“Destrucción creativa” de la red hídrica de Santiago de Cali, Colombia

Abstract

The growth of the city of Cali (Colombia), located in the Cauca river valley, was characterized by expanding its urban perimeter over strategic ecosystems and transforming three rivers (Cañaveralejo, Meléndez and Lili) into a single sewage channel through civil infrastructure works. The central thesis of this article is that this urban development is an example of the principle of "creative destruction" of modernity: destroying nature to redesign territory (Uribe, 2020); in other words, destroying strategic ecosystems to urbanize spaces and incorporate them to real estate speculation, the construction business and urbanism, that is, to the urban land market, whose main strategy for this city has been to transform rural land into urban land. Therefore, this article analyzes urban development from the environmental point of view and reveals how the dominant elites of the region made decisions from the scenarios of the municipal administration in the past, which influenced the difficult environmental conditions of the present city. Present conditions not only express the environmental problems existing today but also foresee an environmentally and ecologically unsustainable future for the city and the region. Methodologically, we resorted to the strategies of environmental history, historical geography and political ecology. Documentary research and case studies were used. The result is the verification of this process of territorial transformation that turned a geographic space characterized by the abundance of wetlands and large lakes into a totally urbanized space incorporated into the perimeter of the city.