​​From Waterfront Activation to Catchment Stewardship: The ONE RIVER Case and the Launch of a Community Research Lab in Okazaki, Japan​

The presentation

Many urban river projects have successfully activated waterfront spaces, yet relatively few have developed forms of participation that extend to catchment stewardship. This presentation focuses on ONE RIVER in Okazaki City, Japan, and explains the background to our launch of the Community Research Lab, while also discussing the challenges now facing the project’s continued development. 

​​First, we trace the project’s trajectory from river use and recreation to environmental education, and then to community-led water management and land stewardship activities, with particular attention to the experiences and turning points that reshaped participants’ perceptions of the river. Drawing on the analysis of local documents and questionnaire surveys, I discuss how engagement with seasonal water-level fluctuations, fish ecology, and upstream–downstream relationships helped broaden residents’ understanding of the river from a recreational amenity to a socio-ecological system. 

These changes are directly related to the context in which we established the Community Research Lab in 2024. We will then introduce the Lab’s current activities. Rather than a conventional research institution, the Community Research Lab is positioned as a collaborative platform through which residents, practitioners, and researchers co-design activities and connect local knowledge with scientific inquiry. 

Finally, we share the challenges we currently face. We introduce our recent attempt to define project goals quantitatively through a public awareness survey. We hope to receive ideas and reflections from the participating audience, grounded in their own local trajectories.​ 

The speaker

​​Yuta Itsumi is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Japan. His research examines human-river relationships, urban river restoration, and community-based catchment stewardship, with a focus on how local participation develops into long-term environmental action. He combines qualitative case analysis, participatory methods, and action research in collaboration with local communities and practitioners. As a co-founder of the ONE RIVER Community Research Lab, he works on building practical frameworks that connect residents’ everyday experiences of rivers with shared learning and collective stewardship in changing social and climatic conditions.​ 

Mitsuru Iwagaya is Project Manager and Secretary General of ONE RIVER. Since 2017, he has been involved in projects to activate the riverfront spaces along the River Otogawa in Okazaki City, Japan, through his work at the NPO Okazaki Machisodate Center Rita. Building on these activities, he co-founded ONE RIVER in 2021 with local activists. As Project Manager, he has launched a wide range of new programs to realize everyday life in a closer relationship with the river, including waterfront use initiatives, environmental education, and agricultural experience programs. As the team’s Local Principal Investigator, he is exploring models of citizen-participatory catchment governance.

Attending the presentation

You can join the presentation via Teams. The presentation will take place on Thursday 12 March 10:00 CET on Teams. Click here to enter the Teams portal.

The River Cities Network presentation series

The River Cities Network presentation series is an online platform for teams in the River Cities Network (RCN) to introduce their river-city case study projects to other members of the network and to an external audience. Teams have approximately 30 minutes to present their projects, after which there will be approximately 30 minutes for discussion. RCN teams that are interested in presenting can contact rcn@iias.nl.

Header image credit: ONE RIVER.