CARDIMED Conference 2026: Bringing Urban Rivers Back to Life

Cities with rivers are beginning to see their urban waters anew. Across the world, municipalities and communities are questioning decades of canalisation and turning toward daylighting, ecological restoration, and the re-imagining of river corridors as vibrant socio-ecological spaces. Through voluntary dialogues, collective action, and creative resurfacing practices, urban groups are rekindling relationships between people and their waterways.

Against this backdrop, CARDIMED, in collaboration with Utrecht University and its Pathways to Sustainability programme, is organising the international conference “Bringing Urban Rivers Back to Life”, to be held on 22–23 September 2026 at Bar Beton, Utrecht.

Register for the CARDIMED conference.

The conference will bring together researchers, practitioners, planners, policy makers, and artists to explore what it truly means to bring urban rivers back to life: to renature, regenerate, and daylight them; to rethink governance and planning; and to co-create a shared manifesto for the rights to urban rivers. Through diverse case studies and interdisciplinary dialogue, participants will expand collective understanding and imagination around the future of urban rivers.

The conference programme will feature plenary sessions alongside seed sessions—small, interactive workshops designed to explore emerging ideas, projects, and collaborative working groups.

Seed sessions are expected to align with one of the following thematic aims:

• Presenting and discussing Nature-based Solutions addressing urban river regeneration challenges (engineering and landscape planning)
• Examining how urban river regeneration and renaturing are planned, governed, and managed, including opportunities and tensions (planning and governance)
• Debating spatial transformations, politics of space, and how Rights to and for Nature can play out in urban river regeneration processes (politics and justice)