Last week’s annual River Restoration Centre conference was buzzing with conversation about an exciting new publication by the EU LIFE+ funded RESTORE partnership project: the Rivers by Design manual.
Rivers by Design is subtitled A guide for planners, developers, architects and landscape architects on maximising the benefits of river restoration.
So it was always likely to be a key inspiration piece for urban river restorationists everywhere… and it’s true to its promise. In fact, we reckon Rivers by Design amounts to essential reading for anyone, community groups included, who might be contemplating ambitious rewilding plans for their stretch of urban, suburban or post-industrial stream or river.
Internationally-sourced step-by-step case studies range in scale from Calne’s (comparatively tiny) River Marden and east London’s Mayes Brook…
… to Seoul’s Cheonggecheon stream (daylighting by demolition of multi-storey motorways) and the massive 8km restoration of Munich’s mighty Isar River.
Other chapters cover the benefits of improving rivers, economic valuation and funding, defining what you want to achieve, and effective project delivery.
Even if your current plans are slightly more modest than whole-river reconstruction on a floodplain or catchment scale, who knows where a little inspiration might lead?
Rivers by Design is freely available to download as a pdf from the RESTORE website: here at Urbantrout we highly recommend you grab your copy today!
(Image: RESTORE)
