Towards a sociogeomorphology of rivers
Peter Ashmore
Department of Geography, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A5C2
a b s t r a c ta r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 28 April 2014
Received in revised form 16 December 2014
Accepted 4 February 2015
Available online 27 February 2015
Keywords:
Rivers
Socio-nature
Sociogeomorphology
Anthropo-geomorphology
Urban
River restoration
While human impacts on rivers and other landforms have long been a component of geomorphic research, little
of this work explicitly includes insights into human agency from social science or recognises that in many cases
rivers can be considered to be hybrid co-productions or ‘socio-natures’. A socio-geomorphic approach proposed
here has parallels with some aspects of sociohydrology and can extend and enrich existing geomorphic explanations
of the morphology of, for example, urban rivers by explicitly recognising and working with the co-evolution of the
human and natural systems. Examples from recent literature illustrate ways in which these relationships can be
understood and analyzed, showing a range of socio-natural inﬂuences in particular contexts that have material
consequences for river morphology and recognising that events in the system have many forms. The approach
recognises the importance of contingency in time and place together with the role and nature of both local
and global knowledge. An important element of this approach is that it provides ways for understanding the
nature, position and intention of geomorphic and other scientiﬁc interventions as part of the system, for example
in the case of river restoration. This also leads to the need for reﬂexivity by geomorphologists and reconsideration
of the nature of geomorphological knowledge by those involved in such work and with respect to
sociogeomorphology as a whole.
© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The central concern of geomorphology is with ‘natural’ processes
and landforms and with enquiry and explanations based almost exclusively
in the natural sciences. Most textbooks in geomorphology
establish this view at the outset and in some cases it is explicit in the
title (e.g. Anderson and Anderson, 2010). In most cases the deﬁnitions
and the scope of geomorphology contain essentially nothing of the
role of socio-political processes as an element of contemporary geomorphology
and humans are seen almost always as separate from geomorphic
systems and impacting the natural system from the outside
(Urban, 2002; Haff, 2003).
The spatial and temporal frames of geomorphology are wide and in
many cases this ‘entirely natural’ framing is appropriate. But even
in studying contemporary and local landscapes over relatively short
time frames, in which these socio-political processes may be relevant,
geomorphologists have tended to seek pristine or wild (natural) landscapes
and to privilege those as the primary object of study for the
discipline (Urban, 2002) and against which human impact is measured.
In ﬂuvial geomorphology, highly modiﬁed rivers have generally been
either avoided as a subject for study or treated as deviating from natural.
In the latter case they are seen as an object for restoration to more
‘natural’ states and on which to practice and impose engineering
geomorphology from a technical point of view.
While the primary focus of geomorphology has been on ‘natural’
processes and landscapes, this is not to say that geomorphology as a
discipline has ignored human effects in the landscape; far from it.
Textbooks and research articles often describe human impacts on landforms
and landscape processes and the role of geomorphology in
documenting, managing and mitigating human impacts and hazards.
In this sense human impacts on landscapes and the recognition of
human-constructed landforms have long had a place in some accounts
of, for example, ﬂuvial geomorphology (Gregory, 2006; James and
Marcus, 2006). In this context the detailed development of “anthropogenic
geomorphology” as documentation, categorization and systematization
of anthropogenic landforms and impacts of a range of human
activities is notable (Szabo et al., 2010). This approach ﬁts into the
established scope of geomorphic studies of human-induced changes
to landforms and processes with the focus on documenting and quantifying
direct and indirect effects of human activities. In this account
humans are seen as interfering from the outside and disturbing the
natural order, human-constructed landforms are artiﬁcial, and humans
are seen as disturbing and upsetting natural equilibrium, changing
boundary conditions, adding ‘unnatural variability’ and creating harmful
effects. Anthropo- geomorphologists then work to measure, document
(Graf, 1996) and account for human impact and to conserve, protect
and repair landforms from damage (Szabo et al., 2010). There have
been several inﬂuential and useful analyses of the overall intensity of
landform and process modiﬁcation by human activity illustrating this
approach (Hooke, 1994, 1999; Douglas and Lawson, 2001; Haff, 2003,
2010, 2012; Price et al., 2011; Overeem et al., 2013) including analysis
Geomorphology 251 (2015) 149–156
E-mail address: pashmore@uwo.ca.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2015.02.020
0169-555X/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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of the “anthropic force” (Haff, 2002) in broad framings of landscape
dynamics.
An anthropo-geomorphic position in which humans are seen as
impacting nature and perturbing natural systems does not allow a
complete explanation of the role of humans within these systems, or
of the mutual evolution of the ‘human’ and ‘natural’ systems, and adheres
to a separation of the two. The position is untenable in situations
in which the landforms and processes are co-produced by the combined
human and ‘natural’ systems (Urban, 2002). Recognition of this concern
is apparent in the oft-repeated calls by geomorphologists to engage
more-fully with social sciences to better understand the integration of
the physical landscape and the human systems, or to establish a ‘cultural’
geomorphology (Gregory, 2000, 2006; James and Marcus, 2006;
Slaymaker, 2009; NRC, 2010; Harden et al., 2014). This arises in part
from explicit concern for landscape sustainability, restoration and
conservation and the need for co-development of a science of humanlandscape
systems (Harden et al., 2014; Wohl et al., 2014). However,
there has been little articulation of how this integration might be done
and what it would look like as a component of explanations and understanding
of landforms and landscapes. Wohl et al. (2014) identify
commonalities of conceptualizations among a wide variety of cognate
ﬁelds that might form a basis for proceeding, which is a useful starting
point, but even this kind of integration may be insufﬁcient as an epistemological
approach.
