Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
A PNAS study traces Valdivia's unequal access to nature back to Mapuche dispossession
An interdisciplinary team co-led from the Cary Institute and Universidad Andres Bello reads colonization, the 1960 earthquake and today's wetland fights as one sequence deciding who in a city of 166,000 lives near flood-absorbing ground.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- A PNAS study of Valdivia in southern Chile reads urban segregation through three periods: colonization, the 1960 earthquake, and the present-day struggles over protecting the city's wetlands.
- It was co-led by Elizabeth M. Cook of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies and Olga Barbosa of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, with Jason Sauer and Karin Weil.
- The team works from a concept it calls the Ecology of Segregation, in which socioeconomic inequality, structural racism and colonial legacies shape the urban environment and are shaped by it.
- Some of the areas Mapuche communities were displaced from are now occupied by high-income neighborhoods with privileged access to green space and ecosystem services, including flood mitigation.
- Valdivia, capital of Los Rios with roughly 166,000 residents, sits inside the Valdivian temperate rainforest hotspot and depends heavily on the surrounding native forests for drinking water.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint One city examined across three periods cannot say how much of the present pattern each period produced. There is no second Valdivia that skipped 1960, so the paper argues sequence and mechanism, and the summary does not give a figure to weigh the three against each other.
- decision The municipality, SENAPRED and the Ministry of Public Works took part in the work, so their next call on a wetland is also a call on who gets flood mitigation.
- precedent If land records and reconstruction history count as segregation evidence, cities in the Global South that measure inequality from census data alone will be asked for an archive they may not hold.
Valdivia sits where rivers and extensive wetlands meet, and those waters act as natural barriers to urban development [8]. After the Spanish refounding, Mapuche communities who kept close relationships with the land, wetlands and rivers were displaced from fertile territory [11]. The authors then follow the spatial restructuring and uncontrolled urban development that came after the 1960 earthquake, and after that a round of urban expansion and wetland occupation under governance shaped by neoliberal economic policies [5].
The colonial period they examine runs from 1552 to 1820 [9], and they reconstructed it from maps of Valdivia made by the Dutch, who briefly occupied the city in the 17th century [10]. The middle of the sequence rests on Barbosa's earlier work mapping the city and modeling what it looked like before and after the earthquake [15]. That earlier work found many areas providing substantial ecosystem services to residents without ever being formally designated as green space, because what they contained were fragments of wetlands and other landscapes [16].
1552 to 1820 is 268 years [20], and the earthquake arrives 140 years after that window closes [21]. A claim that colonial land allocation still governs who can reach a wetland therefore has to hold across four centuries of subsequent building, and the evidence offered for it is documentary: the old maps set against where high-income neighborhoods sit now. The phys.org account of the study does not report a segregation index or a comparison city [18].
Barbosa put the aim in terms of access. "Ultimately, what we wanted to explain is that the segregation we see today also creates inequitable access to nature and its ecosystem services, and that it is multifactorial, involving historical, geological and political processes," she said [13]. A 1960 earthquake is not a social process, and the city that social processes rebuilt afterwards was the one the earthquake had rearranged [5]. The study grew out of a collaboration on how climate change and global change are shaping cities and affecting both biodiversity and people [17].
What to watch
- Whether the PNAS paper itself reports quantitative segregation measures that the phys.org summary leaves out.
- Whether Valdivia's municipality or the Ministry of Public Works formally designates the wetland fragments Barbosa's earlier mapping identified.
- A second Latin American city analyzed the same way would let the three periods be compared against each other.