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The quiet return of the urban river

For most of the twentieth century, the rivers running through European cities were treated as infrastructure rather than landscape. They were straightened, culverted and, in several cases, paved over entirely. The logic was practical: a channelled river floods less, carries waste efficiently and frees land for building. What the engineers of the period did not anticipate was how completely a city forgets a river it can no longer see.

Restoration projects since the 1990s have reversed parts of that work. In Seoul, the removal of an elevated motorway exposed a stream that had been buried for three decades; in Sheffield, a stretch of the Don was reopened at considerable expense. Advocates point to measurable cooling in surrounding streets and to a recovery in fish populations. Critics note that the costs are rarely recovered in the way the initial business cases suggested…

Question 14

According to the passage, engineers of the twentieth century failed to predict

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