What Is My Plaza for? Implementing a Machine Learning Strategy for Public Events Prediction in the Urban Square

Jumana Hamdani, Pablo Antuña Molina, Lucía Leva Fuentes, Hesham Shawqy, Gabriella Rossi and David Andrés León
Additional contact information
Jumana Hamdani: School of Information Systems and Technology Management, University of New South Wales, Australia / Department of Spatial Planning, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Pablo Antuña Molina: IAAC—Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Spain
Lucía Leva Fuentes: IAAC—Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Spain
Hesham Shawqy: IAAC—Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Spain
Gabriella Rossi: CITA, Royal Danish Academy, Denmark
David Andrés León: IAAC—Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Spain

Urban Planning, 2025, vol. 10

Abstract: Plazas are an essential pillar of public life in our cities. Historically, they have been seen as public fora, hosting public events that fostered trade, interaction, and debate. However, with the rise of modern urbanism, city planners considered them as part of a larger strategic development scheme overlooking their social importance. As a result, plazas have lost their function and value. In recent years, awareness has risen of the need to re-activate these public spaces to strive for social inclusion and urban resilience. Geometric and urban features of plazas and their surroundings often suggest what kinds of usage the public can make of them. In this project, we explore the application of machine learning to predict the suitability of events in public spaces, aiming to enhance urban plaza design. Learning from traditional urbanism indicators, we consider factors associated with the features of the public space, such as the number of people and the high degree of comfort, which are evolved from three subcategories: external factors, geometric shape, and design factors. We acknowledge that the predictive capability of our model is constrained by a relatively small dataset, comprising 15 real plazas in Madrid augmented digitally to 2025 fictional scenarios through self-organising maps. The article details the methods to quantify and enumerate quantitative urban features. With a categorical target variable, a classification model is trained to predict the type of event in the urban space. The model is then evaluated locally in Grasshopper by visualising a parametric verified geometry and deploying the model on other existing plazas worldwide regarding geographical proximity to Madrid, where to share or not the same cultural and environmental conditions. Despite these limitations, our findings offer valuable insights into the potential of machine learning in urban planning, suggesting pathways for future research to expand upon this foundational study.

Keywords: data classification; event prediction; machine learning; Madrid; plaza; public squares; self-organising maps; urban planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:urbpla:v10:y:2025:a:8551

DOI: 10.17645/up.8551

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