San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, Argentina
Safe Neighborhood Plazas for All
Project Type:
Community Engagement, Environment, Parks and Recreation
At a Glance
81 accessible, well-lit neighborhood plazas built between 2019 and 2025 in response to residents’ requests, bringing the total number of plazas to 175.
The municipality’s free bike-sharing program includes 19 stations, with placement of cycling infrastructure based on disaggregated data.
100% response rate to resident requests and feedback
Built 3D printed weather satellites that alert residents to bad weather and help the City understand the effects of climate change
Residents of San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca want easy access to safe, high-quality green spaces. This was one clear takeaway from a survey the city conducted to guide the creation of its 2030 Comprehensive Strategic Plan, unveiled in 2022. That plan set a goal of improving green spaces to support social inclusion and urban sustainability.
City leaders didn’t want to take a one-size-fits-all approach to modernizing parks and plazas across Catamarca, a provincial capital of about 160,000 people. Instead, they set out to design and improve these spaces through resident engagement processes that surfaced distinct neighborhood priorities.
2,551 specific actions — such as pothole repairs, sidewalk weeding and street lighting — the city has taken in response to resident requests submitted via the Cerca app.
A data analysis revealed that some of the most common problems flagged by residents involved poor lighting and the desire for a safe, closeby neighborhood public plaza. To help prioritize needs, the City created a heat map illustrating where various complaints were clustered. Municipal officials also gathered data through neighborhood-based, door-to-door outreach to residents. Plaza project designs reflected location-specific input gathered through participatory budgeting, which prioritizes resident input in budgeting processes.
In 2023, the City received even more insights with the launch of Tu Capital Cerca. The resident-facing app provides invaluable data for understanding specific needs and allows residents to submit requests and complaints to the city pertaining to everything from safety to infrastructure to waste collection.
Through data from Tu Capital Cerca, the resident survey and community engagement, the municipality increased the number of plazas from 94 to 175 between 2019 and 2025, spanning all but three Catamarca neighborhoods, which the municipality plans to upgrade next. These spaces vary, incorporating requests for amenities such as dog parks, ping pong and chess tables, soccer fields, basketball courts or disability-friendly play areas. Every public plaza has LED lighting, as well as all sidewalks and other public spaces.
Today Catamarca’s sustainability and infrastructure work continues and city departments are determined to be more responsive than ever to residents’ needs. Leaders have an internal app and dashboard to help track the status of requests and complaints from the Tu Capital Cerca (and other sources, including phone calls and WhatsApp), and average time to resolution. As of November 2025, that duration is about eight days, down from around three weeks when the city first began tracking this metric.
“We have to serve our neighbors well and make people’s lives easier,” Mayor Gustavo Saadi says.