In terms of contemporary environmental geography and related
ﬁelds, many landforms in ‘human impacted’ and ‘restored’ landscapes
can be seen as hybrid manifestations (co-productions) of natureculture
( socio-natures) while at the same time raising the question of
whether there is a prior or separate “nature” (Eden et al., 2000; Urban,
2002; Castree, 2005; Bakker, 2009; Linton, 2010; Hartmann, 2011;
Bouleau, 2013; Di Balldassarre et al., 2013). Adopting a position of hybrid
socio-natures of landforms would enable geomorphologists to engage
in a more complete explanation of human-impacted and human
created landforms bringing the ﬁeld closer to understanding the why
of ‘human impact’ (Urban, 2002) and a reﬁned ability to model these
processes and landscapes at the level of human agency and intention
(Ertsen et al., 2014) within a more complete explanatory and predictive
framework.
The main goal in this paper is to present examples and show the
beneﬁts of taking this position. My use of “socio-geomorphic” is intended
to make a distinction from anthropo-geomorphology. Although
others (e.g. James and Marcus, 2006) have proposed that anthropogeomorphology
might explicitly include elements of socio-cultural
analysis, I use the term here to argue for a distinctive mode of enquiry
that explicitly approaches rivers as socio-natures and adopts some of
the methods and philosophies related to that idea. My use of the term
sociogeomorphology is partly connected with recent developments
in socio-hydrology (Hartmann, 2011; Sivapalan et al., 2011; Di
Baldassarre et al., 2013; Ertsen et al., 2014; Lane, 2014). However,
some distinctly different approaches have already emerged in that
ﬁeld (Lane, 2014). One is of socio-hydrology as a “quantitative science
of people and water, with the ambition to make predictions of water
cycle dynamics” with humans as a social force acting on water ﬂows
(Sivapalan et al., 2011). This is more analogous to what I have identiﬁed
as anthropo-geomorphology and it differs substantially from critical
and radical conceptions of the water cycle (Linton, 2010; Budds et al.,
2014; Linton and Budds, 2014) and socio-hydrology that recognises
constructivist accounts of hydrological science (and of science in general)
and the ways in which hydrologists’ interventions affect outcomes (Lane,
2014) with a goal to explicitly understand human-water systems
(Di Baldasarre et al., 2013). This is exempliﬁed by the concept of the
hydrosocial cycle in which water circulation is seen as a hybrid biophysical
and socio-political set of processes, explicitly contrasting with the
asocial and apolitical conception of the hydrological cycle (Budds et al.,
2014). Thus this approach to sociohydrology looks at the material ﬂows
of water along with the social and political practices, discourses and
power relations as an integral part of water ﬂows such that water and
society make and remake each other (Linton and Budds, 2014).
My proposition for sociogeomorphology is that geomorphological
understanding and explanation can usefully be broadened in some
circumstances by adopting the concept of co-production and of socionatural
systems of landforms, although the exact form of analysis will
depend on evolving philosophical positions and directions of development
of the idea. This ‘more social’, approach also recognises alternative
ways of framing environmental research and the nature of human
agency, and that processes are context-speciﬁc with the implication
that contingent understanding and explanation are the goals of enquiry
rather than generalised quantitative predictions of system dynamics
(Budds et al., 2014). It may also connect to more radical framings of
geomorphology such as the “ethno-geomorphology” recently proposed
by Wilcock et al. (2013). I also propose that this sociogeomorphic approach
can be developed within geomorphology and need not necessarily
involve inter-disciplinary studies and collaborations with, for
example, social science (and see Lane, 2014 on this point).
Here I introduce elements of this ‘more social’ approach in the case
of river morphology and ways in which explanations of river morphology
can be expanded through a more critical view (Lave et al., 2014; Tadaki
et al., 2014a) of rivers as co-productions of socio-geomorphic processes
(Bouleau, 2013). I do so by ﬁrst presenting a case of urban river morphology
illustrating ways in which ‘physical only’, anthropo-geomorphic
analysis limits understanding of morphological changes. I then move to
broaden the discussion using examples from other rivers and aspects of
ﬂuvial geomorphology in which analysis of the social aspects of the
system lead to expanded understanding. This points the way to future
development of the socio-nature of rivers. These examples identify
ways in which institutional power, nation-building, political history and
ideas, cultural norms and perceptions, socio-natural contingencies, environmental
activism, scientiﬁc constructs and ambitions, international
scientiﬁc projects, and the nature of, and motivation for, geomorphic
intervention, as well as ﬂuvial processes, can all be seen to play a role
in ‘explaining’ river morphology.
The consequences of this change in perspective include: a move to
more place-based, contingent and historical understandings of rivers;
the questioning of the role and goal of global-knowledges and predictive
explanations; the development of knew paradigmatic questions
and propositions; and the recognition that geomorphologists are actors
in the socio-geomorphic system whose conceptions and actions are
valid and necessary subjects of enquiry.
2. A case in urban river morphology
There has been substantial geomorphic analysis of the possible
effects of urban development on river morphology (Chin, 2006; Chin
et al., 2013). Analyses focus on changes of river morphology as a consequence
of the ‘impact’ of urbanization, primarily through documented
or assumed changes in stream-ﬂow hydrology and sediment delivery.
