One Garden to Rule Them All? Exploring Recent Changes in Spain’s Urban Riverscapes

Recent transformations of urban rivers have opened the door to the implementation of urban policies that seek to prioritize uses of sociability for a city’s residents. Large river parks, recreational areas, sports fields and tracks and cycling routes have come to epitomize this paradigm shift in the river-citizen relationship. However, there are certain aspects of this transformation of uses that need to be critically examined in the broader debate as to whether this “gardenscape model”—to use the terms in which it is currently being presented—is the one best suited to urban life in the coming decades. Based on the study of several urban rivers in Catalonia (Spain), a set of recommendations are made regarding the need to reformulate certain objectives of this model to address the series of problems identified, most notably the uniformity and homogenization that the implementation of a common solution to environments characterized by their rich diversity and complexity represents.