Maria Augusta Kroetz: Mapping Cities with Data After IAAC

Maria Augusta’s path goes deep into the urban side of IAAC’s work. She has collaborated with Systematica, where she is a mobility planner, and with its research initiative on sustainable transport, with an urban data studio in Barcelona that she started working with during the master, and with her own company in Brazil, where she continues to work on data analysis. She has also recently obtained a professional qualification as a territorial planner in Italy.

She teaches too: she developed a course on how to evaluate public policies in cities with data, and is building a complete course on using urban data to plan better cities.

Her maps cover many questions. Network maps show which streets connect a city and which ones people use most, which helps integrate new developments and master plans into the existing fabric. Activity maps use points of interest to show where restaurants, shops and services concentrate. Accessibility maps cross population and travel time: for a hospital competition, they showed how many people could reach the site and from where.

Other maps reveal risk. For New Delhi, layers of satellite imagery, building data and vegetation built a map of environmental fragility, showing areas more exposed to fires or rising river levels. In Brazil, drone images segmented with machine learning showed where a city needs more vegetation and where the lack of permeable soil increases flood risk. With Systematica’s research team she mapped urban heat using street images and machine learning, showing the power of vegetation and shade to cool streets in summer.

“Every time we developed a new project, we were overcoming the limits of what already existed,” Maria Augusta said. “We were inventing new analyses, inventing new indices.” That environment gave her the courage to try things for the first time and to accept mistakes as part of the process. Coding was the biggest change: “At the beginning it was very scary. Today I don’t finish a project without running some Python scripts.”

She also learned from teaching her classmates and being taught by them, something she now continues as a teacher.

During her master, ChatGPT was launched a week before her thesis reviews, and it changed the way she programmes. She sees artificial intelligence as a major question for urban planning, architecture and computational design, and as a tool to be used with solid foundations and studied properly, “not something to be afraid of.”