The IGSD Cities group welcomed Katherine Illanes and Carmen Herrera from the Instituto de Investigación y Acción para El Desarrollo Integral (IIADI, Bolivia) to present their ongoing action research in our seminar series "Urban Latin America."
The seminar focused on an overview of factors contributing to water contamination in the Katari river connecting the city of El Alto with Lake Titicaca. This watershed suffers from severe deterioration in water and soil quality due to urban, industrial, mining, and livestock activities. Solid and liquid waste discharged into the river contain high levels of chemical, biological, and pathological contaminants, some of which can cause genetic damage. The levels of pollution in the Katari river and Lake Titicaca exceed their capacity for regeneration. Pollution leads to a loss of environmental quality in urban areas and reduced productivity in rural areas, deteriorating the quality of life and health of the most vulnerable small producers and their families, many of them of Indigenous descent. In this critical context, IIADI generates socio-technical solutions to support affected urban, peri-urban and rural Indigenous communities.
Katherine Illanes and Carmen Herrera are research staff at IIADI and visited the School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield as part of a secondment linked to the Horizon 2020 staff exchange initiative "Contested Territories."