MarcoRanzato Water|UrbanScapes

Š 2017 by jovis Verlag GmbH Texts by kind permission of the author.

Pictures by kind permission of the photographers/ holders of the picture rights.

All rights reserved.

Design and setting: Daniele Tonon Proofreading: Martina Gentili Lithography: Bild1Druck, Berlin Cover: Daniele Tonon Printed in the EU Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de jovis Verlag GmbH KurfĂźrstenstrasse 15/16 10785 Berlin Germany www.jovis.de jovis books are available worldwide in select bookstores. Please contact your nearest bookseller or visit www.jovis.de for information concerning your local distribution.

ISBN 978-3-86859-475-1

WATER VS. URBAN SCAPE Exploring Integrated Water-Urban Arrangements

MARCO RANZATO (ed.)

Table of Contents

7

Preface Marco Ranzato

11

Introduction: the Water-Urban Dilemma Marco Ranzato

25

Designing for Diverse Urban-Waterscapes

27

Diffuse Water in Città Diffusa Marco Ranzato and Giambattista Zaccariotto

49

Reimagining the Relationship Between Cities and Water: an Australian Perspective Dave Hedgcock and Mike Mouritz

147

Designing the Brussels Urban-Waterscape

149

Brussels Urban-Waterscape Marco Ranzato

185

Brussels’ Visible Water Marco Ranzato, Alessandra Marcon, Simone Conz, Liu Siyu, and Zhao Yang

202

Towards New Urban ‘Hydrographies’ Alessandra Marcon and Marie Pire

207

Brussels’ Heterogeneity for Water Marco Ranzato, Roberto Genna, Pauline Cabrit, Maëlle Thueux, and Wu Xiaoyu

226

Integrated Water Systems in Heterogeneous Urban Areas Martina Gentili and Andrea Aragone

233

Water Following Brussels’ Socio-Topography Marco Ranzato, Marta De Marchi, Simone Conz, Yixin Xu, and Bianca Fanta

252

Water Management in the Light of Social Topography Marta De Marchi

65

Grafting on the Water Landscape in the Dispersed Urban Territory of Flanders Christian Nolf and Bruno De Meulder

259

Brussels’ Water Courses Retrofitting Marco Ranzato, Catalina Codruta Dobre, Simone Conz, and Olivia Adamska

83

Oslo Water Sensitive City.

A Design Approach for Transition Giambattista Zaccariotto

278

Retrofitting Urban Rivers in Dense Areas: Urban Space as a Critical Resource Andrea Bortolotti, Catalina Codruta Dobre, and Luisa Moretto

97

Making City. Arnavutköy, Istanbul Sotiria Kornaropoulou, Jaap van der Salm, and Dirk Sijmons

285

Brussels’ Heterogeneity and Fragmentation via Topography Géry Leloutre

309 115

Conceiving Water Space in Kigali: Difficulties and Opportunities in Shaping the Informal City Ilaria Boniburini

133

Rediscovering the Water Network for Enhancing the Pedestrian System of Shanghai Tongyu Sun

Epilogue: Designers’ Dreams and Urban Water Sybrand Tjallingii

Marco Ranzato

Preface

This book is mainly a collection of design experiences around the current urbanisation and the arrangement of its waters1. The idea came about in the frame of the workshop Water vs. Urban Scape? Exploring integrated and decentralised arrangements of water in the Brussels Capital Region held in Brussels in July 2013. Organised by the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta of the UniversitĂŠ libre de Bruxelles in collaboration with the College of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Tongij University, this intensive pedagogical and design experience was tutored by Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design. Soon after, it appeared important to further develop the ‘raw materials’ worked out in the workshop and to frame them in a broader reflection regarding the role of design in the matter. The scope of the reflection expanded in a stroll round the challenges and lines of work concerning Brussels as well as those of other emblematic urban conditions resulting from the varied urbanisation processes presently changing the planetary landscape2.

In thus proceeding, the book attempts to trace a line with Hydropolis: the role of water in urban planning, a key international UNESCO-IHP workshop on the subject from 1993. Already at that time, in the urban design discourse, the concept of Integrated Water Management was gaining momentum3. Diverse researchers were launched to explore design tools and processes integrating the water issue. After about 20 years, this book indirectly acts as a foundation

7

to reflect about the extent to which what was expected by design at that time actually came later. In so doing, the book also wonders if, under the relentless progress of urbanisation, water-related design challenges and lines of work have changed in the meantime.

