Samenvatting

Girona is a city located in the river Ter Basin, in the Principality of Catalonia. The city’s convenient access to water played a role during the 19thcentury to quickly industrialise and modernise the city. Yet, not at the cost of polluting the rivers and turning natural habitats, places of enjoyment into unwelcoming spaces. Besides, during the 20thcentury, the rivers were severely modified to avoid the city from getting flooded. Such modifications pretended to transform the rivers into canals, and at some areas even cover them, transforming the rivers into simple water paths and building water reservoirs upstream to provide Barcelona with tap water. Consequently, people detached themselves from the rivers, lost a sense of responsibility towards them, and became unprepared before floods. On the other hand, the rivers got excluded from the city daily life and lost part of their ecological functions. Nonetheless, the river is still part of the most recognised images of the city, and over the last decades, there have been efforts to recover the fluvial spaces. Public administrations passed a bill on sewage, treatment plants were built, and a social web of organisations advocates and works for the recovery and protection of the landscape before the destructive policy of governments. Nowadays, new factors are also leveraging these efforts, with a growing environmentalism movement and covid-19 changing people’s life routines. Such behavioural changes seem to indicate a cultural change towards Nature and the rivers.

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