Citizen participation as a social shift tool in projects of urban fluvial space recovery: A case study in Spain

This article reviews the impact of social participation on the results of projects aimed at the improvement and conditioning of fluvial spaces for public use. This work focuses on a partially materialised fluvial rehabilitation in Arévalo (Ávila), a Spanish rural settlement. The hypothesis of the study was that the project́s success depended not only on its technical aspects but also on the involvement of local population from its beginning and on the information and environmental education that they received. Once the first stage of the project was completed, and in order to measure the project́s performance, some indicators related to the developed activities were collected and a survey was carried out. The results show that, thanks to a social feedback process, there was a rise of the fluvial space knowledge and consciousness of the environment among the population, as well as a reconciliation with the river area.