This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Segregation is a multidimensional phenomenon deeply intertwined with historical, social and ecological contexts. Yet this more integrated perspective has received limited attention in the Global South.
A recent study focusing on the city of Valdivia offers an exception, examining three key historical moments: colonization, the devastating 1960 earthquake and current struggles to protect urban wetlands. The research, published in the journal PNAS, was carried out by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Chile and abroad specializing in ecology, hydrology and anthropology, in collaboration with a broad network of public-sector and civil society stakeholders, including the municipality, SENAPRED, Chile's Ministry of Public Works (MOP) and civil society organizations. The study was co-led by Elizabeth M.
Cook of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies and Olga Barbosa, associate director of the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity (IEB) and professor at Universidad Andrés Bello, together with Jason Sauer of the Oregon Department of Energy and Karin Weil of Chile's National Cultural Heritage Service. Using the concept of the Ecology of Segregation, the researchers explored how socioecological dynamics—including socioeconomic inequality, structural racism and colonial legacies—shape the urban environment and, in turn, are shaped by it. Their findings show that current patterns of segregation are the result of complex, multidimensional processes that differ in important ways from those more commonly described.
The analysis also considered the displacement of Indigenous Mapuche communities during the conquest, the spatial restructuring and uncontrolled urban development that followed the 1960 earthquake and urban expansion and wetland occupation influenced by governance shaped by neoliberal economic policies. Barbosa, a professor at Universidad Andrés Bello, explains that the study grew out of a collaboration examining how climate change and global change more broadly are shaping cities and affecting both biodiversity and people. The publication also draws on previous research conducted by the scientist, including work mapping Valdivia and modeling what the city looked like before and after the earthquake.
That research found, for example, that many areas providing substantial ecosystem services to the population were not formally designated as green spaces, despite functioning as such because they included fragments of wetlands and other landscapes. "In this recent work, which highlights the value of natural and social capital simultaneously, we wanted to discuss what happens with segregation in cities from an ecological perspective and in the context of Latin America. Through this study, we sought to bring forward questions related to environmental and socioeconomic justice.
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," says the researcher. According to the study's authors, Valdivia, the capital of the Los Ríos region in southern Chile, has a unique sociocultural and ecological history. With a population of approximately 166,000, the city lies within the Valdivian temperate rainforest biodiversity hotspot, an area characterized by high species richness and endemism.
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