Learning from small urban rivers and the people who steward them: How grassroots expertise can inform policy at the intersection of nature recovery and planning

What are the tensions in current policy regarding urban river restoration? How can policymakers learn from the locally embedded expertise of people living with and caring for urban rivers?

Drawing on research focused on place-making and urban rivers in the London Borough of Lewisham, this paper argues that these forms of good practice can be learned from and scaled up.

The paper first sets out the ambitions and tensions in recent national and local policy regarding urban river restoration. We use three empirical examples of case studies to demonstrate how local river organisations respond to these challenges by innovative practices. These include stewardship and care, meaning regular practical maintenance and action; advocacy and scrutiny whereby groups engage in debates about planning; and partnership working where mechanisms are in place to enable groups to share knowledge with other stakeholders and inform decision making.

The paper is based on a year-long project ‘Place-making and the rivers of Lewisham’ carried out at the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths (University of London) that combined archival research on planning documents and a policy review with an in-depth qualitative study.

Key themes

Urban rivers; river restoration; place-making; city planning; stewardship; care; advocacy; London, environmental volunteering.

Dr Emma Jackson is an urban sociologist and research consultant working on practices of place, belonging and the city. She is an Associate at Art of Regeneration, Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the LSE, and Emeritus Professor at Goldsmiths. She was formerly Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths. Emma is an editor of The Sociological Review and a trustee of the IJURR Foundation.

Dr Louise Rondel is a Research Fellow in Sociology at Brunel University of London where she works on projects on urban planning and community engagement. Her research interests include lived experiences of cities, urban materialities, the uneven distribution of air pollution, infrastructure, and questions of socio-environmental inequality. Louise is the co-founder of Infrastructural Explorations, a series of urban walking workshops which invite participants to critically engage with the impacts of infrastructure on the city.