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-**About the Creek**
-The Limas Creek (Quebrada Limas) is a small but signiﬁcant tributary of the Tunjuelo River, which in turn ﬂows into the larger Bogotá River, one of Colombia’s principal waterways. Within the Ciudad Bolívar-the poorest administrative district of Bogotá-the Limas Creek represents both an ecological and social frontier in the city’s southern periphery.
-The Tunjuelo River follows the general course of south to north through the city, with its source in the wetlands of the southern Bogotá Savanna, the remains of the old Lake Humboldt. It joins the Limas Creek, which originates on the northern slopes of Ciudad Bolívar, and together they continue downstream, part of a larger hydrological network flowing into the Bogotá River basin.
-This is an interconnected system that underlines how Bogotá's urban hydrology is layered and entangled, where geography and ecology meet social inequality within the most marginalized landscapes of the city.
-**Pollution and waste | An Interpretation by the Creek**
-Quebrada Limas River of Bogotá suffers from heavy pollution due to the improper disposal of solid waste and wastewater from untreated domestic and industrial sources from surrounding informal urban settlements. Therefore, different waste management areas, such as the Recicladora Los Sauces site, are located very close to the creek, increasing its exposure to contamination.
-While infrastructural development in the nearby areas can be mapped clearly, it remains distributed unevenly: the regions adjacent to the creek reveal a stark lack of basic infrastructure and environmental management. However, this absence does not necessarily reflect infrastructural "need" but reflects complex socio-political and spatial inequalities within the urban fabric.
-Lucci (2025) suggests that the lack of environmental education and awareness among residents in low-income neighborhoods exacerbates this situation: The creek is used habitually as a dumping ground for domestic waste. Moreover, there are major rivers feeding into the city's waterways that are directly connected to the sewage system; one example is the Tunjuelo River, from which Quebrada Limas originates.
-Hence, the Quebrada Limas and rivers like it become at once victims and witnesses of the waste crisis of the city, bearing material traces of urban neglect and ecological degradation. This condition underlines with urgency the role of local stewardship and collective reinterpretation of these waterways, not simply as polluted channels to be managed, but as living systems whose restoration might redefine the relations of the city to its hydrological and ecological networks.
-__**Interactions and relations to pollution and waste**__
-) //Waste Management Systems//
-The relationship between waste management sites and local waterways in Ciudad Bolívar, for instance, epitomizes systemic governance failures and infrastructural gaps that contribute to enhanced environmental degradation. Waste facilities in the area, like Recicladora Los Sauces, function within a contextual management system characterized by limited regulation and containment measures, which contributes to the generation and migration of leachate-a toxic by-product in waste decomposition responsible for the contamination of both surface and groundwater. Investigations into Bogotá's waste systems, such as the Doña Juana Landfill and Limas Creek, show similar patterns of unregulated leachate release and illegal dumping along riparian zones flanking unauthorized settlements (Universidad Distrital, 2021; ResearchGate, 2024). These conditions exemplify a network of entangled actors-informal recyclers, municipal authorities, and residents-whose uncoordinated practices lead to pollution, ecological degradation, and marginalization of already vulnerable urban ecologies.
-) //Role of Residents//
-Due to lack of formal infrastructure and low environmental awareness, the residents along the river are unaware of its potential and impact to the larger ecosystem, there’s also the issue of economic struggle within the region; all these are factors that result in informal waste disposal into the creek by residents.
-Residents living within the area are the indirect sources of sewage waste due to domestic activities and these sewage wastes are one of the major sources of the rivers pollutions
-) //Artistic Movements like Museo Libre//
-The growing pollution of Limas Creek raised a collective awareness among the local residents and artists about the urgent need for environmental consciousness among the surrounding communities. A group of local artists, concerned by the deterioration of this creek and the lack of awareness about its ecological importance, started a project using public art and graffiti as an educational tool for transformation. Their work was to raise awareness of ensuring water bodies are clean and healthy, but also to reinstate the visual and social identity of the area-long stigmatized as an economically marginal and "dirty" space.
-As the artists put it, "Drawing from our own pockets we succeeded in bringing together more than a dozen artists who took their freely-formed ideas to various walls around the local Limas ravine, a small body of water that is of great importance to the neighbourhood Nueva Colombia, the place where the project was born. " (Survamos et al.). These artistic interventions made art an act of care and reclamation, through which walls were turned into canvases of collective responsibility. Here, the polluted creek got reimagined not just as a site of environmental degradation but as a cultural and ecological commons, a space where community identity, activism, and environmental restoration come together.
-BIBLIOGRAPHY
-Survamos et al. (no date) Image-maker in residence: Museo Libre, The Sociological Review. Available at: https://thesociologicalreview.org/image-maker-in-residence/museo-libre/ (Accessed: 07 November 2025).
-https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718525001794?fr=RR-2&ref=pdf_download&rr=99a5f5d03aea636d