Finding the right four streets, 48 times over

Buenos Aires undertook an ambitious participatory planning initiative to identify pedestrianization candidates across all 48 neighborhoods — a task infeasible to do by hand. Working with AFD, urbaplan, and the ETI Chaire (Carlos Moreno’s research group), we built a scoring engine that evaluated every street segment against 25+ environmental, social, and safety indicators: noise exposure, flood risk, crime density, tree canopy coverage, population density, and accessibility to key amenities. The system scored approximately one million indicator values across 30,000 street segments, producing a ranked list of four finalists per neighborhood.

The results defied the planning intuition most urban designers brought to the task. Segments that felt like “obvious” pedestrianization candidates — lively commercial blocks with high foot traffic — often failed on hard constraints: acoustic levels above livability thresholds, or flood-risk zones that would require expensive mitigation. In contrast, segments initially perceived as unremarkable frequently ranked high when multi-dimensional scoring replaced gut feeling, often because they combined moderate activity with superior environmental quality, tree cover, and safety metrics.

The model overturned the assumption that walkability and livability are synonymous with street vibrancy or obvious commercial value. By making environmental and safety constraints explicit and measurable, it surfaced opportunities in quieter, greener neighborhoods that human scoring would have overlooked. The four highest-ranked candidates per neighborhood became the focus of detailed participatory planning sessions, ensuring that the selection process was both rigorous and defensible.