Water pollution is all about quantities: how much of a polluting substance is released and how big a volume of water it is released into. A small quantity of a toxic chemical may have little impact if it is spilled into the ocean from a ship. But the same amount of the same chemical can have a much bigger impact pumped into a lake or river, where there is less clean water to disperse it.

 

Water pollution almost always means that some damage has been done to an ocean, river, lake, or other water source

 

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the city faced an urgent need for new infrastructure, owing to the demands of transforming its image and the living conditions of its inhabitants. The modernization of Bogotá necessitated the transformation of public and private spaces following European and North American paradigms of hygiene, ornamentation, and morality. While the city grew in population and infrastructure, the volume of waste produced by the population increased too. Waste materiality and placing in the urban setting changed rapidly. The industrial capitalist economy brought not only the settlement of a new working class in certain urban areas but also resulted in challenges to the urban rivers that played fundamental roles as part of the waste system. This initiated a technology-driven process of water domestication that was parallel to the intensification of water pollution.

The demand of the growing population and changing economy on river basins lowered the volume of water that supplied fountains and aqueducts, thus reducing the volume of water that transported waste from streets to rivers. The appearance of the rivers and the quality of their waters began to deteriorate, and citizens' health worsened.