Tracing Sustainable Urban River Space Transformations

Accelerated urbanization, climate change and the increasing need for resilience to environmental shocks and stresses have brought urban river spaces, as vital green-blue corridors and central public spaces, to the forefront of urban transformations worldwide. Yet, as urban design and planning research tackles the spatial implications of this trend, it faces the challenge of capturing the specificities and complexities of riverside urban areas. An essential part of that challenge is how boundaries are drawn in the analysis of urban areas surrounding rivers, as the resulting spatial units of analysis and decision-making can have a considerable impact on the sustainability of urban riverspace transformations.

With this workshop, we aim to further the discussion on sustainable urban riverspace transformations with a specific focus on how morphologically grounded spatial analysis can support decision-making while leveraging the social, environmental and economic potentials of urban riverspaces. Although the workshop is motivated to a large extent by the development of the City River Spaces (CRiSp) open-source software package for spatial delineation, the scope of the workshop is broader: understanding the analytical needs and ambitions of researchers and practitioners concerned with the transformation of urban river spaces and formulating concrete ways forward to meeting those needs and ambitions.

Through this workshop, we reach out to a diverse, growing and cross-disciplinary research community concerned with understanding urban riverspaces in an integrated and scalable way. We will explore case studies brought by the participants (urban rivers with specific analytical or transformation challenges) and use-cases of delineation across disciplines (e.g., slow-mobility network optimisation in urban river corridors, riverfront public space provision, urban heat island reduction, riverfront urban development, green-blue infrastructure planning). The choice of cases will not be limited to a specific geographic area as one of the objectives of the workshop is to reveal generalisable patterns of urban riverspace transformation.