of the future
New policies in terms of urbanization and combating climate change, demographic shifts and the emergence of a growing middle class in several countries around the world are just some of the phenomena that will contribute to changing the faces of our cities.
Knowing the data of the imbalances in the proximity of the cultural offerings of today’s Rome gives us a chance to concretely outline the city of tomorrow, taking into account the critical issues to be adjusted and the opportunities to be seized.
To do so, it is necessary to know what phenomena will most affect the accessibility of cultural offerings in urban contexts. We have identified three that are indispensable in defining the cities of the future:
1. Increased tourist flows
%
between now and 2030, 44% of the Italian market will depend on international tourists. The countries of origin will be India, China, African countries and those in the Middle East: here the middle class is growing exponentially and about 88% of the next billion people, globally, who will join it will come from Asia.
people aged 26-45 will make up 30% of tourists, followed by the 46-55 bracket, which is the one willing to spend the most. In fact, baby boomers in 2022 faced a cost, on average, of about $6,600 per person just to travel.
%
will increasingly vacation alone. A Booking.com study conducted in 2021 recorded that only 14% of travelers were planning a solo vacation, while nearly twice as many (23%) said they intended to do so in the future.
This increase in tourist flows will presumably lead to an even greater imbalance of proximity indices to cultural offerings in favor of tourists.
2. Aging population
Crucial will be the of: a target audience with, presumably, greater difficulty in travel, must lead us to reflect on how we move within our cities.
3. The evolution of city transportation
On a citizen and tourist scale
To show how Rome could adapt, proactively, to these new trends let us try to imagine two different types of people who will be able to make use of city cultural services in 2030.
We will then assume the perspective of Clara, a Roman pensioner living in the suburbs, and Ram, a middle-aged man traveling from India. To identify with their lives, we must then imagine ourselves in the city we intend to help build.
Conclusions
The proximity indicators have allowed us to show, on a quantitative level, how cultural services in Rome are, data in hand, still too territorially concentrated in the city center, with a disproportion that grows as the distance from the boundaries drawn by the railway ring increases.
But that is not all: the offer is in fact also too unbalanced in favor of the tourist. This, as we have seen, is particularly true with regard to the peripheral areas of the city, which, paradoxically, are experienced mostly by citizens and which in the future will be increasingly populated and thus in need of more and more services to meet the needs of its residents.
The added value of the foresight approach lies in the possibility of imagining these disparities as focal points from which to define local, regional and national public policies for reorganizing culture in the city.
Methodology
Geolocation of services
The geolocation of cultural services within the city was identified using Open Street Map, while for accommodation facilities we used data provided by the City of Rome.
Proximity zone calculation
The proximity calculation, valid for both services and hotels, vacation rentals, etc., was carried out using the following method:
- the starting point is the street graph of Rome, a graph in which each intersection represents a node and the streets represent arcs
- once a service, such as a theater, is identified, it is added to the graph as a node
- from it one then calculates all the roads that can be reached in less than 15 minutes and assigns that accessibility property to the arcs involved
- one then repeats the operation for all services and obtains a graph in which each arc is assigned or not assigned the accessibility property with respect to each individual service. Therefore, for each street it will be known which services can be reached in less than 15 minutes.
The graph tool allows us to have a very high level of detail about the location of services and their actual reachability (a service might be close as the crow flies but the path to reach it might be long). This enables very in-depth searches of the analyzed territory and the possibility of performing point simulations.
Definition of weights
Considering that different services will have a different value for citizen* or turist*, the following system of weights was assumed to favor, for example, archaeological sites and info points for l* turist* while cinemas and libraries for l* citizen*:
Calculating the indicator
At the level of visualization, however, when larger areas of the city are considered, the level of detail of the graph is unnecessary and we instead found it interesting to regroup the information it contains over larger areas. In this case, we chose the hexagon area, which allows the city to be mapped with a hexagonal grid. The re-aggregation of the data over defined areas also allows for the comparison of different indicators over the same areas (for example, as we did with the comparison of the indicator of*citizen* and*tourist).
For each hexagonal area, the percentage of the length of roads covered by a certain cultural service out of the total length of roads in the hexagon was then calculated.
The value of the two indicators, of resident and tourist, is obtained by calculating weighted averages of these percentages, each according to its own weighting system.
But where do turist* and citizen* stand with respect to services that are important to them?
As far as l* cittadin* are concerned, we considered the population density in the various areas. Since the highest level of detail on which ISTAT provides such information is census areas, we calculated the citizen indicator also on that lining, in addition to the hexagonal one, in order to be able to compare these areas and study whether the presence of cultural services important to l* cittadin* was accompanied by the actual presence of residents (and vice versa). Four case studies of such comparisons are presented in the research.
Likewise for l* turist* we considered the presence of accommodation facilities in the Roman area to investigate whether the presence of cultural services important to l* turist* was accompanied by the presence of accommodation facilities (and vice versa).
Future developments
This research represents a pilot study, and a first snapshot and analysis of Roman cultural services. There are many possible developments and insights, for example, the possibility of establishing indicator weights from a survey done of the Roman population so as to reflect as much as possible the actual needs of* residents, with a view to participatory planning and not an imposed, top-down intervention.
APPOINTMENTS
The realization of this research was possible thanks to the well-established collaboration that, for years, has united IZILab and the Rome City Council. As mentioned earlier, from the union of these synergies, we have produced several analyses based on the principle of proximity provision in the urban environment, which have touched on so many other issues related to living in the city.
In recent years, moreover, the analysis technologies implemented by IZILab have made great strides thanks to new investments that focus on technological innovation and through collaboration with various universities. Discussions with architects, urban planners, and developers at the University of Roma Tre, for example, have allowed the transition from calculating proximity as a Euclidean distance to calculating it on the street graph, as was the case for this research. This allowed for maximum accuracy in processing the data, because the actual spaces and travel times to reach a given service go into consideration.
Finally, a big step forward from static maps, which were already very informative and eye-catching, was the development of a dynamic dashboard that allows users and public decision makers to interact directly with the data and see the changes that the territory would undergo with the addition of new services through real-time simulations. This system thus becomes not only descriptive of the current situation, the starting point for any informed and data-driven decision making, but also a precise, agile and intuitive tool for:
– project into the future
– design possible intervention scenarios.
SOURCES
The research made use of the following sources:
United Nations (2023)
WTTC (2022)
Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies (2019, 2023)
World Economic Forum (2023)
OECD (2022, 2018, 2023)
Demoskopika (2023)
ISTAT (2022) – dati censuari
EuroStat (2022)
New York Times (2022)
CNBC (2023)
Deloitte (2021)
Arup (2019, 2021)
National League of Cities (2021)
Globetrender (2017)
UK Music (2023)
LiveDMA (2022)
Open Street Map (2023) – dati relativi ai servizi culturali presi in esame
Comune di Roma (2021) – dati relativi alle strutture ricettive
Future foundation (2016)
WTTC’s Economic Impact Report (EIR) (2022)
Moody’s (2019)
International Tourism Group (2021)