Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Water and soil pollutants are a controversial issue due to the problems they cause to modern agriculture. Population growth has caused the expansion of cultivated areas, overexploitation of natural resources, as well as problems of availability and degradation of resources. This situation is aggravated due to the inappropriate management of industrial waste, pesticides, and fertilizers which contaminate with organic and inorganic elements by persisting in the environment and dispersing through bioaccumulation processes in animal and plant species, contributing to the imbalance of the ecosystems. This review article presents an overview of the main pollution factors that contaminate natural resources and specifically, the situation facing agriculture in Mexico and other countries due to the transport of chemical compounds to crops.

Reviewing the forms of access to energy for indigenous women in isolated rural areas requires an intersectional approach (race, gender, environment) in order to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the social organization of care in these communities. Having good quality energy sources and technologies allows water to be pumped, food to be cooked and refrigerated, work and/or study hours to be extended through lighting, the use of different devices intended for communication (television, radio, computer, mobile telephony). In northwestern Argentina, indigenous populations access energy in conditions of inequity and inequality. Therefore, the work raises the debate on these scenarios, reviews related experiences and points out aspects to consider for the design of public policies that are appropriate to these territories.

Since the intervention of a company in the Wichi community of San Ignacio de Loyola, a socio-technical alliance was created that survives to this day and led to changes in the economic flows of the area and also structural modifications in the habitat conditions, in particular, access to household electricity and running water through a well. The case demonstrates how socio-technical alliances can be part of paternalistic welfare processes, without thereby ceasing to bring benefits to the populations that are part of these trajectories. It is proposed to incorporate an intersectional look at the socio-technical perspective to contribute not only to a better understanding of these cases but also to a more efficient development of artifacts and solutions. For this article, a fieldwork was carried out that included notes, documentation retrieval and interviews with key informants. 

There is an effect of migration on urban concentrations and a segregated growth model of the 4 large Bolivian cities (Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, La Paz and El Alto). Around 2012, the face of a migrant woman from the Bolivian highlands directed towards the peri-urban spaces of the largest cities reveals the search for a response to a range of dissatisfactions. On the other hand, international immigrants from Brazil, the United States and Argentina are predominantly men who go more strongly to the residential spaces of large cities. In the case of international immigrant women, they come from Spain and Italy regardless of the space of residence, residential or peripheral. In the field of international emigration, men go more strongly to Argentina and Brazil, both of which border Bolivia. Instead, there is a feminization of the migration towards Spain, Italy and Chile. The databases of the national population and housing censuses from 1900 to 2012 are used and, in order to demonstrate the spatially segregated migratory directionality, the surveys on transnational migrations carried out in the cities of Cochabamba, La Paz y El Alto are used. These databases were obtained thanks to the financing of the Belgian cooperation of CIUF in Cochabamba, and Fundación Esperanza and CAN, for the cases in the cities of La Paz and El Alto. The results of the application of the multivariate model ratify the existence of socio-spatial segregation and socioeconomic inequalities, the exclusion and vulnerability of the poorest households residing in the periphery of the cities studied is eloquent.

After 22 years of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) being in force, the new river basin management plans for the third planning cycle (2022-2027) are being approved in all the countries of the European Union. A common framework of objectives, methodology, spatial scale and timetable are applied, as in our case study, the Guadalquivir river basin. Following the analysis methodology proposed by the Observatory of Public Water Policies (OPPA) since the first planning cycle throughout Spain, we identified in our case, among others, the following major problems: a level of water bodies status deterioration higher than it is recognised in official documents; the overestimation of natural resources in the context of climate change; inaccuracies in the data on agricultural water demand; neglect of the ecological, social and territorial problems of crop intensification; and analysis of alternatives with preconceived solutions. The main article’s conclusions are the need to reconceptualise permanent water stress, no longer confusing it with extraordinary drought; and, inevitably, the need to overcome, or at least reduce, chronic governance deficits.

