Napirze: reforesting a riverside
Anna Edgar
Deme Gorgadze
Data Tsintsadze
Napirze is a community-led rewilding project based in Rustavi, Georgia. We began our work in 2022 by taking down an old garage and replacing it with a plant nursery and collaboration space, where we hosted community activities including discussions, film screenings, planting workshops, and recycling collection.
At the same time, we were researching Rustavi’s history and learning how our young industrial city had come to occupy what had previously been pastureland surrounding a floodplain.
Our core aim was always to reforest a 300 hectare floodplain in the heart of our industrial city. Ravaged by economic and political upheaval in the 90s, the once dense forest became an abandoned wasteland. Motivated by the stories of our parents, who had experienced the joy of a forest in the centre of a city, as well as the functional benefits of cooling and cleaning the city’s air, we decided to find a way to rewild our riverside.
Along the way, we realised that such a project was inherently and powerfully social in its nature - providing a space for Rustavi’s people to come together outside of standard institutional structures, creating an example of change in our community, and connecting our city and citizens to the wider world.
One of our main achievements so far is planting 4,000 native trees on the floodplain using the Miyawaki method. The plantings, which took place on three separate days in 2024 and 2025, were volunteer-led, and attended by diverse members of our community. We were also featured participants of the 2024 Tbilisi Architectural Biennial, were profiled in the Atlas of Commoning (ARCH+ with the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University), and took part in a 2025 Community-led Landscape Restoration in Science and Practice exchange.
We are a small core group, with experience and backgrounds spanning landscape architecture, videography, ecology, journalism, and technology, supported by a broader team of friends, colleagues, and others.
Napirze, meaning ‘on the riverbank’ in Georgian, is a community-led rewilding project based in Rustavi, Georgia. Our core proposal is to rewild a 300 hectare area of degraded riverside woodland in the heart of our industrial city, and in doing so not only restore ecosystems and protect public health, but rebuild the city’s community.
We began our work in 2022 when we replaced an old concrete garage in a private yard with a tree nursery and meeting space. In the years since, we have hosted public events and discussions, set up a recycling collection point, held community planting days on the floodplain, and built trails on the land.
Throughout, our aims have been holistic, focused on the interconnections between nature, people, and the wider world.
Our aims include:
- Reforesting the floodplain, which will support local biodiversity, cool the city amidst increasingly high temperatures, improve air quality, and provide a recreational space.
- Rebuilding human-river connections that have been lost, by hosting rewilding activities on the floodplain, creating more infrastructure for visitors to the site, and engaging in public education about the site and its biodiversity.
- Setting an example of changemaking for others in the city, the country, and the broader region - demonstrating that we can, as citizens, find pockets of power and agency even in the face of large-scale challenges. We also aim to demonstrate that there is space for experimentation and innovation even in less-developed regions, as exemplified by our use of the Miyawaki afforestation method.
- Connecting our city to the broader world - collaborating with others in the region to clean the river, and working with academics, architects, students, creatives, and others to share expertise and shine a spotlight on Rustavi. In doing so, we want to use our work as a meeting point for people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines.
- Building a new identity for our industrial city.