To everyone’s surprise, Prince Willem-Alexander last year selected ‘water management’ as his special field of interest. 1

On second thoughts, it’s an apt choice, for several reasons, chiefly because water management really is a subject with a future, and therefore fitting for a future king: ‘Water is a theme which will not evaporate in the coming decades.’ 2

His first steps in the new territory have been expressly exploratory. He skims past Holland Promotion, concern and romanticism (‘who has not sat beside the water in silent admiration, or on a boat, watching the waves?’), yet has prodded his subjects in the meantime to engage in what is seemingly obvious: ‘The challenge for the future is not just to continue doing what we’ve been good at for centuries, but to put what we have learnt to a different use.’ 3

Now his mother’s cabinet is working on a new Report on Spatial Planning, we cannot disregard this hint.
It’s a well-known fact that the Netherlands is located in a region which God passed over on the third day of creation, to enable later inhabitants to take care of the division between land and water themselves. The simplified, heroic version of history suggests that they did so energetically and ever more successfully. In actual fact it was an alternation of spectacular achievements, botched jobs, and trial and error, and even the greatest achievements often had ambiguous results: they solved one problem whilst creating another. In the simplified version, water management has now been sorted out, almost as a matter of course. Not much more is being done to ‘keep alive the idea that the land is still vulnerable’. 4

Though the ‘water machine’ 5

is meanwhile displaying imbalances which are gradually aggravating the equilibrium between land and water.
The sea level is rising, so that river water can flow less easily into the sea; and this at a time when more river water is entering the delta. Intense drainage is causing the level of the polders to drop, necessitating even more intense drainage and further increasing the difference between the level of the water in the polder and that of the surrounding ‘storage water’. One-fifth of our well-watered country meanwhile has to contend with a drying out of the soil. The provision of drinking water has its own contradictions. In winter, excess rainwater of fairly good quality is drained away as quickly as possible, whereas in summer river water of dubious quality has to be used – which makes consideable demands on purification. The fact that good rainwater is despised is all the more surprising, with drinking water becoming an increasingly enviableresource, also on an international scale. The Rotterdam water company even considered importing drinking water from Norway at one stage. 6

In this way water management creates and aggravates its own discrepancies, and then is obliged to curb them with progressively powerful technical means. Recently numerous alternative solutions have emerged, which roughly add up to ‘rewetting’ the Netherlands. Apart from the hard methods of raised dikes, a softer strategy is being worked out, of ‘overfalls’ – the regulated flooding of designated areas when river levels are high – and of an ‘elastic coast’. Even the mighty State Department of Roads and Waterways no longer by definition ‘restrains natural forces in the fetters of civil engineering’, according to Twee Eeuwen Rijkswaterstaat, a book celebrating 200 years of that department. ‘Instead, a new approach has been introduced: that of “building with nature”. It entails putting the power of nature to maximum use and moving in step with it, so to speak.’ 7

The option of reflooding drained areas at some stage is being seriously considered. And when new nature reserves are created, ‘wet environments’ are well represented.
Such plans are often cause for surprise. ‘Pierce the dikes? “De-polder” the polders? Let the sea and rivers back in? I couldn’t believe my ears,’ wrote Tracy Metz. 8

Or else attention is drawn to ‘paradoxes’: as the last part of the Delta works comes into operation, dunes are being pierced elsewhere along the coast; here the river is caged in stronger dikes, elsewhere it is allowed to widen. 9

However, if the ‘rewetting’ trends are viewed not as incidents, but in the perspective of water management (‘courtesy of the prince’), it will augment their logic considerably. The regulation of land and water is the primary issue in Dutch spatial planning, historically and currently. It can be carried out in various ways. These differ greatly in their premises and spatial consequences and yet can be of equal merit, for instance on the safety front. Back in the sixteenth century Andries Vierlingh suggested as an alternative for the then accepted procedure ‘a humanist philosophy of hydraulics’, as Simon Schama terms it, not based on force but on ingenuity and reason, not approaching the water as an enemy but civilizing it with understanding. 10

