Hidden rivers

Hidden Rivers addresses the challenge faced by river courses across urbanized territories. Historically rivers marked the centers of a new civilization, whereby its natural fluvial sources nourished the land with biodiverse ecosystems. However today these watercourses no longer serve as the vital link between inhabitants and natural environments, in fact, they have become increasingly exploited and fragmented across the landscape. As a consequence of the push towards rapid urbanization and industrialization, riverways have become gradually canalized, channeled underground, exploited, and reconstructed.  Subsequently stripped from its natural ecologies, as an infrastructurally controlled water resource managed for various use in urban, agriculture, and other industrial purposes including energy.

The modification of river courses into more hydraulic states of infrastructure has not only disconnected water streams from natural water ecosystems functions but also resulted in water management being less transparent in society.  Thus, our unawareness of how current-day rivers are transformed for different water controls has resulted in the degradation of the ecological states of water ecosystems, paradoxically resulting in worsened flooding events, pollution, and more severe climate change impacts.

The workshop shall investigate the natural ecosystems, cultural landscapes, and hydraulic infrastructures surrounding contemporary watercourses through interdisciplinary dialogues between city experts, ecologists, engineers, and urbanists. The aim of Hidden Rivers is to understand the current rationale behind the constructed state of urban rivers by building knowledge about different procedures taken by water actors (in urban water management, the agriculture industry, energy generation) and to post rationalize on existing water systems by answering the following question,

"how could the relationship of urban rivers be reconsidered between humans and nature?"

To answer the question, we shall explore multifunctional ecosystems design, the workshop activities shall take place across the multidisciplinary analysis of an urban river, with a focus on drawing the river, its hydraulic systems, and surrounding ecologies.