Waste management and urban segregation: Villa estaciones ferroviarias, Puente Alto, Santiago, Chile (1985-2015).

Abstract

Since the end of the twentieth century, urban development in Chile and Latin America has produced cities segregated according to the level of income of their inhabitants, thereby deepening the conditions of inequality of the population by generating homogeneous poor areas. This inequality is not only limited to the population´s income, but also to the distribution of urban opportunities and costs to which this population is subjected. One of these costs is the location of waste dumps, which are situated in the districts that have a high level of poverty, where the social housing provided by the government subsidy system and managed by the construction business sector is also located. This means that there is a relationship between garbage-producing districts and garbage-receiving districts, an issue that is growing due to the traditional garbage management system in Chile. In this context, this article aims to analyze the consequences of the unsustainable waste management system and its relationship to the system of subsidiary social housing in Chile, specifically in the Santiago Metropolitan Region. For the above, the case of Villa Estaciones Ferroviaria of Puente Alto is analyzed. Built in the early 1990s, it was provided to the public through housing subsidy programs and is located on a former landfill. This research suggests that the reactive approach to domestic waste management be reconsidered in order to make it preventative. In other words, the main task of the waste disposal system --which has space, land and disease problems-- should become the reduction, reuse, recycling and sustainable elimination of waste.