The book is organised in two sections. The first part collects a series of written essays. Researchers and designers have responded to the call for opening up design-based experiences on the matter drawn up for specific socio-spatial landscapes. In urban situations widely differing in climatic, economic, social and spatial terms, the agency of design will often result as the key factor. Sometimes it will appear as the genuine mean to devise water-urban arrangements in balance, while some other times it will look very superfluous, factitious, or definitively behindhand. It remains to figure out if it is important or not that ‘water sensitive’ design research spans the variegated range of socio-spatial landscapes produced by the planetary urbanisation process and if these diverse design experiences can actually learn from each other.

The second part focuses on the case of Brussels. After two introductory texts that provide the background, four visual essays report the imaginary scenarios for Brussels initiated in the frame of the workshop and afterwards elaborated in both form and content. A graphic layout serves as common ground and meets the ambition of exploring a graphic system for water-related design. A small written essay follows each visual essay. Young researchers and designers previously involved in the educational activity have taken up the challenge of upshifting the specific line of change mobilised by the related scenario. Visual and written essays inform each other. These can be read as single pieces questioning the inner capability of the design of rising theoretical reflections and feeding the learning process.

This work was supported by the Institut Bruxellois pour la Recherche Scientifique under the grant Prospective Research for Brussels [2012], the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta, the Département des Relations Extérieures and the Secrétariat Département Recherche of the Université libre de Bruxelles.

I am grateful to all members of the scientific committee – Sybrand Tjallingii, Luisa Moretto, Richard Ashley, Maria Chiara Tosi, Meredith Dobbie, Davide Fornari and Daniele Tonon – who made it possible to set up a peer review process for both the written and visual contributions of this book.

The design team for the book consisted of Marta De Marchi and Martina Gentili of Latitude Platform. Both deserve extended appreciation for the generous, creative, and professional collaboration offered during the consuming selection and editing of texts and images. Andrea Aragone, Simone Conz, Roberto Genna, and Federico Gobbato provided their refined skills as designers for the production of many of the visual aids of the second part. Daniele Tonon provided able support to layout the book. Andrea Bortolotti and Géry Leloutre shared some of the concepts and research questions presented in the introductory texts.

8

My appreciation extends also to Philipp Sperrle of Jovis Verlag in Berlin for his professionalism and expertise.

Lastly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Sybrand Tjallingii, who revised the content of the entire book and contributed ideas while supporting me constantly.

Marco Ranzato Brussels, Belgium December 2016

Endnotes 1

2

The expression “its waters” is already vitiated.

It provocatively presupposes a subordination of water to the urbanisation.

See Brenner, N. (2014). Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanisation.

Berlin: Jovis.

3

The proceedings of the workshop are collected in van Engen, H., Kampe, D. & Tjallingii, S.P. (1993). Hydropolis: the role of water in urban planning. Leiden: Backhuys Publishers.

9

Marco Ranzato

Introduction: the Water-Urban Dilemma

Water is an urban issue River floods, inundations, water shortage, dirty water, water pollution, drowning, etc. are not a new issue for urban landscapes and their inhabitants. This sequence of words makes water and urban appear like two antithetical matters almost as if water was an external nature from which the urban has to protect itself. However complicated the relation might appear, the need for urban areas to continuously interplay with water cannot be disputed. Whatever the way water is metabolised by the urban milieu, water and urban are indissociable. It is as simple as the following: Water is life. The water-urban binomial, however, is not a fixed ‘thing’1.

It instead “embodies a multiplicity of historical-geographical relations and processes” in continual change (Swyngedouw, 1999, p.2). The intensification of the modernisation process and the related technical progress occurred over the last centuries brought the water-urban to a profound ’relationship crisis’. It has been under the light of modernism, with its belief in linear progress (Harvey, 1989), that the water-urban production and consumption patterns have intensified massively. Since the emergence of the industrial city – and the advent of the centralised states (Cosgrove, 1990) – the exploitation of water resources has continued to rise at an unprecedented pace. Rapidly, the conviction that water can actually be completely controlled became a certainty (e.g. Cosgrove, 1990;

11

Petts, 1990). In order to realise the financial gains that come from increased land values – both in the city and in the country – and to meet relentless demands for even more water, capitalist markets invested in the technological innovation required to engineer the landscape (Cosgrove, 1990). Provision and discharge of water was up-scaled further by sourcing, using, and transforming huge amounts of resources from ecosystems far beyond the urban bioregion (Monstadt, 2009).

