Paper short abstract:

Modernist discourse dictated that there should be a clear separation between land and water in the Netherlands. Between 1945 and 1970, Dutch water engineers got the financial and technical means to implement this ideal: the land became dry, water was controlled and locked outside the sea dykes.

Paper long abstract:

The boundaries between land and water were, traditionally, quite fluid in the landscape of the Netherlands. Not all land was not really land (e.g. peatlands) and there were numerous transition zones: wetlands, floodplains, reed swamps etc.

Modernist discourse since the 19th century, however, insisted that a clear boundary be drawn between land and water. Wetlands and peatlands should be drained and turned into ‘real’ agricultural land, rivers ‘normalised’ and swamps and tidal marshes reclaimed and impoldered. The ideal of a strict separation between land and water was already in place, but its implementation was often impeded by the high costs and the low value of the newly reclaimed land.

That changed after 1945. Financial and political constraints were brushed aside and the Netherlands embarked on a full-scale modernist programme of moulding the land according to human needs. Large-scale projects of land consolidation and drainage maximised the amount of agricultural land suitable for intensified, mechanised forms of agriculture, whereas water engineers built an elaborate system of flood protection works. Politicians, citizens and planners canalised remaining streams and waterways and responded to floods by building higher dykes. Water increasingly turned from a natural resource into a nuisance, a feature of the human environment that had to be managed and controlled by modern technology.

Between 1945 and 1970, the Netherlands discursively ‘turned its back on the water’. The country now regularly suffers from severe droughts in summer, although 26 % of its land surface lies below sea level...