✨ I GO! Edition 26 | Daylighting Rivers: Restoring the Vibrant Flow of Life in Our Cities – and Ourselves

This week: London

“Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything.” Henry David Thoreau

September kicks off the ‘Totally Thames’ festival, a celebration of the capital's watery artery. The Thames is London’s lifeblood - admired by visitors, adored by those who live along its banks. I can’t imagine living far from its dark emerald waters.

But here’s a secret: in most big cities, many rivers and streams still run beneath our feet, buried and forgotten. Once treated as an inconvenience, they were forced into underground pipes to cover their flow. Today, a global movement is bringing them back to light and thus life - daylighting rivers.

A city breathing again

One of my most vivid memories in Seoul this summer was strolling along Cheonggyecheon – a stream once hidden beneath a highway, now reborn through a large-scale urban regeneration project. Clear waters, willows bending, carp leaping, cranes parading in front of office workers in need of a break, lonely retirees, lovers walking hand in hand, street performers singing on bridges - an incongruously bucolic and magnetic, soothing sight in the middle of a megacity.

Since its restoration in 2005, biodiversity has increased fivefold – and it did in just two years! Fish species jumped from 4 to 25, insect species from 15 to 192, and more than 60,000 visitors now come daily (Seoul Metropolitan Government). Local temperatures dropped by up to 5.9 °C compared to neighbouring streets, nitrogen dioxide pollution fell by nearly 35%, and the stream helps manage floods that once threatened the capital (Landscape Performance; The Guardian).

A popular evening spot, with friends gathering to drink beer or chitchat, the 11-km waterway has transformed Seoul.

And here’s a serendipity: this summer, as I read Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky, I found her writing in the same paragraph about Cheonggyecheon, but also about the Bièvre in Paris, London’s lost Fleet, Saw Mill in New York, Sydney’s Tank Stream, São Paulo’s buried waterways, and even Tokyo’s old rivers.

I smiled, remembering my own travels to all these cities this year, how profoundly happy and excited, curious I felt then - and the moment, stuck in São Paulo traffic, when I remarked aloud how strange it felt that such a vast city seemed to lack rivers when large urban centres are normally built around them. Our local guide corrected me: the city has more than 300 waterways, but nearly all of them canalised or buried.

Daylighting Ourselves

Daylighting rivers is more than ecology - it is symbolic and a very Jungian metaphor.

Carl Jung taught that what we repress never vanishes. It flows beneath the surface, shaping us in unseen ways.

To daylight a river - in a city or in ourselves - is to peel back layers of progress, survival, performance, and welcome back what was hidden.

This is the process of individuation: the journey toward wholeness. Bringing back to light our forgotten creativity, vitality, and joy.

Perhaps that is our midlife task: to uncover what we’ve buried - and letting it flow again.

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”- Rainer Maria Rilke