Urban Planning for Transit-Oriented Development: An application in the Naples metropolitan area.

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is a planning strategy that aims to concentrate jobs, housing, and services around mass transit stations to make cities more sustainable, productive, and liveable. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy, and TOD principles cannot be uniformly applied across an entire city or transit network. This paper provides an innovative methodology to assess areas around transit nodes and supports decision-makers in identifying critical assets for investment. The developed methodology utilises Bertolini’s node-place model (1996), classifying station nodes according to their transit characteristics (transit features) and the quality of the spaces (open areas) and the built environment (built development). The proposed methodology is applied to the Naples metropolitan area (Italy), which includes 92 municipalities and over 3 million inhabitants. The study identified significant transit corridors and urban hotspots within the study area, where integrated transport and urban strategies would effectively promote more sustainable development.