Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage

Historic waterworks, including aqueducts and sewers, are civil engineering achievements with unique heritage management challenges. Often designed to be silent and unseen, the subgrade and inaudible infrastructure that delivers water and removes waste is frequently ignored by the public unless it stops working. Although these systems can benefit from official designation as heritage, they are infrequently given this benefit, as the water and wastewater management community that is responsible for them often remains disconnected from the heritage management community. I argue for the establishment of best practice guidelines on the stewardship of historic waterworks infrastructure. Further, I examine the need to evaluate historic significance and identify character-defining features as well as to promote rehabilitation, redundancy, and sustainability of active elements. This discussion is illustrated by the cases of the Aqua Virgo and the Cloaca Maxima of Ancient Rome, the karez of China’s Turpan Province, the Jerome Park Reservoir and Water Tunnel No. 3 in New York City, and the mamanteo canals of Peru. In addition, I recommend strongly that water and wastewater managers and preservationists consider adaptive use of historic waterworks infrastructure after they are decommissioned from active use. Vibrant examples of repurposing are included from around the world, including subgrade sewers, cisterns, and weirs, as well as above-grade gatehouses, wastewater treatment plants, and pumping stations. The heroic civil engineering achievements of the past were often realized amidst the need for social change. In particular, water infrastructure systems, such as gravity-fed aqueducts, delivered reliable sources of potable water to communities while also consistently reducing outbreaks of disease and fire. Preservation of this heritage poses multiple challenges, owing, in part, to the inaudibility and invisibility of these systems, the general public’s limited awareness of this heritage’s civil engineering significance, underrepresentation in World Heritage listings, and limited funding from government agencies that often privilege utility over aesthetics. Although it is inextricably linked to cultural, agrarian, industrial, and maritime landscapes in urban and rural communities worldwide, this infrastructural heritage can suffer unsympathetic alteration, encroachment, obsolescence, demolition, and abandonment. Nonetheless, some waterworks heritage has been preserved within active systems, and some decommissioned sites have successfully been repurposed. All merit closer study by modern planners, engineers, and policymakers as they work to meet water delivery and wastewater removal needs today. In regulatory and political climates where heritage is increasingly threatened, there is a need for management guidelines for historic waterworks infrastructure, in order to consistently apply best practices to analysis, decision making, and modes of treatment. Conservation must be balanced with the demand for new construction and upgrades, in a process that (1) acknowledges significance and identifies character-defining features; (2) evaluates the choice between rehabilitation and replacement for prudence and feasibility; (3) views preservation as a pragmatic and cost-effective means to extend purpose-built service life; (4) replaces sacrificial elements; and (5) repurposes decommissioned elements.

This chapter focuses on a traditional Iranian water infrastructure, the qanat system, a technical solution to the problem of accessing water for irrigation and urbanization that has shaped the landscape and organized the territory. The qanat was the basis for habitation, construction, and prosperity (abadani). It is also a key to understanding the culture and civilization of the Iranian Plateau and has evolved as a form of cultural heritage. Therefore, preserving this heritage is more than protecting an old technology. Rather, it requires a deeper understanding of the territory in which the qanat operated and of its limitations and possibilities. Discussing a historical work, The Extraction of Hidden Waters by Muhammad Al-Karaji (953–1029), this chapter explicates the multivalent role of the qanat system in managing and organizing the territory, society, life, and culture in the Iranian Plateau; this multiplicity of aspects and scales shapes its consideration of qanats’ heritage today.

In the past, between the sixth century BCE and the ninth century CE, the Zapotec people managed rainwater in Monte Albán, in the state of Oaxaca, south of Mexico, through terraces, canals, dams, and wells. Water was a keystone of their worldview and ritual practice. Today, this knowledge is in oblivion. Rapid but irregular urbanization threatens the remnants of these water control systems, still hidden on this archaeological hill site. Our ongoing interdisciplinary project, Parque Monte Albán, has centered on the water that flows down the hill and offers new strategies to increase the value and quality of water by revitalizing and redesigning ancient hydraulic technology. In the short and long term, our solutions can restore the natural environment, improve the quality of urban living, and help protect archaeological heritage.

