The Politics of Urban Water by Kimberley Kinder

Author:Kimberley Kinder [Kinder, Kimberley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Social Science, Human Geography, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9780820347943
Google: uHLHBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-01-15T03:58:33+00:00

The IJssel Lake District

The collaboration of city planners and nature preservation groups on a large urban expansion project in the IJssel Lake District in the 2000s generated a robust environmental framework that crystallized the capacity to view urban water through the lens of nature. As with houseboats, pleasure boats, heritage preservation, and harbor enthusiasm, this environmental lens initially emerged in tension with city planning objectives and then gradually became integrated into core understandings of urban water identity. City planners at the time were acutely concerned with environmental issues, as evident by the municipality’s overt commitment to reducing its environmental and carbon footprint by building compact neighborhoods, promoting alternative transportation, and pursuing energy-neutral housing options.15 However, sustainability rhetoric was virtually silent on the topic of wet urban nature. The political negotiations over IJburg dramatically changed this mentality, bringing nature and cities into explicit articulation.

The history of the IJssel Lake District functioned as a prime example of the longue duree interconnection between environmental and human processes in the Netherlands. According to secondary environmental histories, in the early Middle Ages bogs, moors, and fens covered the land where the IJssel Lake District would eventually stand. Farmers built drainage ditches and a few small freshwater lakes across the region over a six-hundred-year period. By the twelfth century, most of the land was under cultivation.

Then, “the tragedies” began. Drainage caused the ground to subside while warming climates caused sea levels to rise. A series of strong storm surges between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries broke through dikes and flooded the region on several occasions. Pop-culture references to these events in the 2000s said these inundations covered up to seventy towns at a time and swept as many as a hundred thousand people and the land underneath them out to sea. Academic scholarship has shown that these legends exaggerated casualty tolls by a factor of ten or more. Geographically, however, the myths were instructive. By the fifteenth century, storm surges had transformed the medieval agrarian landscape into an inland saltwater bay, the Zuider Zee (South Sea), the same bay that Amsterdam’s nautical seafarers would later traverse en route to the East Indies and the Americas.16

This oceanic landscape, the Zuider Zee, remained in place until the early twentieth century when the region was geographically transformed yet again. After a 1916 storm surge crushed dozens of local dams, claiming lives and damaging property, national government officials oversaw the construction of the Enclosure Dike (Afsluitdijk), a sea wall that divided the inland saltwater bay from the outlying Atlantic Ocean. The national government and its engineering team initially planned to gradually reclaim the entire bay to make developable land. By the 1970s, four large reclamation areas had been completed, but further infill efforts floundered in the wake of fiscal shortfalls stemming from deindustrialization, as well as from antidevelopment pressure stemming from the burgeoning environmental movement.17

By the late twentieth century, rivers and rainfall had flushed the salt out of the remaining 1,800 square kilometers of open water, and the IJssel Lake District had become the largest freshwater body in Western Europe.

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