The Changing Significance of Urban Infrastructure: A Study of Dikes in the Dutch Landscape

Abstract

In Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, Robert Pogue Harrison discusses the garden as being “nothing if not a phenomenon,” (p. 118) This transitional nature of landscape also applies to urban infrastructure; changing with time and in response to the needs of its users, for protection, transportation, or resource delivery. More recently, defensive dikes in the Netherlands have joined this group, as the relationship of the Dutch to their dikes has changed. This paper presentation presents the results of a study of the dike as an evolving defensible architecture that has changed in significance due to climate change. An important issue as we are all experiencing the unknown of what life will look like as the waters continue to rise and our coastlines are redrawn.

Description: As landscape architects we have become comfortable with our ability of manipulating the ground to create beautiful and well-loved places. We now need to stop and think seriously about how we are going to address this rapidly eroding medium. The dikes can be likened to the system of defensive walls surrounding medieval cities such as Paris and Rome. However, while those walls have largely become invisible to the casual viewer, the dikes have maintained their structure, mainly changing their roles within, and their relationship to, the surrounding urban fabric. Where they were once the last defense against rising waters, flooding, loss of crops and livestock, even death, many dikes have been absorbed into the urban infrastructure with different roles to play. Roles such as public parks, no longer separating people from the water, but instead transitioning to a connective fabric, and routes of circulation for a variety of users.

Logistics: Using a combination of maps and aerial photographs of Dutch cities from the 18th and 19th Centuries through the present day, the study traces the evolution of this system of infrastructures from defensive to connective, while revealing associated landscape patterns and stories of contemporary resonance and significance. The proposed presentation will require only standard conference computer projection equipment.

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