Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (2025)

We are very pleased to announce that the River Cities Network will start an online book club to generate and discuss collective reflections related to our respective interests and experiences in rivers. Each book talk will be led by a discussant, who will select a book and pose one or several questions related to the work in advance, and lead the conversation. Are you interested to be a discussant for a future RCN book club event? Please let Cherelle Karsseboom know at rcn@iias.nl. Please join us here on Teams on Tuesday 9 December at 15:00 CET. 

In our first online book club event, we are inviting Tatiana Thieme (Geography, UCL) to lead a discussion of Robert Macfarlane’s recent book, Is a River Alive? (Hamish Hamilton, 2025). We believe this book speaks to our troubled times with a deep sense of urgency, poetry, and hope, offering a compelling invitation to think with rivers as we reimagine human–environment relations and consider what it might mean to begin healing our waterways and, in turn, ourselves.

For this book club event, the question Tatiana would like us to consider is, ‘What stories do rivers tell, and what happens when we think with rivers and river journeys?’

Preparation

We would like to encourage you to read the book ahead of the book club event, and we are also sharing a link to a podcast that was recorded in conversation with Robert Macfarlane here: https://tinhouse.com/podcast/robert-macfarlane-is-a-river-alive/

Discussant

Tatiana Adeline Thieme is an ethnographer and Associate Professor of Geography at University College London (UCL). Her research and teaching is animated by her training in Dance, Anthropology and Geography. At a broad level, Tatiana's research focuses on different forms of entrepreneurial and makeshift urbanism in under-served communities and how these intersect with social and environmental justice. She is interested in moving between and thinking with urban contexts across the majority and minority world. Currently, she is engaged in three South-South-North collaborations: An Urban Interregnum with the CCCB (2025-2026), an Asian-African Collaborative Network focused on Digital Infrastructural Urbanisms with Tongji University (2024-2026), and she has recently taken part in the Ngong River Riparian Renewal and Transformation in-situ engagement project in Nairobi (2025), with RCN and the Ngong River Planning Consortium. Tatiana is the author of Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi (University of Minnesota Press, 2025). Alongside academic writing, she explores different genres and mediums of collaborative storytelling including sketching, dance, and short film production.