Yofyros: A River Beyond Banks

Abstract

In a context of neglect for natural resources, formerly guiding cores of cultural development and revealed in a constitution of public spaces - due to the urban and economic development in the city of Iraklion, Crete, this project aims at exploring, understanding and revealing the potentials of Yofyros river as an actor to facilitate, enhance, and connect living-with-water in the nature, the field, and the city.

In Yofyros landscape human activities and environmental imbalance are inscribed, and -in terms of use and movement, seasonal interventions for flood protection, and lack of urban planning- it is a fact that the river is pressed in a “corset” made of built irrationalities. As a physical space, it does not belong nor is included in the structure and the organization of the urban tissue, and essentially, its significance, as a part that preexists and can reinforce the public space of the city, is ignored. When it overflows, it floods the city and the outskirts, claiming more space, but also damaging houses, farming, and infrastructure. As a place with cultural and symbolic role it is rejected from the urban memory. Flood events are relatively frequent, and in combination with the contemporary fast building- they displace locals and direct stakeholders living in adjacency to the river, away from the values embedded in it.

Thus, this project suggests that the locals should become actively engaged and committed to the place in their everyday life and through a physical experience that promotes further interpretation and bonds with the material and immaterial heritage of the location. The landscape biography approach was drawn upon and from the discovery of existing spatial and physical elements that specify the developing relation between the locals and the river, by defining also the main authors of the landscape, and they become the main drivers of this research and the on-site analysis, in order to retrieve multifaceted meanings of the place, their in-between connections, and their potentials for further interventions.

Interventions are guided through the notion of “bridge” that situates the physical landscape and its intellectual interpretation on the ground, as it, upon itself, has both spatial and symbolic meaning. Bridge as a physical structure is dealt with the incorporation of existing pedestrian bridges and the addition of new ones, emerging to connect spaces of long-term value, and derelict spaces that are newly envisioned and intervened to reinforce already operating programs by also including their surrounding, and improve environmental issues, while through the trails they form, they provide users with “new” perceptions and mental connections with the existent and its context.