If we update this metaphor, we approximate the option introduced in 1987 by the landscape architect Dirk Sijmons in the Ooievaar plan for the river region: we can box against the water or we can do judo with it. 11

Unlike what Vierlingh wanted, we don’t have to opt categorically for either one or the other. Boxing against the water has been the dominant sport this century, but the appeal of judo has meanwhile been rediscovered. In this way a wide selection of hard and soft options can be brought to bear, of civil and natural engineering, that facilitates real choices: social choices, programmatic choices, design choices. Various solutions for the same task are conceivable that also expedite solutions at the next levels of planning and organization. Sometimes soft, ‘wetting’ solutions, like lakes, bogs, marshes or ‘overfalls’ will be preferred, requiring a large area though one suitable for multiple uses (water storage, nature, recreation and/or the highly desirable waterside residential environments). Then again, the hard approach may be chosen for other locations to achieve well-defined distinctions. ‘Blue’ offers structure, as can ‘green’, to the ‘red’ of urban design. 12

What seemed at first sight like a paradox has proved to enrich design freedom.
So redesigned and refined water machinery can be the driving force for new ways of organizing space. But those possibilities must be recognized. And such recognition is, as yet, scant. Recently Ole Bouman commented with respect to the practice of building that ‘more and more money is being pumped into services technology and less and less into the design of the building itself. Yet the level of design creativity in services technology … is still depressingly low.’ 13

Designers and engineers still tend to work at cross purposes. And that applies equally at the spatial planning level, with the water management system as the elementary and biggest technical service of the delta area. In the same way that Bouman points architects towards services technology, Lodewijk van Nieuwenhuijze summons his landscape architecture colleagues to enter what once was the ‘closed, technical domain of the water manager’ and focus their creative design skills on ‘the circuit diagram of the Dutch water machine’. 14

However, water management and spatial planning are still largely separate domains. The two are located in different sectors of the government apparatus, which hampers dialogue. The issues of water management and its power as a guideline in planning play an insubordinate role in the debate on overall spatial planning. For example, there are no signs that the existing Vierde Nota Waterhuishouding (Fourth Government Report on Water Management – 1997) will form the foundations for the coming Vijfde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening (Fifth Report on Spatial Planning).

The explanation can of course be found in the past. The water management tradition goes back many centuries, that of spatial planning little more than one. The former was intended to tame the ‘water wolf’, the latter to curb urbanization and rapid industrialization. Each necessity then is the mother of a new discipline.
One might well wonder whether these genealogical differences still matter much. That question would have been perfect for the ‘spatial development policy report’ drawn up by the Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid (WRR), 15

in which that council formulates a new structure for spatial planning, one ‘which ties in better with social dynamics’. 16

Unfortunately the question is defined into a corner on the first pages. The WRR starts by making a clear distinction between spatial organization as ‘the social process of the ever-changing use of space’ and spatial planning as a government activity, ‘the deliberate, policy-induced attempts to influence the use of space’. But it becomes immediately clear that not all of government activity may be termed ‘spatial planning’: ‘The term spatial planning is reserved for such spatial policy as has emerged since the start of this century … This policy has always been primarily focused on steering and regulating the country’s urbanization.’ Other government activities, like the organization of water management ‘reach back still further in time’ and have ‘a tradition of active spatial organization, though there is little point interpreting this entire tradition as “spatial planning’. 17

‘Little point’: the words sound just a bit too facile in this context. Is the age of a tradition a good criterion for including or excluding aspects of spatial policy? Precisely because the Netherlands as a whole has become ever more urbanized, and post-industrial, with the traditional fields of spatial planning and water management largely overlapping, it is interesting to develop a new concept of spatial planning which takes account of all spatial-organization activities, focusing not on their age but on their topicality and their vitality.

No – the Crown prince, as he read up on the subject, can’t but have embarked on the WRR report with a sense of disappointment. In it, one of the most important advisory bodies to the government discusses the planning of the entire Netherlands – yet his beloved water management is immediately sent packing. Later in the report it turns out, fortunately, that the WRR does not adhere all too strictly to its own definition. Though the report does revolve mainly around the administrative universe, with proposals to redistribute powers among the state, provinces and municipalities. What it lacks is a liberating outlook of land and water – which is, first and foremost, the subject of planning.

