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Drawing Attention  

CROCUS – Channel RestOration in Contaminated Urban Settings
CrocusRiver restoration schemes are increasingly proposed as key components of urban regeneration programmes, having the potential to contribute to meeting a range of quality-of-life goals. However, urban watercourse sediments are also recognised to contain elevated levels of a range of pollutants. Hence, a potential conflict can be seen to be emerging between the social and ecological goals of urban river restoration and the possible risk to public health of increased access to urban rivers which may contain contaminated sediments.

The Flood Hazard Research Centre and the Urban Pollution Research Centre at Middlesex University, in collaboration with the Geography Department at Queen Mary College, University of London have recently undertaken a research seminar series under the auspices of the NERC-ESRC transdisciplinary seminar series initiative to tackle this issue by exploring tensions between the social, environmental and physical goals in this contentious area, an issue made all the more timely by the on-going implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive.

CROCUS has brought together leading researchers from the social and physical sciences with key practitioners from a variety of governmental, non-governmental and consultancy backgrounds for a series of six seminars over a period of two years to brainstorm key issues associated with urban river restoration - from the culture-nature debate to the identification and communication of risk management solutions. The seminars have involved a combination of keynote presentations, discussion groups and field visits.

The major outputs of CROCUS are the identification of key research questions and the development of multi-disciplinary proposals through which such questions may be addressed. These outputs aim to be of direct relevance to discussions, on enhancing the quality-of-life in urban areas, between Local Authorities, community groups and environment protection agencies within the UK, as well as more widely in Europe.


fhrc Queen Mary University of London Middlesex University


Workshop Outputs

  Workshop 1 - Restored Rivers as Culture, January 2006 (10.7 MB)
  Workshop 2 - Restored Rivers as Contested Nature: Engineered Components
of Urban Lifestyles, May 2006 (8.76 MB)
  Workshop 3 - River Restoration and Public Health (i) Problems and Issues,
July 2006 (12.2 MB)
  Workshop 4 - River Restoration and Public Health (ii) Methodologies
and Tools (9.29 MB)
  Workshop 5 - Policy, Governance and the Management of Restored Rivers
as 'Risk-prone Environments', March 2007 (5.33MB)
  Workshop 6 - Communicating and Managing Risk in Urban River Settings:
Towards Solutions, October 2007 (xxMB)

 


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