Yerevan’s Blue Memory: Water, Loss and the Work of (Cultural) Daylighting

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Yerevan is hosting COP17, the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. For a few days, the Armenian capital will become the venue for the world to discuss the future of biodiversity and the world’s natural resources. This is a striking moment for a city that has been quietly losing its own resources for the past few decades.

COP17 is not specifically about Armenia, but its presence in Yerevan inevitably raises questions about what the country brings to the global conversation, and how local environmental concerns are reflected within it. This makes the presence of Armenian organizations within the official program particularly significant. Among them is the Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory (CSN Lab), which approaches environmental questions through cultural research and practice.

CSN Lab will be represented in the COP17 Blue Zone, the part of the conference reserved for international delegations, accredited organizations, and the official program. There, the Laboratory will present Blue Yerevan, its long-term research project examining the city’s water heritage and its transformation. It’s a subject that brings the global discussion on biodiversity back to a much more intimate scale: the rivers, springs, canals and other water systems that have shaped Yerevan, and what happens when they disappear, are altered or are forgotten. 

It is a project I had the opportunity to join this summer, when I spent July working with the organization and contributing to its research.

Working on Blue Yerevan made me look differently at something I had noticed since I first came to Yerevan four years ago: water, or more precisely, its apparent absence from much of the city. Yerevan was built between two rivers, the Hrazdan and the Getar, and around a network of canals, springs and fountains. Today, much of this network has disappeared from view. The Getar, buried in 2008 under the pretext of flood risk, still flows beneath the city streets, yet most residents are unaware of its existence. The Hrazdan flows through a gorge that is gradually being stripped of its cultural and social significance. The remaining fountains are concentrated in gentrified neighborhoods. The urban landscape is thirsty for water, even though the water itself is still there. 

I came to Yerevan as a researcher, armed with a literature review and a search for conceptual frameworks. I left with an unexpected understanding: the disappearance of urban water is not simply a local curiosity, but a global trend, and Yerevan is part of a much larger story.

Global Waters: Disappearance and Rediscovery

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many cities gradually turned away from the waterways that had once been part of their everyday life. Rivers were channelled or covered, fountains disappeared, and water became increasingly hidden within urban infrastructure. The logic seemed modernist and hygienic, as polluted bodies of water posed a real threat to residents’ health, but the result was the severing of the bonds that had shaped urban communities for generations. This transformation became a recurring pattern in cities across the world. In Manchester, for example, the Irk River was built over and forgotten; in Seoul, the Cheonggyecheon Stream disappeared under an overpass. In Montreal in 2022, a small group of activists gathered to discuss something that has yet to be named: the burial of a stream, simply buried with a pipe by city officials. Now researchers are studying this phenomenon as a distinct phenomenon of ghost rivers, vanished but not quite gone, simply reclaimed by cities that have forgotten them.

Over the past few decades, a counter-movement has emerged in cities around the world, from Munich and Yonkers to Sheffield, where I now live. These cities are bringing buried rivers back to the surface, a practice known as daylighting. The idea goes beyond restoring waterways. It recognizes that when rivers disappear underground, they can take with them the social fabric that once formed around them. When I learned that Sheffield’s Porter Brook river, which I pass every day on my way to university and other places, had itself once been buried in the city center and later brought back to the surface, my understanding of what CSN Lab does changed. They are not simply working on a local problem but participating in a global conversation about what cities owe their water and what water gives back to cities.

While the transformation of waterways was a global phenomenon, these processes became particularly intensive in the Soviet context, where large-scale interventions in natural landscapes were closely tied to projects of modernization, infrastructure development, and the technocratic management of nature. As historian Maya Peterson has shown in her work on water and empire in Central Asia, the hydrotechnical reforms of the Soviet period were part of a global modernization project shared by imperial powers from Russia to Britain and France, in which control over water resources became an instrument of colonial governance.[1] Rivers were straightened, wetlands drained, and local water cultures were gradually subordinated to centralized technocratic notions of what a modern city should look like. The disappearance of the Aral Sea is the most catastrophic result of this logic, but the same logic operated at all levels, in all Soviet republics. The decision to canalize Getar and gradually build over it, and to push the Hrazdan outside the cityscape and disconnect it from Yerevan’s daily urban life, was not an isolated engineering decision. It was the expression of a political vision that viewed nature as a resource to be managed, water as infrastructure to be controlled, and the inherited relationships between communities and their rivers as obstacles to be overcome. Understanding Yerevan’s water loss in this context allows us to understand the situation at an international level: Yerevan is becoming part of a pattern whose consequences cities around the world are now slowly, costly, and incompletely addressing.

Local Waters: Yerevan’s Blue Geography

What does Yerevan’s blue geography look like today? This question is more difficult to answer than it seems, and therein lies part of the answer. The city’s relationship with water in 2026 is extremely uneven. In reconstructed central areas and new commercial zones, water has once again become an element of urban development. Fountains and landscaped water features increasingly appear in gentrified public spaces and private developments, where water also contributes to the visual and commercial appeal of these areas. Meanwhile, the Getar River flows largely out of sight. The Hrazdan is being extremely polluted and reaches its lowest water quality indicators precisely as it passes through Yerevan. In 2021, more than 90% of the wastewater concentrated in Yerevan was discharged directly into the aquatic environment without undergoing any treatment process.