Cities worldwide currently face freshwater shortages. Forecasts predict that demand will outstrip naturally renewable and available water supplies by 40% by 2030. This poses a serious threat to livability in cities and urban areas that are already struggling with water-related issues like floods and land subsidence. Water insecurity, in particular, now intensified by climate change, calls for integrated and creative solutions. The Dutch heritage in freshwater management, sometimes overlooked and undervalued due to its utilitarian and often modest orientation, is able to provide knowledge and inspiration toward developing water-secure, water-sensitive cities. Three lessons can be learned from Dutch water supply heritage. First, the quest for clean drinking water has sometimes driven the development of valuable urban greenscapes, waterscapes, and nature and landscape conservation areas. Second, those who initiated and managed water-related innovations were often private and commercial parties which collaborated with public entities. Third, although Dutch water supply heritage has become invisible or is not recognized, it embodies valuable systems and practices, particularly with regard to the multisource water supply, private and collective rainwater harvesting, that today could benefit both water supply and wastewater systems. Reducing the need for clean drinking water, generating less storm water runoff, needs to be done while engaging the public in building water-sensitive, safe cities.

From the Middle Ages until the twentieth century, water meadows in Europe were primarily irrigated to improve their productivity and to lengthen the growing season. They were water management systems designed to collect and use water and to discharge it: water had to be kept moving. This chapter presents a general overview and a history of research on European water meadows. It also examines examples from the sandy landscapes of northwestern Europe, from Slovakia, and Norway. Three main types of water meadows are distinguished: simple dam systems, more elaborate catchworks, and highly developed bedworks. Of these, bedworks were technically and organizationally the most complex; they were also the most costly in construction and maintenance. Most water meadows were abandoned in the twentieth century; in many places, however, their traces can still be recognized in the landscape. They are both an interesting part of European agrarian and landscape heritage and a carrier of regional identity. In recent years, a number of water meadows have been restored, for ecological, water management, tourism, and heritage purposes.

The Holler colonies are settlements in European marsh and dyke landscapes created starting in the High Middle Ages through land reclamation by Dutch water engineers who had been hired by local leaders. Some Holler colonies were later abandoned; others remained. Surviving colonies, some of which remain and are largely intact, was often changed by later land reclamation processes (Renes and Piastra 2011: 24). Today, the remainders of these landscapes are visible proof of the intangible and tangible heritage of European economic and social history. These created landscapes—Holler landscapes—are easily recognized by their linear landscape structure and small parceling. Other characteristic features are hydraulic engineering structures, such as dykes, drainage systems, receiving waters, and the pumping stations used to clear the marshes of water and strip parceling, linear settlements, and infrastructure, houses and farms in a row, dykes, roads and byways, ditches, and channels. Holler colonies are a European landscape typology in several respects. First, they were the consequence of Dutch water engineers’ large-scale knowledge transfer within Europe, are always built at the invitation of local leaders, and always encompass the diffusion of Dutch laws, traditions, production, and models of society. Second, they may be considered a European landscape type that defined European wetland areas along large rivers from the Middle Ages onwards. Their uniqueness is based on the techniques applied, the social processes involved, and their long duration.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, agriculture formed the basis of cultural identity in the many parts of Japan where land and water were locally maintained, managed, and sustained (Wigen 1995; Toyama 1993). This chapter expands the Japanese idea of heritage beyond the question of beauty to include agricultural social systems and water management, exploring the long-term interactive relationship between water resources, the riverine landscape, and local people (Soja 2003). It does so by unraveling the formation and transformation of the legend of the irrigation pioneers. Tsutō Nitobe, a samurai of the Nanbu clan, is legendary for his pioneering water resource management and land reclamation in Japan’s Sanbonkihara region in the nineteenth century (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries 2018). After his death, his irrigation project was the pride of the region; part of the legend is that subsequent irrigation projects inherited the spirit of his work (Northeast Agricultural Administration Bureau 2018). The legend changed over time: the Meiji government and postwar governmental officials developed the nation in Nitobe’s name; and today Land Improvement Districts (LID), or water user associations, and agricultural bureaus exalt Nitobe as the spiritual symbol of agricultural society and its cultural landscapes. However, in on-site research, we discovered that many untold people put together these projects. This chapter shows that the tangible heritage of the irrigation project is inseparable from the area’s historical identity or intangible heritage.

