Water Commoning: Testing the Bille River in Hamburg as a Space for Collaborative Experimentation (original) (raw)

Space for people? Citizen action in three Space for the River projects

Flood interventions are generally justified with a view to the common good, to security. ‘Making space for the river’ as currently advocated in the UK and the Netherlands emphasises non-structural approaches combining environmental values with economic development and safe water levels. Yet, the local response to ‘making space’ is rarely ecstatic. The present contribution looks into the citizen response to three river interventions to ´make space´. A degree of conflict can be expected because interventions in the general interest almost inevitably require sacrifice of locally affected stakeholders. Yet, the three cases seem to show that finding space for rivers is not always regarded locally as the problem, but rather the process of decision-making and communication. The paper will discuss the cases of the Maidenhead, Eton and Windsor Flood Alleviation Scheme, subsequently rechristened the Jubilee River on the Thames; the set-aside for controlled flooding of the Ooij polder in the Netherlands, near the German border, and the Zutphen bypass on the river Ijssel, a tributary of the river Rhine, also in the Netherlands. It sketches the history and assesses how citizen action influenced the decision-making. The Jubilee River won several awards for its innovative engineering, while the Space for the River programme was deemed an administrative success (ten Heuvelhof 2007). The present paper however will argue that each of the projects analysed below could have been more successful with better communication between authorities and citizens.

Urban water bodies as the basis for functioning of public spaces

E3S Web of Conferences, 2020

Recently, housing construction in cities has been carried out at a high rate. Increasingly, urban abandoned and flooded depressive spaces near water bodies (often rivers), which were previously used as industrial facilities or temporarily used, are becoming the sphere of architectural and landscape transformations. The restoration of such territories helps to improve the quality of urban space and improve its ecological properties. Correct development of territories near rivers and various water bodies has a great health-improving effect on the urban environment, improves its natural and climatic conditions. In addition, social and economic factors play an important role in this process, since such transformed territories and territories adjacent to them significantly increase investment attractiveness. This paper examines modern approaches to the development of urban public spaces, based on the formation of architectural environments that ensure the relationship of urban developmen...

The Social, Political, and Environmental Dimensions in Designing Urban Public Space from a Water Management Perspective: Testing European Experiences

Land

Urban areas are increasingly experiencing extreme weather events, especially related to water (e.g., droughts, heatwaves, floods), which are devastatingly impacting infrastructure and human lives. Compact cities, conceived to create more robust, effective, and sustainable environments, are under pressure to increase their resilience by co-producing adaptive strategies mainly focused on the urban public space. However, public space design tends to face environmental challenges without sufficiently exploring their intersection with social issues (citizens living conditions and vulnerability) and political structures (governance). This contribution delves into how urban public space interventions are (not) moving towards achieving urban resilience in an integrated way instead of sectoral. A triple-loop approach has been developed and tested in ten urban public spaces in European compact cities in the last 25 years. The results report how most projects reinforce the social dimension by ...

(2017) A METROPOLITAN PARK OF WATER in in WATER as CATALYST in Interventions and Adaptive Reuse, vol. 8, Department of Interior Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design, Two College Street, Providence (USA), BIRKHÄUSER / DEGRUYTER, 2017, pp. 82-87. ISBN 978-3-0356-1197-7

Interventions and Adaptive Reuse, 2017

For three decades, numerous urban renewal projects have involved European cities located on rivers, demonstrating how an interpretation of the urban and peri-urban areas is related to questions about high-quality ecological development and environmental sustainability. This report places the majority of large projects involving river cities among new environmental practices, usually adhered to for large events which are seen as tools for transforming the land and the image of the host city. In this context, cities near rivers are increasingly aware of the natural environment which shapes the identity of a place and which requires ordinary and extraordinary renewal projects. This is the framework for the various elements of the ambitious project taken on by Zaragoza, the Spanish city which hosted the International Expo in 2008 with the theme “Water and Sustainable Development”. It is entirely appropriate then, that it was integrated into a strategy aimed at the transformation and regeneration of the territory surrounding the river. The urban-environmental project along the shores of the Ebro River, joining green areas with leisure activities, has not only created a space for enjoyment, but it has also become a place for activity within a wide urban park. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the project for the Zaragoza Expo (and the policies created for a new metropolitan vision before 2020) encapsulates the reciprocal relationship between the event, which sought to transform the river’s surrounding region, and the resources which this very region has placed front and center in order to relaunch its identity.

The river contract in urban context as a new network of experiences

2021

The river contract can be identified as a process, linking different intervention scales, able to solve the complex system of relationships between all involved components. In the landscape improving interventions, the River Contract is a new opportunity to experiment innovative planning and design approaches for fragile territories. Due to climate change, they have become favourite settings to simultaneously implement territorial and local strategies. This paper concentrates in particular on the European panorama and tries to deepen the analysis of some test areas in Italy, proposing a methodology to compare their applications and their relationship with the planning tools in force.

“Room for river” measures and public visions in the Netherlands: A survey on river perceptions among riverside residents

Water Resources Research - WATER RESOUR RES, 2009

Dutch river management is moving from traditional dike reinforcements toward “room for river” measures to assure flood protection and to serve other societal goals. With that, the engineering paradigm shifts from mastership over nature to a more partnership-like attitude toward nature. Are these values shared by Dutch riverside residents? Are the measures proposed under the new paradigm accepted? This paper investigates these two questions on the basis of semistructured interviews and a survey in communities along the floodplain of the river Waal (i.e., Rhine). The analyses show that even though their visions of nature are remarkably ecocentric, partnership with nature is not the dominant idea within that ecocentric realm. Partly as a consequence of that and partly because the respondents do not perceive the measures as natural, the investigated room for river measures are not endorsed.