There has been very little generalization from this assemblage of studies
for a variety of reasons (Chin, 2006; James and Marcus, 2006). But even
if that generalization were accomplished it is questionable whether a
complete understanding of urban river morphology can be achieved
by this ‘physical only’ account that views hydrological change as simply
being imposed on the system by some set of urbanization processes, the
analysis of which is beyond the norms of geomorphic research.
Highland Creek watershed in the City of Toronto has an area of
about 100 km2
draining directly into Lake Ontario (Toronto Region
Conservation Authority (TRCA), 1999; Vocal-Ferencevic and Ashmore,
2012). Extensive forest clearance for agriculture occurred in the 18th
and 19th centuries as a consequence of European settlement. The dominant
agricultural land use was supplanted by urban development
between the early 1950s and the 1980s. Greater than 85% of the watershed
area is now urban land use (much of the remainder is riparian parkland
along the main river valleys) and 53% has impervious surfaces
150 P. Ashmore / Geomorphology 251 (2015) 149–156
(Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), 1999; Satgunarajah,
2009; Vocal-Ferencevic and Ashmore, 2012). Especially in the headwaters,
surface drainage was extended and modiﬁed and many of the
headwater channels are rectilinear, lined channels with trapezoidal
cross-sections.
One consequence of urbanization has been an abrupt change in the
stream-ﬂow regime of the river. A typical annual regime dominated
by spring snowmelt freshet and occasional storm events in summer
and fall has been transformed into an extremely ﬂashy ﬂow regime
with peak ﬂow events at almost any time of year and a comparatively
small spring freshet peak. Instantaneous maximum discharges are
now 5 or 6 times higher than those of nearby agricultural catchments
of similar area and of the pre-urban Highland Creek (TRCA, 1999;
O’Neill, 2008; McDonald, 2011).
After severe ﬂooding caused by Hurricane Hazel in 1954, the newlyestablished
Toronto Conservation Authority enacted a policy of clearing
any settlement from valley ﬂoors in the river systems of Toronto
(McLean, 2004). There are similar cases in other river systems in which
a single event or set of events set off a train of decision ‘events’, actions
and policies leading eventually to substantial modiﬁcations to river
morphology and function (e.g. Orsi, 2004). In Highland Creek the removal
and banning of any settlement from valley ﬂoors might have
allowed the rivers the space and time to adjust to streamﬂow changes
following urban development. However, this was quickly circumscribed
by construction of trafﬁc bridges for the new arterial grid roads, the use
of the valley for routing sanitary sewer systems, building at the top of
unstable valley-side bluffs, and the development of a recreational trail
system in the valleys, all of which necessitated the progressive protection
of infrastructure, channel straightening and engineered limits to
erosion of the river bed and banks. These decisions and actions (of planners,
developers, engineers and municipalities) collectively constrained
the morphological future of the river and the way in which the river was
viewed by these actors.
Highland Creek is almost an ideal inadvertent ﬂuvial geomorphic
experiment (Church, 1984) on the impact of human land-use change
on channel-forming ﬂows and channel morphology (Chin, 2006) within
a ‘physical-only’ approach. The river experienced a measurable, imposed
impact (large increase in channel-forming discharge) caused by
human activity. The consequences for channel morphology can be measured,
predicted and compared to theory and to empirically-derived
predictions of river channel adjustment. Deviation of the response
from predictions can be accounted for by uncertainty in the relevant
independent variables and predictive equations, and precision in observed
channel changes (McDonald, 2011). However, Highland Creek
was subject to substantial intervention in some reaches in the form of
channel engineering. In these cases standard channel regime formulas
yield inconsistent results and a full explanation of response depends
on knowing the intention, available knowledge and typical design practice
of the engineers and their role in the decision-making system. In
fact, in many cases a traditional geomorphic view might be that the
river is so extensively engineered as to be of no inherent geomorphic
interest – essentially the notion that ‘ the engineers did it’ is sufﬁcient
and the river then largely disappears from geomorphic view. In neither
the engineered nor the ‘physical only’ analysis is it the norm in geomorphology
to think about the problem in a larger context and explicitly
engage with those larger circumstances. For example, the land-use and
land-use policy changes and interactions against which this geomorphic
story played out had a signiﬁcant effect in determining the future of the
river, as did conceptions of, and technical interventions in, modifying
the river and protecting infrastructure. These are relevant to a full understanding
of the river morphology but are seldom analyzed as part of
geomorphological explanation.
The Highland Creek story does not end here. In August 2005 an
intense rainstorm affected the headwaters of Highland Creek, with
peak instantaneous ﬂows well in excess of the historic maxima. There
was extensive channel change and one instance of a major meander
cut-off causing the breakage of a sanitary sewer pipe. Similarly to Hurricane
Hazel in 1954, this event initiated a phase of extensive re-thinking
of the river and its valley and re-construction of several kilometers of
one of the main channels. At this point it becomes not only limiting,
but actually impossible, to explain the river morphology using a strictly
‘physical-only’ view. A major and intriguing factor in the need for this
shift to a socio-geomorphic view at this stage is that there was greater
and more direct intervention by various public, private sector and
community actors, as well as the application of ﬂuvial geomorphic
principles in analysis and design of the ‘new’ Highland Creek. Importantly
for geomorphological explanation, geomorphic consultants were
among those designing, in detail, realignments and the future morphology
and function of Highland Creek. Consequently, as is increasingly the
case in many such projects, the status, role and position of geomorphic
knowledge and expertise needs to be understood in explaining the new
morphology (see below, sections 4 and 5). The re-constructed channel
has only superﬁcial similarity to the pre-ﬂood river and is radically different
from the pre-urban river. At the same time it has set the trajectory for
the future morphology and dynamics of Highland Creek. There are clear,
immediate reasons for these design decisions including protection of infrastructure,
design of ecological function, and constraints of the physical
setting and compromises around various considerations as well as
competing goals and interests of various agencies and people in the
process. Seldom is this examined from the point of view of socionatural
explanations of river form and function; what actually happens
to result in particular material morphological outcomes for the river
and what explanations and theory support this?
