Between concrete and current: Econostalgia and the reimagining of urban-nature relations along Tbilisi’s Mtkvari river

This article examines how the Mtkvari river in Tbilisi is remembered, narrated and politically reimagined after decades of infrastructural enclosure. Based on multi-method anthropological research, including participant observation, interviews, digital materials and archival sources, it traces the river’s transformation from a sacred, social and ecological presence into an increasingly marginalized urban watercourse shaped by embankments, highways, pollution and concrete. The article conceptualises these damaged relations through ecological nostalgia, understood not as passive longing for a lost past but as a situated civic repertoire through which memories of riverine life become claims for repair, access and responsibility. The analysis focuses especially on Dighomi Meadows, one of Tbilisi’s last semi-wild riverside ecosystems, where activists mobilise memories and imaginaries of floodplain forest, riverine sacredness and more-than-human life against extractive development and new cycles of concrete urbanisation. By linking ecological nostalgia to riverine citizenship, the article shows how care for a damaged river can expand urban belonging beyond property, residence or administrative citizenship towards responsibility for shared human and more-than-human worlds. Finally, it situates the Mtkvari/Kura as a transboundary river, inviting comparative attention to river memory, attachment and ecological vulnerability across the wider Kura-Aras basin.