Latin American cities face an urban environmental crisis caused by global economic programs, faulty housing and land-use policies, and uneven economic development and uncontrolled industrial pollution, according to experts who presented papers at a workshop on the "Future of the Latin American City," held July 710 at Cornell.
Urban planners from Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Cuba and faculty from Cornell and from colleges across the country offered commentary on these causes of environmental degradation in Latin American cities.
"Urban transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean has brought with it a new environmental crisis, one that cannot be explained as a symptom of overpopulation or underdevelopment," said Barbara Lynch, professor and director of Cornell's Program in International Studies in Planning, who coordinated the workshop.
Chief among the symptoms of the deepening environmental crisis is industrial pollution.
Lynch reported on pollution in Santiago, a city of 500,000 in the northern Dominican Republic. A free-trade industrial zone implemented to increase employment in Santiago through the production of textiles, clothes, paper goods, cigars and electronic equipment has contributed to a growing, but unacknowledged, pollution problem, she said.
"Environmental contamination is exacerbated by the accumulation of solid and liquid wastes due to the lack of adequate infrastructure, the absence of technical and administrative capacity on the part of the local government and the lack of control over real estate speculation," Lynch reported. "The free-trade zone lacks a waste-water treatment plant, allowing untreated waste water to spill into nearby waterways, and if not reusable, solid waste from industry in the free-enterprise zone and nearby industrial plants is hauled in open trucks to a municipal garbage dump."
Despite residents' complaints about respiratory problems and negative publicity in the local media, little has been done to clean up the water supply or address the issues of open sewers or informal solid waste dumps, she said.
Other urban areas and rivers, Lynch maintained, suffer similar fates. In the end, she said, Santiago is paying a stiff price for implementing new technologies without developing the systems to regulate their use and to dispose of their waste products properly.
Nations that fail to address industrial pollution and its accompanying health hazards are "gambling that economic growth will exceed the future costs of environmental contamination and remediation," contends James Platner, director of the Chemical Hazards Information Program of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations Extension Division. "This may result in near-permanent contamination and damage to the workforce where economic growth is inadequate such that nations may never have the resources to clean up these problems or to adequately compensate workers or the public once the damage is incurred."
Platner said planners, engineers and industrial hygienists should be consulted early on regarding industrial development initiatives to help anticipate hazards and minimize risks.
"Failing to require employer/polluter controls will lead to a greater burden of injured or disabled workers, increased health care costs, reduced productivity, reduced quality of life and contaminated or destroyed ecosystems," he said. "This may slow development of higher skill, higher capital processes where product quality is more likely to be impacted and where individual worker productivity is increasingly critical."
But, Platner concluded, "There must be political and social will to act when hazards are anticipated."
An example of how political and social will can create positive results was presented by Johanna W. Looye, assistant professor in the School of Planning at the University of Cincinnati, who discussed the clean-up of the Carioca River that runs through Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In 1989 masses of raw sewage were discovered washed ashore on Flamingo Beach, located in a middle-class area of Rio de Janeiro. A neighborhood group immediately took action, initiating discussions with government agencies and launching an aggressive media campaign that pressured government officials to act. The group's activities, which included a public education campaign on the importance of a clean river, drew support from other interest groups, who also joined in the fight for cleaner water. To halt the dumping of raw sewage, the neighborhood groups representing the middle class sought improvements in trash collection and sanitation systems in the poor neighborhoods, where the sewage leak was identified.
By 1994, much progress had been made on the clean-up project, including the construction of a diversion canal and repair of sewer lines.
Looye said the success of the project is due, in large part, to the participation of and cooperation among community groups representing different socio-economic classes. "The fact that this project never became a formal document allowed different neighborhood groups to define the 'same' project in its different terms which allowed them to cooperate," she said. "In this case, the middle-class groups viewed it as environmental clean-up while the favela (shantytown) groups thought of it as basic sanitation. The informal nature of the collaboration enabled the lower-income groups to work alongside the middle-income groups without automatically adopting the goals of that group."
Politics, she said, also helped bring about a quick resolution to the Carioca River pollution, as politicians saw the project as an opportunity to broaden their support base.
As part of the workshop, program participants took a tour of the Ithaca city water and sewer facilities, during which Ithaca City Planner Matthys Van Cort offered insight into how small municipalities address environmental problems in the face of declining revenues and increasing external pressures on natural resources.