The story of Highland Creek helps to see the advantages of a more
integrated socio-geomorphic approach in which human agency and
intention are tackled explicitly and in which the morphology is explained
through the co-evolution of the social and natural systems. This is not
new to ﬁelds such as geography (e.g. Bakker (2009), Linton and Budds
(2014)), or environmental studies, environmental history and ecology,
and it has developed rapidly in hydrology in recent years (Linton,
2008; Hartmann, 2011; Di Balldassarre et al., 2013; Ertsen et al., 2014;
Lane, 2014). Consequently there are already well-developed ideas,
philosophies and methods for thinking about this approach that might
be applied to ‘doing’ sociogeomorphology. In the remainder of the
paper I identify some examples of the ways in which social processes
and a socio-geomorphic approach maybe expand understanding of
river morphology, especially in urban and ‘restored’ rivers and argue
that such thinking may be more broadly useful given the extent and
duration of ‘human impact’ on rivers globally. I also propose that this
is properly a topic for geomorphic enquiry alone, although interdisciplinary
collaboration may be beneﬁcial.
3. Culture, history and socio-politics in river morphology
One facet of a socio-geomorphic approach to river morphology is to
seek understanding of the ways in which social processes have direct
and indirect outcomes for river morphology and the ways in which
river systems interact with these human systems, with consequences
for both. Urban (2002) argued that the ‘impacted’ landscape has physical
characteristics but at the same time contains material, physical effects of
types of behaviour determined to be appropriate for a given community.
In this way the physical attributes of the landscape depend partly on
local socio-cultural dynamics. In the case of the headwater streams of
the Embarrass River, Illinois (Urban, 2002), the contemporary ﬂuvial
system was strongly inﬂuenced by initial perceptions of the original
wetland landscape, and changes from direct human action. The extant
channel straightening can be explained solely as a pragmatic and efﬁcient
approach to land drainage. Urban (2002) goes further by making
the case that the orderly, ditched landscape carries signiﬁcant meaning
for the landowners which is in part related to the collective farming
aesthetic that values orderly, straight ditches. Thus the rectilinear
channel system reﬂects socio-cultural norms as much as the utility of
151P. Ashmore / Geomorphology 251 (2015) 149–156
the drainage system. Kondolf (2006) has also argued that a larger cultural
and landscape aesthetic is at play in the imposition of stable
meandering river forms in many instances of river restoration design.
The legislative and political-economic inﬂuences on river morphology
and design are also signiﬁcant and apparent in many ways and at
different scales. For example, the transformation of some large river
systems in the U.S. into ﬂood control channels has had clear and extensive
effects on river morphology and function (O’Neill, 2006). The reasons
lie partly in politics and the political history and the role of rivers in nation
building and federalism (O’Neill, 2006). In the U.S. the Federal Government
has a responsibility for river design inherited ultimately from local
and regional lobbying for the need to undertake local ﬂood control in
the national interest. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers became the
primary enactors of ﬂood control schemes through political processes
which expanded their original (navigation) mandate (O’Neill, 2006).
Large scale ﬂood control schemes have the effect of designing rivers in
particular ways as the outcome of these political negotiations and as a
consequence of particular approaches to river control at particular
times and places. This leads directly to transformation of the morphology
and of the role and meanings of rivers. In this way river control
and design can be seen as part of the larger project of state building
and justiﬁed as a national good (O’Neill, 2006). This also raises the
important effect of historical (mainly political) contingency; rivers
could have turned out differently but alternatives did not develop or
were not politically supported. In the U.S. case, this can be traced in
part to the detailed political history of the Federal Flood Control Bill
in 1935 (O’Neill, 2006). In this sense “Government made the rivers”
(O’Neill, 2006) and it is possible to show in detail how this happened.
In recent years the rise of river activism has tried to re-imagine rivers
(O’Neill, 2006). The origins of these forces are different and yet also,
to some extent locally derived, and politics is still part of the explanation
of ﬂuvial outcomes. But historical legacies are still at work and these
environmentally motivated projects are constrained by historical actions
and ﬂuvial legacies (O’Neill, 2006; Winiwarter et al., 2013).
Similar nation-building agendas and river control ideas are at the
heart of the development, and consequent morphology, of the Rhône
River in France in the 20th century (Pritchard, 2011). One could argue
also that at multi-national scales the European Union Water Framework
Directive, for example, is having, and will have, similar large-scale
effects on the ﬂuvial landscape (Eden et al., 2000). This type of large
scale scientiﬁcally-driven agenda and its universal knowledge claims
are susceptible to analysis in the same way as the IPCC and its role in
deﬁning climate, climate change, climate futures and mitigation have
been (Hulme, 2008). This may be a fruitful way of understanding and
critically explaining ﬂuvial landscape characteristics that emerge from
broad policy initiatives and related international scientiﬁc projects.
