Riverhood

A Geographic City Model
Rubén García Rubio

Riverhood: A Geographic City Model explores how cities can be reorganized through their geography, particularly their rivers. Using Addis Ababa as a case study, it proposes a city model that addresses urgent urban challenges and offers a replicable framework for climate-adaptive cities worldwide. 

This book introduces Riverhood, a geographic city model designed to organize sustainable urban growth and regeneration while addressing climate change through the integration of urban, landscape, and architectural design. Using Addis Ababa as its primary case study, the book responds to the city’s rapid expansion and environmental vulnerability while leveraging its natural systems—particularly rivers—and its deep cultural connection to the landscape. The book unfolds through a territorial overview, a diagnosis of five pressing urban challenges—flooding, scarcity, pollution, connectivity, and facilities—and the implementation of the Riverhood model in the Upper Kebena sub-watershed, activated by twelve urban catalysts that demonstrate how rivers can be reintegrated into civic life and ecological restoration. 

At a time when cities face ecological urgency and spatial inequality, Riverhood offers a transformative framework for architecture and urbanism, grounded in geography and ecology. It repositions geography as a design tool and rivers as agents of urban structure, resilience, and civic identity. Blending territorial research, design experimentation, and pedagogical collaboration, the book presents richly illustrated prototypes developed within academic settings. While rooted in Addis Ababa, its strategies are adaptable to other cities facing similar pressures, making Riverhoods both a conceptual model and a practical framework for climate-adaptive urbanism worldwide. 

With Contributions of
Foreword: Iñaki Alday 
Selected Projects: Fiona Alicandri, Anjali Anand, Yue Chen, Michael Clifton, Luke Escobar, Laura Gonzalez, Ryan Harnish, Hugh Jackson, Lauren Lake, Elise Macey, Kayla Mitchell, Avanti Patel, Alec Paulson, Taylor Scott, Ella Weeks
Selected Photographs: Michael Bailey, Danielle Scheeringa, Taylor Scott, and Rubén García Rubio  

Quote from the book
“This research proposes a reorganization of cities based on their geographical territories. The envisioned city model aims to transform the current land management system, which is predominantly determined by political boundaries, into a framework guided by geographical principles. Given that rivers significantly characterize the case study, the research introduces the concept of Riverhoods, which reorganizes urban environments around river basins on an intermediate scale, upgrading the traditional idea of neighborhoods.”