This uneven geography is also what makes the work of CSN Lab significant. Over the past few years, the Laboratory has produced a substantial body of work on the history of Yerevan’s water resources. Its research on the Getar River, documented in the collective monograph Getar: Memory of a River (my personal favorite), examines the river’s history from the perspectives of social and cultural memory, environmental studies, architecture and urbanism, literature and anthropology. Its publications on the Kechut Reservoir and mamour, a zine on urban- and hydrofeminism, have extended this research beyond the city.

The Laboratory has also translated this research into exhibitions and public programs. Tigran Amiryan and Arsen Abrahamyan curated Blue Archives and Blue Yerevan, and presented in Yerevan and in Europe, including at the Leipzig International Book Fair, making visible what processes of urban transformation have rendered invisible. Blue Yerevan was also presented during the 14th European History Forum 2026, and formed part of the discursive program of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial in 2024 and 2026. The School of Complex Past has also addressed environmental memory, bringing together experts from Georgia, Belgium, Turkey, Ukraine and beyond working on water conservation and environmental heritage. The Laboratory is currently developing Kond: The Natural History of Networking Architecture, which explores, among other questions, the connections between Kond and Yerevan’s blue landscape.

The new book, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, is on its way, and I am personally incredibly excited about it. Blue Yerevan, due out this year, will bring together research on the city’s water history and its contemporary condition. My work this summer was to help build its theoretical framework, to find the international scholarly literature that contextualises what CSN Lab has been doing empirically and to show where Yerevan fits into the global story.

I am not an expert on hydropolitics or the blue humanities, but what I discovered was rich. The growing field of blue humanities has generated a substantial body of research on water and memory, the politics of urban rivers, and on the social life of fountains and public baths. Much of it speaks directly to the Yerevan context. As Erik Swyngedouw’s concept of the hydrosocial cycle argues, water infrastructure is never simply technical. Decisions about where water flows, who can access it, and what happens when it disappears are also shaped by particular distributions of power.[2] This provides another way of thinking about the transformation of Yerevan’s rivers and the uneven presence of water in the city today.

But perhaps the most immediate result of working on Blue Yerevan was a change in how I myself saw the city. I lived in Yerevan for two years before beginning my PhD journey, long enough to have walked past Getar’s concrete covering hundreds of times without knowing what lay beneath it, crossed the Hrazdan Gorge without noticing what had been stripped from it, and drunk from pulpulaks wherever I went without wondering which parts of the city had no fountains at all. I knew Yerevan the way you know a place you live in without studying it, through its textures and rhythms, rather than its stories.

Returning as a researcher changed my perception. The Kond neighborhood is minutes from the glittering bars and restaurants of Saryan Street, but its relationship to water, and to visibility, is entirely different. The Hrazdan Gorge, once an important ecological and social component of the city, occupies a very different position within everyday urban life today. The fountains in Republic Square are still playing, but the same cannot be said of many other ones.

After spending a month in the city with CSN Lab, attending their events and sitting in their office surrounded by books, maps, and photographs of nearly a decade of water research, I began to understand their work differently. It is not simply an exercise in documenting what has disappeared. It is also an attempt to make forgotten or obscured relationships between the city and its waters visible again.

Cultural Daylighting

This brings us back to the question of awareness. In a recent essay on this platform, Heghine Pilosyan argued that “the city’s crisis runs deeper than symbolic production,” and that the creative class cannot save Yerevan because its institutions and spaces are being lost not only through large-scale demolitions but also through more subtle processes: administrative restructuring, redevelopment, and the gradual subordination of historical continuity to commercial value. Indeed, research projects and exhibitions cannot, by themselves, return the Getar to the surface or reverse the political and economic processes that have transformed Yerevan’s waterways. Awareness alone does not physically restore a river.

But awareness is not nothing, and it is not where the work stops. It is the beginning of a public conversation about what has disappeared and why, one that connects Yerevan’s specific hi/stories to global frameworks and makes the question of the city’s waters legible to audiences beyond Armenia. A book that places Yerevan’s rivers within international scholarship on urban river loss, examines the political economy of water infrastructure in a post-Soviet city, and asks what daylighting might mean in Yerevan, changes what it is possible to see, discuss, and ultimately demand.

Daylighting does not have to be physical after all. In Manchester, not far from where I now live, activists organize workshops around the River Irk in order to restore it through stories and folklore. They create new knowledge that reconnects communities to lost waterways because revealing rivers is not enough. In order to fully restore a river, it is also vital to reclaim it in people’s imaginations. Researchers call this process cultural daylighting,[3] which is what CSN Lab does with Armenian waters.

The waters of Yerevan are still there. They flow under streets, through pipes, and through gorges from which much of the city has turned away. As one researcher wrote about buried rivers elsewhere, something remains of the original connections, and “when the pipes begin to leak, water finds its old haunts and collects where the shape of the land allows it.”[4]

As Yerevan hosts the world’s conversation about nature, that is worth remembering. Biodiversity and water are inseparable, and the urban ecosystem depends on the health of its water system. Residents’ well-being is equally connected to the quality of the urban environment and its water resources. The city’s waters have not been destroyed yet; they are waiting to be uncovered.  Perhaps uncovering them, then, begins not only by physically bringing water back to the surface, but by learning to see it again. And I will continue to stroll along the Porter Brook and hope that its relatives in Yerevan will also see the light.

Environment