Planificación orientada a la acción aplicada al espacio público en una intersección de Cuenca

Abstract

The growth of car ownership in recent decades has caused cities to be designed considering the private vehicle as the main means of transportation. This has resulted in a notable reduction in public space for pedestrians and other cleaner means of transport such as bicycles. Poor planning of public space, often based on outdated and rigid approaches that no longer fit current reality, motivates the need to plan cities and solve their mobility problems differently. In this context, this document presents Action-Oriented Planning and Tactical Urbanism as tools capable of generating mobility solutions that involve citizens and democratize access to public space. The results of this research suggest that Action-Oriented Planning may be a solution to some of the biggest challenges of today’s urban planning: encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process about public space and communicating the objectives of urban projects effectively. This type of intervention has the capacity to generate almost immediate changes in the public space, at a very low cost, which allows testing the proposed solutions before investing large sums of money in projects that are difficult to reverse. Such strategy can provide valuable information about space, helping city planners to make it more inclusive, safe, and user-friendly