Heritage preservation in Taiwan was for many years limited to a small group of art experts, who focused on masterpieces in museums or on magnificent architecture, disconnected from people’s daily lives and current society. Others made efforts to enhance local cultures and encourage grassroot participation in heritage preservation, but, as heritage sites continued to be treated as single, unrelated objects, these efforts remained only loosely tied to local communities. A recent campaign for the preservation of the pond–canal system heritage in the Taoyuan tableland suggests a change of direction and indicates new opportunities for increased attention to and participation in heritage. In 2008, a plan for developing an airport-based metropolitan region, a so-called Aerotropolis, threatened the local water heritage infrastructure, including its distribution network and the local sustaining eco- and social systems. Opposition arose among a wide range of environmental and social groups, which weighed in on the importance of the water system. Together their stories wove a fine and unbreakable “web of narratives,” which became a shield that successfully protected the water heritage. Water heritage, as a system of multiple sites that is by nature more relevant to people’s daily lives, can benefit from such participatory preservation. Moreover, it is possible, too, that the conservation of heritage of all categories could find inspiration in this strategy.

The Hachirogata central polder in Akita Prefecture in Japan is an important example of a completely planned and constructed agricultural production landscape and also of an industrial heritage landscape built in the context of the myth of modernism and large-scale planning intervention. The land was reclaimed from the Hachirogata lagoon in the middle of the twentieth century with the help of Dutch engineers. Today, the polder is one of the most productive landscapes in Japan for growing rice. For centuries, the fishery was the main industry of the lagoon. But the government was interested in developing agriculture by turning the lagoon into agricultural land, and it did not initially consider fishermen’s rights or the traditional lifestyle and heritage of the region in its planning. This chapter explores the planning of the land reclamation from about 1930 to the late 1950s. Drawing on articles in local newspapers and on official planning documents, it explores the conflicting interests and heated debates between the central government, the prefecture office, local municipalities, and local people regarding agriculture and fishing in local history. It contributes insights on food production, environmental issues, and local traditional industries to both heritage debates and the planning of future industrial heritage landscapes.

The Netherlands has a centuries-long tradition of reclaiming land. In the last century gaining land from water peaked with the IJsselmeerpolders, made possible by technical innovations. The Noordoostpolder (1937–1942), one of the IJsselmeerpolders, is a unique example of a fully designed agricultural landscape of the twentieth century. It is the first Dutch modern polder in which the layout was planned as an integral task, involving all its agricultural, urban, and landscape elements at once, while reflecting the state of the art in design, science, and engineering. Using the Noordoostpolder as an example, this chapter discusses the preservation and development of twentieth-century polders as cultural heritage landscapes. It elaborates a preservation-through-planning approach that takes spatial development with historical landscape structures as a basis. The chapter also briefly elaborates a critical way of understanding the coherence and variation of modern landscapes such as the Noordoostpolder, providing clues for spatial planning by systematically delineating and identifying spatial design principles.

Since the twelfth century, polder landscapes have characterized the Netherlands, in particular, but also have appeared across Europe—vast plains reclaimed from water and repurposed for crops and livestock, farmers and rural communities. Over the centuries, urbanization has brought domestic and international visitors seeking leisure activities in these cultural landscapes. But polders have lain mostly in the shade, as it were, of other landscapes, merely a link between hills, dunes, ocean beaches, and historic cities. The Europolders Program emancipates this characteristic landscape, and strengthens prosperity in it, showing it to be an attractive and interesting territory. The Netherlands has a remarkable hydraulic engineering reputation abroad, not only because of work they have done at home—to endless extraction, reclamation and drainage, irrigation projects, dyke, channel, and harbor works—but also because they brought their expertise to the farthest corners of the world. Polders across Europe were shaped or at least influenced by Dutch (Frisian, Hollanders, Zeeuw) and Flemish people. The Europolders Program focuses on developing a European network of polder landscapes with extensive cultural and natural value. It aims to increase the accessibility, visibility, and awareness of historical polder landscapes, water management, and technological innovation, for the benefit of residents and visitors, and to strengthen regional economies.

The redevelopment of the New Dutch Waterline, also known as the New Hollandic Waterline, was crucial to a change in public appreciation of Dutch military heritage and its connection to landscape design. Starting in 1980, new methods of revitalization combined preservation, renewal, and narrative approaches. At the same time, the work on the New Dutch Waterline changed; a nationally driven project became a series of local interventions. Throughout the effort, it was critical to success to have different actors understand and promote it as a heritage landscape of national importance. The project undertook not only to revitalize individual fortresses, but to enhance regional identity and tourism, a new scale in heritage debates. This chapter shows the importance of understanding and intervening in defense heritage as landscape–as well as individual objects. It also indicates how addressing these different scales can help in future spatial challenges. Finally, it addresses how understanding water heritage can help to tackle the imminent challenge of climate change at the scale of the landscape.