The role of large scale government initiatives’ legislation and national
culture in re-envisioning of rivers is also evident in river engineering
and restoration in Japan (Waley and Åberg, 2011).
The effects of historical and environmental history and contingency
are conspicuously manifest in the Los Angeles River, famous for having
been engineered into dramatic and iconic concrete ﬂood control channels
in the mid-20th century. The details of the development of the Los
Angeles River, the political history, the nature of the engineering of the
river system and its eventual conversion to a system of concrete ﬂood
control channels has been well-described (Gumprecht, 1999; Orsi,
2004) as have the related complexities of river system and hazards
management (Cooke, 1984). The Los Angeles River looks as it does for a
complex set of reasons and histories, apart from the actual engineering
practices and principles used to design the channel system. Prominent
among these is the importance of historical contingency in both the social
and natural realms, and their interaction. This form of contingency
has signiﬁcance for the types and relevance of generalities that might
emerge from analysis of this type of system. An example is the occurrence
of natural ﬂood events at particular points in political history,
economic development, and evolution of socio-political power structures
(Orsi, 2004). In the case of the Los Angeles River the exact path and
history of channel changes, the move towards particular types of projects
and designs relative to alternatives, and the eventual engineering of the
river channels all have complex histories unique to the particular case
(Gumprecht, 1999; Orsi, 2004; Wolch, 2007). Again, the river need not
have turned out the way it has but it is important to understand why it
has both for its own sake and because it sets the path for future changes
to the river. Orsi (2004) argues that the city and the river system in
particular is a complexly organised, highly contingent and tightly coupled
“ecosystem” patterned around historical events, agents and structures.
Structures such as political arrangements both generate and are generated
by historical events including physical ﬂoods (which stimulated
funding of the ﬂood control channels). But events are not just physical
ﬂoods. In socio-natural systems events may be election outcomes,
founding of environmental organizations, shifting responsibilities between
agencies or levels of government or many other such things,
some of which are direct responses to the physical events and so modify
future events. Events may also be “staged” (Lane, 2014) i.e. deliberate
interventions such as public meetings and planning groups designed
to analyze and enact a particular plan for the river. Floods are not purely
physical, they are “ordered events” (Orsi, 2004) that themselves grow
out of intricate relationships and historical changes in interactions
between nature and human choice about how to structure society and
community, and the jurisdictional and power relations locally (see
also The Center for Governmental Studies, 2002) . These events have
speciﬁc material consequences for the morphology, characteristics and
functioning of the river.
The river morphology is also a consequence of the ways in which the
river was perceived by the community at large (e.g. as hazardous and
threatening) (Orsi, 2004; Gandy, 2006; Wolch, 2007) and the ways in
which those perceptions change over time. In relation to perceived
hazards, action on geomorphic and hydrologic hazards is bound up in
complex jurisdictional conﬂicts, societal philosophies of individual and
communal action, the politics of who is affected and the hierarchy of
perceived environmental problems (Cooke, 1984). All of this eventually
affects the nature of any structural or other solutions within the existing
hydro-geomorphic system and therefore the characteristics and geomorphic
functioning of that system.
Following this theme, the contemporary Los Angeles River has also
been seen as a consequence of the particular form of environmental
and local governance, and community attitudes towards the river
(Desfor and Kiel, 2000). In contrasting the Don River in Toronto with
the Los Angeles River, Desfor and Kiel (2000) point out the differing
roles of the rivers in the community and collective imagination. While
the Don was a genteel, bucolic, home-away-from-home for early British
settlers and part of the liveable city, the Los Angeles River was seen
generally as part of a treacherous landscape and a threat to be dealt
with (Orsi, 2004). The rivers look different partly because societal relations
with nature are not all the same and the material realities (rivers)
are sites of intense negotiation (e.g. The Center for Governmental
Studies, 2002; Emery et al., 2013). City politics and discourses have
direct material outcomes that can be understood through urban political
economy, including the origins, roles and nature of environmental
activism. In the Don River civic activism manifested in collective ‘caring’
for the river while the Los Angeles River ﬁrst needed to establish its
riparian reality and be ‘discovered’ by activists (Gumprecht, 1999;
Desfor and Kiel, 2000; Orsi, 2004; Gandy, 2006; Wolch, 2007). Even
now the future of the Los Angeles River depends on a schism between
top-down master planning for enhancing ﬂood capacity (which retains
the ‘threatening river’ discourse), versus ecological, community-based
activism and environmentalism, both of which are essentially ‘expert’
visions for the river (Gandy, 2006). The ecological activism is also
socio-economically driven and raises questions of social and environmental
justice in deﬁning the role and reality of the river (Gumprecht,
1999; Orsi, 2004; Gandy, 2006; Wolch, 2007). This also raises the
question of what is lost in either case by ‘restoring’ the river to an
152 P. Ashmore / Geomorphology 251 (2015) 149–156
“environmental simulacrum” with claims to represent the public interest
(Gandy, 2006).
In this type of analysis rivers are artefacts as much as they are ’natural’
features. The reverse is also true, that the nature and role of the river
affects the socio-political structures around it, and the two co-evolve.
Through these landscapes, activists articulate concerns and so change
the meaning and the reality of the river in the urban context. Recognition
of the roles of various political actors, including civic environmentalists,
within the hybrid system provides useful explanatory insights. It may
also be seen as a way of initiating alternative and more effective forms
of governance and management of these systems, which will in turn
have different material outcomes (Karvonen, 2010, 2011; Karvonen
and Yocom, 2011). In both the Don and Los Angeles River cases activists
used the rivers to mobilize opinion and new ideas of urban design
and ﬂuvial reality (Desfor and Kiel, 2000). It is striking that some of
the schemes for re-designing the Los Angeles River re-envision it as
something quite different from its original semi-arid, shallow, ‘wash’.
