2024 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

The Cildáñez Biocorridor consists of recovering the course of one of the most important streams in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. Projects on a basin scale (Ex Mercado de Hacienda, Parque Avellaneda, Villa Cildáñez, Parque Indoamericano and Reserva Lago Lugano) are linked through a path of native plants and community gardens that form a system of green areas. 

The main innovation consists of having installed a basin scenario that transcends political boundaries and allows for inter-jurisdictional planning and management of the city, placing the reconstruction of the social fabric and the environmental fabric in direct relation to each other. The continuity of the PPGA methodology of Participatory Planning and Associated Management allowed for the promotion of a scenario of decision-making by consensus, building a technical-political-community network for an integral, intersectoral and multidisciplinary approach that gives life to a bio-cultural bio-corridor project, which recovers the historical and environmental memory of the territory. The achievements in terms of institutionalisation of the practices with the sanctioning of laws and inclusion in the government's organisational charts have become an unprecedented innovation in terms of recognition of participatory democracy that establishes the practice as a School-Project. 

The project is the continuity of an experience that began at the end of the 80s, with the recovery of democracy after a terrible dictatorship and that has resulted in the recovery of Avellaneda Park, the second green and public space, its greatest expression. The founding milestone of the experience arose on April 2, 2013 after the tragic flood that left more than 100 dead in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. The Intercommunal Network of the Cildáñez Basin was immediately created to develop workshops implementing the Risk Map methodology, which made it possible to involve a large number of actors to carry out a diagnosis and develop a Programme for Before-During and After a future event, with recommendations for the formulation of public policies. The flood had its greatest impact in Villa Cildáñez, where the water reached a height of 1.5 metres. This is where the poorest population lives, on unregulated land and with poor housing and infrastructure. The population of the neighbourhood is very diverse, with an important socio-cultural richness from Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay.

• www.cuencaenred.com.ar (External link)