Drawing upon post-structuralist theories of heritage and Derridian theory in particular, this chapter examines the idea of ‘absent–present’ heritage: heritage that is non-existent, but whose trace remains in the present in a social, memorial and sometimes physical way. Exploring this theoretical approach to heritage, this chapter examines cultures of dwelling on and alongside the Yangtze River. Empirically, it examines the histories and contemporary status of floating fields, sampans and tracking on the Yangtze; treating these social material entities as absent–present heritage, it ends with a discussion of augmented reality as a new digital technology that could allow for the conservation of this heritage. It is also suggested here that such conservation practices might offer space for critical reflection.

Alblasserdam is a Dutch dyke village dating to the thirteenth century, with its earliest houses built along the embankment of a major dyke. Most of its history is closely related to shipping and shipbuilding. The village center had a harbor for inland ships and a navigation lock; in the hinterland, industrialization created several yards where workers built many types of vessels: simple wooden rowing boats, wooden ships, and steel ships. Other yards related to shipbuilding—a steel mill, a construction yard for railway infrastructure—rose there too. The material used in these yards came in by ship and ferry. Today, the local ferry has been replaced by bridges and a tunnel. Sites once hosting major shipyard now hold housing. Halls that were used to build minesweepers for the Dutch Navy are now used for building beautiful yachts. Cranes and old buildings alike have disappeared, and new areas have become available for redevelopment. Five objects on the waterfront of the Noord exemplify the connections of history to possible transformations in the future, and the question of safeguarding the area’s history as cultural heritage: the site of the Nedstal steel factor, the historic bridge (and an art installation proposed for it), the shipyard of van de Giessen de Noord, the Oude Werf yard, and the Mercon Kloos site. Two citizen initiatives seek to restore and manage cultural heritage in the Alblasserwaard and the river Noord. The analysis shows that cultural heritage has gotten more attention from public and private stakeholders and civil society over time.

Dutch river management has changed dramatically over the past two hundred years. Approaches to flood management, however, date back many more centuries. This chapter compares the state river management program, Room for the River (undertaken from 2006 to 2015), to historical flood management strategies and techniques. We consider which measures used in this program might be useful in addressing the possibly accelerated pace of climate change and rise in sea level. We focus on the cultural water landscape of the Noordwaard. Formed in response to large river discharges occurring in 1993 and 1995–and the precautionary evacuation of two hundred fifty thousand inhabitants which accompanied them–Room for the River consisted of more than thirty projects and eight measures. In a departure from past policies, most measures took place in the winter bed, or floodplain, of the river or behind its dike. Another innovative characteristic was its dual objective of ensuring safety and contributing to spatial quality–which the program defined as the balance between hydraulic effectiveness, ecological robustness, and cultural meaning and aesthetics. The program dedicated a special team to monitor progress on cultural issues. Room for the River represented a paradigm shift from the flood management policies of the recent past. Yet, some of the measures it recommended, such as digging a bypass and raising mounds in the Noordwaard, also recalled into practice much older approaches. This cutting-edge program made visible and returned to use traditional ways of flood management.

Heritage in coastal landscapes confronts preservationists, spatial planners, policymakers, and politicians with distinctive challenges. Coastal landscapes in all their varieties share common features because humans have interacted in similar ways with their environments on the edge of land and sea, including coastal defence, fishing, shipping, mussel farming, harvesting salt, swimming, boating, and using the beach as a tourist attraction. Coastal communities and societies are historically interconnected with each other and are more like each other than their respective inland societies in language, customs, ways of life, ways of building, and heritage. Moreover, they have a distinctive cultural and spiritual relationship with the sea. Cultural heritage and its management in coastal landscapes can vary greatly from one area to the next, but throughout Europe several key issues and challenges recur. In this chapter, I argue that coastal regions in Europe could manage their heritage resources more efficiently by exchanging expertise and experience. I address the importance of taking each site’s regional, spatial, and historical characteristics into account, while not losing sight of their many contemporary economic, social, cultural, and ecological challenges. I address four of these issues: interconnected cultural frontiers; the common challenges of coast-specific heritage; the threats and opportunities of coastal tourism; and the effects of ecological changes on cultural heritage. Each of them is illustrated by an example from one of the European coastal regions. Finally, I consider the roles that coastal heritage plays in the historiography of regions and nations, and how that affects the ways in which the coastal past is remembered, preserved and redeveloped.