Within the framework of Het Metropolitane Debat Maurits de Hoog, Dirk Sijmons and San Verschuuren examined the same question as the WRR: how can we plan planning? How can we arrange the vast number of interests, wishes and ideas that spatial policy affects, in a clear and practicable way? They too proposed a division into three, though theirs differs from that of the WRR, being based not on the distribution structure but on a spatial analysis, thus literally assuming a ‘bottom-up’ character. The prime concern in their list of spatial tasks is concern for the Lowland’s base, followed by the networks and lastly the pattern of occupation. The consequence is that matters relating to water management are of prime importance, and infrastructure and all manner of spatial claims only occupy the second and third places. 18

This approach reminds us that the third day of creation has never ended as a design task, and that the habitable lowland must be built up out of the water, again and again for years to come, and always differently. Or as Sijmons has explained: ‘The task is in fact to get down to particularizing the balance of power in spatial planning and to draw up a logical sequence of priorities: first things first.’ 19

But it is also little less than a reversal of the assignment of current political priorities and the dominant preoccupations of planners and designers. Which is why the proposal, however irresistible its logic may be, does not have much chance of being used as a guideline in the Fifth Government Report. It may have to limber up on the practice field for a year or so until, say, the Sixth Report – in true Crown-princely fashion.
If I were the Metropolitan Debate, I know who I’d like to have as my patron.

NOTES

1. Interview with Paul Witteman, NPS television, 11-9-97.

2. Trouw, 16-7-98.

3. ibid.

4. A. Bosch and W. van der Ham, Twee eeuwen Rijkswaterstaat. 1798-1998, Zaltbommel (European Library) 1998, p. 287.

5. The term was devised by Lodewijk van Nieuwenhuijze, ‘The Return of the waterstaatskaart’, in Dirk Sijmons (comp.), = Landschap, Amsterdam (Architectura et Natura) 1998, pp. 29-42.

6. For a survey of the problems with water see: Raad voor het Landelijk Gebied, Overvloed en schaarste: water als geld. Advies over de gevolgen van klimaatverandering, zeespegelrijzing en bodemdaling in het landelijk gebied, RLG 98/05, May 1998.

7. A. Bosch and W. van der Ham, op. cit. (note 4), p. 301.

8. Tracy Metz, Nieuwe natuur. Reportages over veranderend landschap, Amsterdam (Ambo) 1998, p. 7.

9. See Jan Brouwer, ‘Een methode van beslissen’, in D.H. Frieling (comp.), Het Metropolitane Debat, Bussum (Thoth) 1998, p. 29.

10. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, London (Fontana Press), 1991, p. 42.

11. In D. de Bruin et al., Ooievaar. De toekomst van het rivierengebied, Arnhem (Stichting Gelderse Milieufederatie) 1987.

12. See Tom Maas, ‘Niet Rood, maar Groen moet Nieuwe Kaart structuur geven’, in Cobouw, 23-6-97.

13. Ole Bouman, ‘Quick Space in Real Time, Part 3: Interactive architecture’, in Archis, no. 6, 1998, pp. 77-78.

14. Lodewijk van Nieuwenhuijze, op. cit. (note 5), p. 32.

15. Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regieringsbeleid, Ruimtelijke ontwikkelingspolitiek, Rapporten aan de Regering no. 53, The Hague (Sdu Uitgevers) 1998

16. Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regieringsbeleid, press release, 10-3-98.

17. WRR, op. cit. (note 15), p. 15.

18. Maurits de Hoog, Dirk Sijmons and San Verschuuren, ‘Herontwerp van het Laagland’, in Het Metropolitane Debat, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 74-87.

19. Dirk Sijmons, ‘Vliegtuigstrepen in een wolkenlucht. Naar een royale landing van natuurontwikkelingsprojecten’, in Fred Feddes et al. (ed.), Oorden van onthouding. Nieuwe natuur in verstedelijkend Nederland, Rotterdam (NAi Uitgevers) 1998, p. 237.