The first permanent settlement on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos Archipelago –about a thousand kilometres from thecontinental Ecuador– landed at the beginning of the 20th century. The Norwegian colony Sociedad Anónima Santa Cruz built its habitat anchoring their material and immaterial everyday practices to the island, seeking to maintain the territorial ties with their places of origin. A decade later, the Kastdalen family sailed, carrying their home on their back, to expand their domesticity throughout the island territory. Their house overlooking the sea is an architectural space that enables the construction of spatial narratives that articulate the Norwegian way of living in the archipelago through its inhabitants’ life stories, ideas, objects, and everyday practices. This expanded narrative written from a gender experience restores the memory of women pioneers, re-signifying the material and immaterial legacy of the Norwegian families. These stories move across different scales and territorial layers, interweaving the temporal space with the subjects that build it. By making evident the processes of habitat construction, it is possible to re-locate and re-territorialize the meanings and everyday practices that have been disrupted by migration.

The growth of favelas and other spaces occupied by poverty in medium-sized Brazilian cities - a result, at the same time, of the intensification of persistent structural issues, such as rural/city migration - has pointed to the reconfiguration of these spaces. In this sense, the examination of the life trajectories of migrants makes it possible to highlight the dynamics of poor spaces inhabited by them and the emergence of new actors in the public scene of the city. In addition to the conceptual discussion about the trajectory of life, the article works on the concept of popular class, as well as discussing notions such as urban periphery and favela. To investigate the theme, based on qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were carried out in an urban occupation that emerged in Florianópolis in 2012. For the article, two life trajectories of local leaders were analyzed. Through them, it was possible to better unfold this reality and present new configurations of the growth process in the spaces inhabited by the population, its complexity and elucidate the issue of social and economic vulnerability in Brazilian cities.

For decades, territorial and urban planning has enjoyed great professional and political acceptance as a desirable practice and great social prestige. The basic conceptual-methodological support is based on the idea that the city and the territory are rational systems that, once their dysfunctions have been diagnosed and their potentialities identified, it is possible to design a preferable state because by applying the appropriate measures the system (city or territory) will evolve along the foreseen path. However, time and again we observe that reality resists to behave as decided in the planning. In many cases, the directive purpose conditions and orients the evolution of the system, but there is no strict implementation of what is planned in the territory or in the city. This difficulty could be due to insufficient precision and efficiency techniques, but this article argues that the cause lies in the fact that the city and the territory are living systems that follow evolutionary trajectories typical of autopoietic systems and not the behaviours of mechanical systems. Likewise, an organizational scheme typical of living systems is proposed as a conceptual and methodological scheme for planning the city and the territory as living systems.

Within the migration-city intersection studies, the territorial dimension of migrants associations presence is analyzed from quantitative and qualitative strategies, applied to the most populated municipality within Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region: La Matanza. To recognize and analyze the territorial dimension of the associations in their diversity, both in origins and functions, is a barely explored axis whithin the incorporation of migrant population studies in the metropolis. Far from constituting itself as a mere descriptive factor, the territorial analysis of migrants associations in La Matanza shows interesting relationships between locations, socio-territorial inequalities and historical-structural contexts in which these institutions were created. European associations are found in more consolidated sectors, while Latin American communities experienced markedly excluding situations, getting access to marginal spaces. The differences of origin, age and capitals configure hierarchies in the associations’ territorialization forms.

In the peripheral and border framework that constitutes Andalusia, in a historical moment in which economic crises follow one another and overlap (2008 crisis, current COVID-19 pandemic...), we wonder about how the settlement of the migrant population occurs, what characters contain the specific territories and habitats in which it is located, and what limitations and opportunities can be recognized from the point of view of social inclusion, intercultural encounter and coexistence. In this sense, we try to address the influence that the market in the agricultural sector and its needs for cheap labor may have, as well as the way in which different immigrant landings occur in disadvantaged peripheral neighborhoods of cities; in both cases, different factors seem to lead to relationships characterized by the loss of the culture of dialogue and by the predominance of a purely multicultural model. In the former, this can be linked to the temporary nature and productive dimension of an agricultural activity that increasingly demands a subordinate and marginalized foreign labor force, while in the latter, the segregating dynamics of urban space are gaining notoriety.