Visioning images show abundant riparian vegetation surrounding an
apparently perennially- ﬂowing river which serves many purposes and
has multiple meanings (City of Los Angeles, accessed April, 2014); that
is, a complex socio-natural reality.
4. Socio-natures of river restoration
The Los Angeles River, and the Highland Creek case with which I
began, illustrate the extensive effects that stream design, rehabilitation
and restoration have had, and are having, on contemporary river morphology
(Pasternak, 2013). Intentionally designed rivers have not
historically been a topic of geomorphic analysis and yet they are a
signiﬁcant part of ﬂuvial landscapes and an important part of the functioning
of those landscapes. Consequently, understanding the process
by which rivers are chosen for projects and the process of design itself
is an essential part of explaining river morphology. Where and why
these interventions occur, in what way and with what knowledge and
methods, clearly has direct effects on the resulting morphology, function
and future of the river system.
It has been said often that river restoration is a socio-political and
cultural process as much as a scientiﬁc one (e.g. Brierley and Fryirs,
2008). But saying this does not get us closer to showing the ways in
which river morphology is affected by this, how this process actually
works, or to explaining why rivers look as they do as the outcome of
that process. If socio-political processes are important to hybrid socionatures
of rivers, then it is necessary to learn something of the way
this works as a means to explaining varieties of ﬂuvial form. One example
comes directly from the science of river restoration and ﬂuvial
geomorphology in what amounts to a power struggle of competing
knowledge claims for river restoration in the United States (Lave,
2009, 2012, 2014). One of the points to emerge from this analysis is
that the political economy of stream restoration science has direct material
effects on the appearance of river systems. For example, in the
case of the Rosgen Natural Channel Design approach (Rosgen, 1996)
and its wide adoption in the United States, Lave (2014) argues that
this has the potential to homogenize normally diverse landscapes
because a quasi-universal approach and methods are applied to large
numbers of rivers and streams. It is necessary to understand why particular
approaches may dominate and, borrowing from science and technology
studies, Lave (2014) proposes that this is in part related to a
‘sociology of expectation’, an analysis of which is used to understand
why some technological innovations survive and others do not. In
particular, it provides a potential means to understanding the prevalence
of Rosgen’s ideas over those of others in particular contexts.
Legislative and political-economic processes are also at work to
affect restoration practice, and the origins of extensive rehabilitation
work in the United States can be traced back to the requirements of
the Clean Water Act (James and Marcus, 2006; Lave, 2014), the application
of which attempts to impose some federal-level uniformity but
elements of which are variably applied locally (Doyle et al., 2013). In
addition, it can be argued that the commercialization of the ﬁeld has
had signiﬁcant effects in the ﬁnal decisions about channel design
(Pasternak, 2013; Lave, 2014). This includes the possibility that, for
example, in a neo-liberal political climate, private and commerciallyvaluable
knowledge claims may be “valorized” (Lave, 2014) and privileged
over public and peer-reviewed academic knowledge. There are
signiﬁcant commercial interests at stake related to these knowledge
claims that may inhibit modiﬁcation of the methods and designs
(Pasternak, 2013). If intensive and expensive projects are more proﬁtable
than low impact approaches then the former may prevail (Lave, 2014)
with direct consequences for the ﬂuvial landscape. Lave (2014) also
argues that particular claims that rivers could be both ‘natural’ and stable
led to the rise of the widespread stream restoration enterprise in the ﬁrst
place, in the absence of which these restored stream transformations may
not have occurred at all.
The restoration industry can be viewed as re-designing rivers by
re-imagining and reconﬁguring the ﬂuvial landscape according to a
particular set of precepts and ambitions, the application of certain scientiﬁc
conceptions, founded on a pre-determined ‘need to restore’, and in
line with particular styles determined by vision, values, politics and the
market. Tadaki et al. (2014b) make essentially this point with respect to
the role of river classiﬁcation systems in river management practices.
One consequence is that these processes play out in different ways
and with different consequences in different places, for reasons that
are only partly related to the geomorphic characteristics of the region.
This effect of differing socio-natural contingencies leading to different
ﬂuvial landscapes is also a theme in socio-hydrological studies
(Di Baldassarre et al., 2013; Lane, 2014), and is susceptible to empirical,
comparative analysis.
Consequently restoration outcomes can also be understood by detailed
case analysis, viewing restoration itself as a socio-natural phenomenon
(e.g. Eden et al., 2000; McDonald et al., 2004; Eden and
Tunstall, 2006; Bracken and Oughton, 2013; Emery et al., 2013). Restoration
is an intertwining of social, scientiﬁc, technical, and natural actors
and both the river and the restoration project are transformed in the
process. A close analysis of the context, motivation and development
of a restoration project on the River Cole, England (Eden et al., 2000)
showed how the speciﬁcs of the project were negotiated among various
actors with varying interests, expertise, motivations and ideas of what
the river used to be and what it ought to be. In this way it is possible
to explain how the river came to be, within the limits of what was pragmatically
possible and permissible in the speciﬁc context, as well as
ways of framing and understanding the negotiated outcome (Bracken
and Oughton, 2013). Although projects are local, they are also tied to
global knowledge networks and norms that are translated into the
local outcome. A single case is also part of a chain of ideas and transformations
stimulated by larger projects such as European Union funding
and agendas for riverscapes (Eden et al., 2000; McDonald et al., 2004).
