In an interview with the program Panorama X of Radio X Quinta Región, Esteban Undurraga, development manager of Las Salinas, and Salvador Donghi, member of the scientific committee that designed the Las Salinas Sanitation Project, emphasized the importance of applying a formula that allows remediation of the Las Salinas area in a safe and non-invasive way for the community. In this sense, the environmental expert emphasized that “there is almost infinite evidence that bioremediation is the most appropriate process in urban contexts because it does not generate environmental impacts”. Regarding the concern of certain groups about the lack of knowledge for this type of process, Donghi was emphatic that “this is not a project that I am improvising…I was recently in Turin, Italy…today bioremediation in Turin is an industry and the company with which the Salinas is advised has more than 300 bioremediation projects in Italy alone”. He also explained that the idea of this proposal is that it can be replicated throughout the country to recover contaminated sites in urban areas. In this sense, he indicated that “on the success of this project we can take a much more ambitious step and go to contaminated land, such as Quintero-Puchuncaví”. For his part, Esteban Undurraga explained that the generation of a future urban project on the land obeys Viña’s original vision, “(Las Salinas) is a land that has an urban vocation”. In this sense, he added that what Las Salinas proposes is “a new centrality for Viña del Mar and, therefore – unlike the homogeneous projects to which people are accustomed, the second home towers overlooking the sea – this is completely different, this is a project that aims at mixed use, to create local economy, create a business center, students, cultural infrastructure associated with the park system, community services systems, etc.”. Finally, Salvador Donghi highlighted the fundamental role of community participation in processes of this type, emphasizing that participation works “when projects are discussed with the community and the community is willing to take into account the technical background provided by the academy”. In this respect, Undurraga commented that “for us the interaction and reception of people’s observations is very valuable; our project has in fact mutated and evolved thanks to these observations”.
