Bringing together a range of international and interdisciplinary scholars from the fields of architecture, planning, urban design, landscape ecologies and the humanities, this volume describes the relationships of cities with their hydro proximities and examines how these relationships are established, enlarged and compromised. Often the narratives of hydro urbanities are about the decisive acts of physical making (construction) and un-making (demolition and dismembering) of the sectional transept that critically separates, yet inherently connects these urbanities to water. The volume focuses on the description, mapping and interrogation of this complex liminal zone of incessant human intervention. It questions how the latent and frequently overt actions of human agency define the character of these sites and what the specific design politics are that create the architecture of the urban-hydro edge and pre-mediate its formal qualities. The volume also examines how a particular kind of architectural and urban spatiality is defined through the potomology of the idiosyncratic (and occasionally predictable) riverine zone, and asks why some urban centres completely ’occupy’ the hydro edge, while others ’move away’ from it.