Spatialization of political action applied to waterways management an overview of Parisian urban small rivers

Environnement Urbain, 2013

 RÉSUMÉ Les petites rivières urbaines de l'agglomération parisienne sont caractérisées par une segmentation territoriale de pratiques et de gestion qui doivent elles-mêmes s'inscrire dans une dynamique d'ajustement entre politique urbaine et politique environnementale. Actuellement l'obligation d'une restauration de ces cours d'eau (mise en application de la DCE) pose la question de la coordination des acteurs et de leur capacité à agir pour une prise en charge collective de cette renaturation. Dans cet article, il s'agit de rendre explicite les convergences et divergences dans la représentation commune de la relation des acteurs locaux au cours d'eau à travers un certain nombre de trajectoires spatio-temporelles propres à chaque petite rivière. Nous montrerons que l'enjeu d'une gestion commune de la rivière n'est pas seulement celui d'une gestion de la ressource mais d'un espace commun. Choisir de modéliser la relation entre les sociétés locales et leur rivière dans le temps et dans l'espace, autour d'une figure territorialisée, fournit aux acteurs locaux et régionaux une explication de leurs interactions avec la rivière et ses milieux, révélatrice d'une capacité à agir ensemble.

Revisiting the appropriation of space in metropolitan river corridors

Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2015

This article reintroduces the concept of 'appropriation of space' into current theoretical debates and empirical approaches in environmental psychology. We present an analysis of a case study conducted in a Barcelona metropolitan river corridor, aimed at exploring how the development of people-place bonds can foster pro-environmental behaviours in a natural open space. The multi-method qualitative analysis based on participant observation, documentary research and interviews with 57 inhabitants reveals a long-term process of appropriation of the riverside environment that typically results in a sense of responsibility of the subject towards it. The article specifically shows that the time factor is crucial in the explanation of the process of appropriation, and that future longitudinal studies in this and other cases will be required to assess more accurately its importance. Finally, we stress the benefits of taking proper advantage of citizens' cumulative awareness of the management of river corridors.

Change the City, Design the Water

Urban regeneration projects and initiatives are producing, especially in the last thirty years, a strong change in the pattern of urban public spaces in European cities: architectural design stands as a true «treatment of space» (Emery, 2008), where its purpose is to «protect the public value of undeveloped natural areas» disclosing «the strategic preciousness of places even if minimal» (Ottolini, 2002). Within this new process of transformation, rediscovery and new configurations of urban public spaces, water is recognized as an important resource structuring the new open spaces, thanks to a new ecological awareness, reading the form and the role in order to adapt to the changes that the city and society have matured. Water could come back to play a central role not only in the conformation of the open spaces of the city but also in social processes, returning to the community new living spaces: architecture as «the weighed construction of space» (L. I. Kahn: Bonati, 2002) with its geometry, its dimensions, from the planimetric relations with the context to the scale of furniture, the human scale. The project becomes the interpreter of places of the city in direct contact with water, forming a complex network of relationships. It’s all about grasping the potential that the complex experiential relationship between man and water allows, interweaving with the living body, full of signs and tracks, of the open spaces of the city.

Unveiling Cities Identity Through Water

An exponential and badly managed use of land has led to a progressive crisis of open spaces. They become residues in-between the cities, the marginal part of the fragmented urban periphery in contact with still agricultural areas. In these territory waterways represent an important connecting element with environmental and sustainable potentialities able to create a new system with open spaces, in and outside the city, becoming opportunity to rebuild structures of meanings and to give back habitability to the open spaces of the future city. The potential of these projects is not only responding to evident ecological and biodiversity possibilities, but also to a real management of the resource that has to be in synergy with local and regional administrations. The designs dealing with open spaces along waterways have to have in themselves an effective character over a long period, on one side able to adapt to the economic potential and management of local governments, on the other able to provide a tool to indicate guidelines and objectives for the management of the territory and future cities. With this goal the research wants to investigate the territory around Milano that, as Carlo Cattaneo said, is based on an historical tradition characterized by an important domestication work conducted by man on the water, claiming, in the nineteenth century, the primacy of Lombardy in the field of hydraulic science and agriculture. Today what’s left of the domestication work are natural areas, often residual, in between a territory made of spaces strongly anthropic, where dwelling is the new protagonist and where open space for citizen public life is reduced and without quality as well as fragmentary on urban fringes. The research has set up either through didactic research, specifically through courses dealing with the topic of open spaces from the territorial scale to the specific one of single places with them equipments, either through funded research, shared with public institutions, making strong links between didactic and local policies of territorial government to think about and create a new development of the future city in relation with water (a vast topic evidenced by the work done and in progress for the Villoresi Canal that crosses whole the territory North of Milano). The studies made on the canal demonstrate how waterways become strategic places where public firm and local authorities should invest to create new urban areas and a new image of cities in relation with water, follow a trend witnessed by urban regeneration projects that especially in the last thirty years characterized and continue to characterize the cities and towns around the world.