Coming from the successful session set up in the 9th EUGEO congress in Barcelona, in which this topic had more than 30 presentations, we would like to keep this congress as a place of interaction of human and physical geographers to expose, analyse and discuss the effects of the Anthropocene actions in water and, more specifically, in fluvial urban systems.

On this occasion, we would like to centre the topic of the session on the recuperation of altered river systems in urban areas. A strong debate between greening or renaturalization of urban rivers is undergoing, and it is highly likely that no clear answer to this debate could be established (Farguell and Santasusagna, 2024).

Greening refers to the creation of new green areas in cities for leisure purposes, priorizing the sociability of the river space. These projects usually enjoy great social acceptance as they are seen as a way of using the river space as a healthy environment which provides environmental, educational and leisure values. However, this position often forgets that the river is an active geomorphic agent that changes according to rain events, transports water and sediment, and needs more space than that one provided within an urban area.

On the other hand, renaturalization focuses on the restoration of its ecological functioning and structure by improving the water quality of the river, recovering the natural regime, or the hydro-geomorphological processes involved. This approach often limits the accessibility of people to the river because priority to natural fauna and flora development, and river channel shape conservation is given. Despite it, it also increases the quality of the river environment and hence, the quality of the city itself.

Under these premises, in this session we would like to draw your attention on the presentation of cases involving greening, renaturalization or other situations that improve somehow the river sections flowing through a city, and how the cities cope with the interaction of river systems flowing through them during extreme events.

Farguell and Santasusagna, 2024. Urban and Metropolitan Rivers. Ed. Springer, ISBN: 978-3-031-62640-1, 306 pp. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-62641-8