The larger socio-political framework, all the way down to local decision
chains and negotiations, can be seen as part of the explanation of river
characteristics.
5. Intention and intervention in river morphology
An important element of the socio-natures of rivers is that ﬂuvial
geomorphologists no longer stand apart from the system because
geomorphology is directly applied to management, restoration and
design of rivers. This alone disturbs the normal scientiﬁc view of objective
scientists standing apart from the system that they are analyzing
(Lane, 2014). There is wide discussion about the roles and methods by
which geomorphologists may intervene, the importance of establishing
generalised theory and scientiﬁc basis for restoration (Wohl et al., 2005;
Bennett et al., 2011), and acknowledgement that outcomes are also
driven by community goals and decisions (McDonald et al., 2004;
Bennett et al., 2011; Pasternak, 2013). But seldom has the position,
153P. Ashmore / Geomorphology 251 (2015) 149–156
intention and the nature of the intervention of geomorphologists (and
other actors) been explicitly considered such that we can see how geomorphology
is integrated into the hybrid co-production of riverscapes
in deciding locations, need and nature of such interventions or ‘management’
actions, and in analyzing and categorising river type and function
(Tadaki et al., 2014b). This requires a substantial shift in stance and
philosophy. Borrowing ideas from socio-hydrology (Lane, 2014) this
includes recognition that geomorphologists are not experts outside
the system but part of the system, that science is not linearly translated
into outcomes, and that the ways in which geomorphologists conceive
and model landscapes is not a neutral activity and may transform
those landscapes as much as they represent them. Tadaki et al. (2014b)
argue that the design and adoption of particular river classiﬁcation
schemes is part of this process which has an important role in framing
management practices. Classiﬁcation schemes are ‘more-than-scientiﬁc’
constructions that act on rivers in particular ways. Collateral material
results for the riverscape will differ depending on the scheme adopted
and its role and inﬂuence in the restoration process. In this way, classiﬁcation
activities and politics have direct outcomes for the river depending
directly on geomorphological conceptions of rivers which are decisionmaking
rationalities rather than strict ‘truths of nature’ (Tadaki et al.,
2014b).
Bouleau (2013) argues from an analysis of the history of interventions
and plans in the Rhône and Seine Rivers that particular scientiﬁc
conceptions and representations of the rivers have direct material
outcomes for the appearance and trajectory of the river morphology,
environment and policy. Furthermore, these outcomes can be directly
tied, in part, to the motivations of the scientists as actors in the coproduction
of the “waterscape” and their exploitation of the related
scientiﬁc opportunities which differed between the two rivers. In the
case of the upper Rhone, Bouleau (2013) concludes that the river
became a site for ambitious scientists looking for interesting physical
and human changes to observe and that the river was conceived and
promoted, according to their own particular training and interests, as
a linked hydro-system within which they could undertake further
research. Geomorphic and ecological knowledge was privileged in
conceptions of the river and what the river should look like. Envisaging
the upper Rhône as a hydro-system with linked ecological and geomorphic
function had direct consequences for (non)development of hydro
power schemes, the management framework and goals, the maintenance
of in-stream ﬂows, the subsequent restoration narrative, and the
river scape as a whole. The scientists saw the river they were (self?)
interested in seeing and knowing and at the same time the river shaped
the science through these opportunities to act and intervene, and therefore
the future management paths and opportunities (Bouleau, 2013;
Toone et al., 2014). Particular waterscapes do not interest all river
scientists in the same way and this changes the river materially and
conceptually (Bouleau, 2013). Therefore, particular disciplines or groups
of scientists have a framing effect on the problems, and the solutions,
with direct consequences for the river form, function and future (and
see Tadaki et al., 2014b).
Critical examination of geomorphic conceptions of rivers is an important
element of the explanation of morphology whether directly
through river restoration or less-directly through ‘global’ conceptions
and knowledges of rivers more generally (Eden et al., 2000; McDonald
et al., 2004). A consistent thread in the past two decades or more
of river restoration research and practice is essentially one in which
applied ﬂuvial geomorphology is seen as a science for designing, managing,
rehabilitating, restoring, repairing, sustaining, improving and
conserving rivers (e.g. Wohl et al, 2005; Brierley and Fryirs, 2008;
Bennett et al., 2011; Pasternak, 2013). This reveals a particular set of
views of the river and geomorphic approaches for analysing rivers:
machines in need of repair, damaged landscapes, impacted landscapes
in need of ‘re-naturalising’, contrasting to some extent with earlier engineering
conceptions of command and control (Orsi, 2004) and Promethean
projects (Karvonen, 2011). I do not mean to criticise or deny the
validity and value of these views and restoration activities, or to suggest
that they should not happen, but rather to point out, as Bouleau (2013)
argues, that whatever is the view of the river from geomorphic intervenors
and their associated scientiﬁc knowledge, it has material consequences
for the river morphology. The role, function and motivation of
geomorphologists in this socio-natural system, and the consequences
for the system itself, have gone largely unexamined (but see Lave,
2009, 2014 and Tadaki et al., 2014a,b), along with reﬂection on the
consequences of these actions (Lane, 2014). As has been argued by
some biologists in the case of approaches to ‘invasive’ species (e.g.
Chew, 2009), scientists may not be neutral participants and observers.
