The activity was highlighted by the invitation extended to a neighbor of the community adjacent to the project, Pablo Roncagliolo of the Anakena Condominium, to present his opposition to the project, mainly based on the desire that the land be donated by the company to build a public park, which, he said, would allow modification of the remediation system currently proposed by the company, bioremediation, which generates fear among the neighbors. Esteban Undurraga, development manager of Las Salinas and speaker at the conference, emphasized the need to decontaminate the land beyond what is done later and stressed the thoroughness of the work to be carried out, faithfully respecting the country’s existing air and noise standards, which means that the remediation alone will take five years; He also highlighted the safety provided by bioremediation, since it corresponds to natural biological processes, in an industry and technology that is highly consolidated at international level. He also indicated that the current view of those who oppose the project “is a very binary view, either it is a mega-tower or a park; we propose a project that is as balanced as possible, we seek a harmonious development that manages to capture as many virtues as possible and minimizes as many negative externalities as possible,” he said. David Luza, dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the PUCV, commented on the complexity of generating a harmonious development that requires the participation of the community, highlighting the spirit of dialogue and the willingness to evolve on the part of Las Salinas, something that is not commonly seen in the region. Finally, Pablo Trivelli, an academic from Universidad Mayor and Universidad Di Tella in Buenos Aires, stressed the importance of being transparent in this type of investment and clearly establishing the management model. He also stated that “an urban proposal will always have opponents, no matter how good the project is, because the city is like that”. Trivelli called on Las Salinas to indicate what is to be gained from the project. In this respect, Undurraga indicated that Las Salinas is not a traditional real estate company that rents a business, but was created by Empresas Copec to take charge of an initiative that is not its core business; in this sense, there is a mandate to do so with fiscal responsibility, since Empresas Copec is governed by the shareholders’ law, so it works with the money of the company and of those who have shares in the company. Finally, he clarified that the mandate is to recover all that has been spent and not to make as much money as possible, which allows the project to be assigned almost double the amount of public space established in the Community Regulatory Plan.