This chapter explores two structural aspects of port-city interaction. First, it studies the evolution of planning policies on post-industrial waterfront spaces in the Netherlands before and after the 2008 financial crisis, focusing on the former shipbuilding company Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij (RDM). The RDM site in Rotterdam is a significant part of the old port area, and its submarine and shipbuilding legacy has always been present in the heads and hearts of the citizens. Second, the chapter explores how reawakening the nautical culture and marine traditions in Rotterdam can also reanimate the historical links between port and city. It briefly analyses the goals, achievements, and effects of a few heritage projects on the port-city interaction and the maritime identity of this global port-city.

While the impact of cruise shipping is largely mitigated by the consolidated and diverse economies of port cities, such as Hamburg, Tokyo, and Seattle, it is a key issue in the current transformation of the Caribbean cruise destinations that increasingly depend on tourism. This chapter illustrates how cruise tourism has triggered spatial and sociocultural changes in urban form and architectural heritage in the Caribbean region. It argues that those transformations fall into a path dependency thread, and that we are at a critical juncture whose stakes include the risk that cruise lines might soon just leave heritage sites altogether. The chapter also gives a broader reading of the contemporary modes of cruise tourism exploitation. The “Introduction” describes how previous economic dependencies shaped and conditioned the built heritage (urban form, urban function, and heritage architecture) of Caribbean port cities and how spatial relationships of port, city, and hinterland ultimately followed the spatial logics of colonial exploitation. It describes how this historically established (hence path-dependent) economical patterns are still visible in the current operating modes of cruise tourism in the region. The section “How Historical Political and Socio-economic Dependencies Shaped Both Caribbean Port City Heritage and Current Operating Modes of Cruise Tourism” describes the role of heritage architecture of port cities, in the context of cruise lines’ economic interests. The section “Heritage Architecture of Caribbean Cities and Cruise Lines’ Economic Interests” looks more specifically at how the cruise lines’ original interest in heritage preceded their actual disinterest. If the cruise lines were the first actors to add economic value to Caribbean heritage, the Caribbean cruise experience now sidesteps—if not actually fakes—local culture, cities, and economy.

Port cities face enormous sustainability challenges. In this chapter, we propose a relational view of these challenges and explore how different models of governance connect the three pillars of sustainable development: economy, environment, and society. We also address the contradictions inherent to new port plans or waterfront projects, zooming in on the case of Lisbon, Portugal to evaluate the role of heritage in the sustainable development of its historic maritime waterfront. We assess the extent to which reusing heritage structures strengthens the Lisbon port-to-city relationship with regard to governance and outcome. Our account shows that the city departed from its earlier object-based approach to adopt UNESCO’s approach of Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL). This shift has triggered deeper reflection among key city actors on the connections between city and port in Lisbon, as well as on the role of the waterfront landscape. We argue that its new approach to heritage potentially produces new governance arenas where new port–city coalitions can emerge—coalitions that have the potential to align economic and environmental objectives with the sociocultural motives that underpin the goals of heritage preservation. We conclude by emphasizing both the challenges of public participation and the critical importance of engagement of port authorities. Each is necessary if European port cities are to effectively pursue sustainable relationships.

We need to tell a new story about urbanizing delta regions. Historically, large-scale ‘iconic’ hydraulic works and modern industrial ports have been celebrated as showing the power of humans to control and subject nature. The emphasis on this part of cultural heritage tends to bury the remains of engineering and urban development of the previous periods and to erase the ebb and flow of natural processes in the earlier landscape. Instead of emphasizing resistance against nature and victories over nature, we need to embrace mitigation, adaptation, and uncertainty. Many urbanized delta regions, including the Dutch delta, have a rich history of such approaches. We can learn from that history, from the successes as well as from the failures. This chapter is a plea to embrace the dynamic and evolutionary character of delta regions and the cultures of adaptation which have been developed over many centuries. It means that another policy concerning cultural heritage should be stimulated in urbanizing deltas, fostering a heritage with an adaptive approach, not as a complete departure from present ways of doing things, but as a new stage in a centuries-long tradition.