There are important implications here for the way that geomorphologists
see their role and knowledge, interact with others, and approach
alternative ‘ways of knowing’ the landscape and this is something
that needs greater attention in geomorphic research (see Tadaki et al.,
2014a).
It should also be understood that, in the physical conception of the
river, there are alternative visions, based in river dynamics, but building
on principles that are not solely geomorphic. Prominksi et al. (2012)
provide such an alternative set of conceptions for urban rivers, motivated
in part by the European Water Framework Directive which has encouraged
revitalisation of urban rivers. In this case, based in concepts from
urban design and landscape architecture, they devised a typology of
designs based partly on the nature of lateral and vertical constraints to
the water and the channel. This typology has elements of ﬂood hydrology
and ﬂuvial dynamics (e.g. in the vertical and lateral spread of water)
familiar to ﬂuviologists, but is motivated by conceptions of rivers as
spaces for contemplation and recuperation where landscape aesthetics
is important and riverscapes are enlivened and varied activity spaces.
Thus, vertical ﬂuctuations of water level are an aesthetic issue and a
subject for design, rather than simply a hydraulic or hydrologic problem.
An understanding of alternative conceptions of rivers, especially from the
direction of explicit landscape design, may therefore be an important
component in explaining river form in intentionally designed and
restored rivers.
6. Conclusion: moving on with sociogeomorphology
Using several examples from the literature I have reviewed ways in
which explicit development of a more socio-geomorphic approach
can extend explanations of river morphology from those normally
conceived in geomorphology. I have proposed the term sociogeomorphology
to address the co-evolution of socio-natural systems and the
analysis of human intention and action from social science perspectives.
This framing distinguishes it from anthropo-geomorphology, in which
analysis tends to focus on (unexamined) human impact on a ‘natural’
system or on humans as emergent agents in a physical system whose
role may be externalised to the extent of being a further phase in the
evolution of the planet (Haff, 2010, 2012).
If rivers are seen as socio-natural co-productions, then a series of
ideas follow about the ways in which these systems interact to produce
river morphology. Differences in ﬂuvial morphology can be observed
and expected for socio-political reasons alone, but the key here is to
understand this as part of a combined socio-natural system in which
the river also affects the human elements of the system and in which
history plays a role. I have identiﬁed some concrete examples of this
that point to ways in which future analyses, ‘experiments’ (see Lane,
2014) and comparisons may be done in developing socio-geomorphic
understanding of rivers. Paraphrasing Hartmann (2011) in relation to
ﬂoodplains, rivers are seen as situation- dependent poly-rationalities
with plastic conceptions and social constructions of ‘nature’. They also
have complex, contingent local and general ‘event’ histories with speciﬁc
consequences in particular places.
This also involves a commitment to the idea that ‘highly-impacted’,
engineered and designed landscapes are important phenomena for
geomorphic enquiry, especially in a world where human agency may
154 P. Ashmore / Geomorphology 251 (2015) 149–156
be more important than ‘natural’ processes in shaping riverscapes and
landforms.
Especially in cases in which geomorphic expertise is speciﬁcally part
of the system, there is also a need for a change of ontological and epistemological
positions (Urban, 2002; Linton and Budds, 2014; Lane,
2014) and a critical and reﬂexive stance related to intention and intervention,
and to geomorphic knowledge more generally (Lane, 2014;
Tadaki et al., 2014a,b). This is not something with which geomorphologists
are normally familiar and comfortable, and some may disagree
with this shift in philosophical position. Adopting this approach also
involves moving towards acceptance of a broader conception of contingency,
a critical analysis of local and global knowledge, the role and
nature of generalized knowledge of river morphology, and a rethinking
of the ‘scientiﬁc nature’ of geomorphology in these circumstances, along
with a reformulation of the position of geomorphology with respect to
the landscapes that are investigated.
Social scientists have much to offer in ideas and experience in undertaking
this kind of work in which inter-disciplinary collaboration may
be useful. There is also substantial recent research on the social science
of environmental decision making, and framing of interdisciplinary
research, that will be valuable for both theory and method in pursuing
this type of geomorphology (Oughton and Bracken, 2009; Emery et al.,
2013). But I propose that this is primarily a valid and necessary part of
geomorphic enquiry, the development of which can and should happen
within expanded conceptions of the scope and nature of geomorphology
necessary for pursuing sociogeomorphology. The reward will be more
complete understanding of both geomorphology and of the role and
the consequences of geomorphologists’ understanding of, and interventions
in, these systems.
Acknowledgments
Some of the ideas in this paper originated with my encounters
with urban rivers in Toronto that were initially funded by an NSERC
Strategic Project Grant with Ray Kostaschuk (University of Guelph)
and Joe Desloges (University of Toronto), and supported by City of
Toronto, Toronto Region Conservation Authority, Parish Geomorphic
and Aquafor Beech Ltd. Thesis research by Mariane Vocal-Ferencevic,
John McDonald and Sarah O’Neill provided background on the Highland
Creek case. The ideas in this paper are separate from these collaborations.
I am grateful to Belinda Dodson who has encouraged me intellectually
along this path, to Gary Brierley for his enthusiasm when he ﬁrst heard
me talk on this topic at the IAG conference in 2013, and to Gary Brierley
and Janet Hooke for their invitation to submit to the Special Issue. I thank
Marc Tadaki and an anonymous reviewer for their positive and thorough
engagement in the paper, suggestions for revision and additional references.
For Alick.
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