Concurrently, provision and discharge of water became more and more mediated by institutionalised services and depended on the smooth functioning of a techno-scientific/networked infrastructure.

Water vs. urban If the comfort brought by the techno-scientific systems of water to the everyday life is undeniable, the implacability of the same on urban river floods, inundations, water shortage, dirty water, drowning, etc. has proven that this modus operandi has some minuses. From this angle, the water-urban dialectic seems to have come to a critical point. It looks as though the water vs. urban has become adverse towards each other. It has become increasingly clear that, paradoxically, the positivistic, technocratic, and rationalistic way in which water has been rationalised while providing the terms for a modern life, also has resulted in water-related problems. Now that these inconveniences are in the sunshine, a question emerges: is there any other paradigm to follow rather than going along with fuelling water vs. urban thoughts? Ecologist, scientists, enlightened professionals, parts of civil society, etc. including champions of ‘nature’ – but also, recently and more and more, the market (e.g. Kenis & Lievens, 2014) – lumped together by the common credo of making use of resources while assuring their availability to the following generations, seem to count on the crisis devouring the binomial as an ultimate expedience to actually bring these events and situations to a change. The aspiration is to accomplish arrangements where urban ecosystems are in balance. The shift is rather clear: to give more room to water while turning the circumstances (land/water resources/uses and users) to good account. Water(s) is a precious resource to be stored at any level and as much as possible, to be later used or recycled. Opportunities for storing and synergies for using and/or recycling have to be tracked down and to engage the conditions of the given site in best-performing circuits.

Integrated Water Management and context-based design The Integrated Water Management (IWM) concept, more than others, clearly sets out the terms of the shift. Briefly: a comprehensive understanding of water and its various dimensions that includes also unfolding the interactions between water, land, and the environment as well as corresponding social

12

and economic implications (Mitchell, 1990). The perspective is alternative – or even antithetical – to the universalised infrastructure and service chased to this day by the techno-scientific arrangements associated with the industrial model. The context/the site/the particular and its socio-spatial components are the benchmarks. Dynamics and forces attached to it should be revisited in order to make them ‘accredited actants’2. Following this reasoning, rather than ‘the same all over’ that have been ruling through the last few centuries and in which difference is overtaken by the technical artifice, in the IWM the water arrangement should be compatible and in concert with the conditions of setting, climate, and environment, not excluding social systems. This regard for context gets design – be it architecture, urbanism, or urban planning – back on track to a certain extent3. The technocratic disposition of engineering that up to now has tended to simplify the reality and its complexity by churning out standardised mostly invisible solutions should leave the ground to more ‘dialectic’ procedures where there is room for compromise. Design, as an act of ”orchestrating systems in a system” (Gregotti, 2008, p.24) that draws from a wide range of knowledge and experience, concerning technical, practical, and cultural aspects (Breen, 2002), could better serve the purpose of handling the materials of the site and organising them in arrangements that fit4. This of course recalls and brings credit to the ecological design and planning tradition that from Howard to Geddes, to Mumford, to McHarg, via also the Team 10 – though the latter with a more pronounced socio-cultural stance – have strived to internalise the environment or a supposed ‘nature’ in planning and architectural design5. As reaction to the ills and chaos of the industrial city and moved by the anxious for the city’s future (Jacobs, 1961), the ecological design positions the city against the thermodynamics imperative: “all systems are subjected to the necessity of finding the fittest available environment, adapting it and themselves to make it more fitting” (McHarg, 1992, p.V)6. Thus, the environment – or a supposed original context – sets out the margins within which elaborating water-urban arrangements in “syntropic fitness and health” (McHarg, 1992, p.V)7.

Planetary urbanisation All this, however, cannot materialise regardless of the dynamics concerning the urban environment of today. The call for incorporating the environment and its peculiar conditions in the configuration of the water-urban arrangements, seems to be clashing as never before with the true progress of urbanisation and with what the planet and the environment actually is. As hypothesised by Lefebvre (1970) a few decades back, urbanisation proceeds at an unprecedented pace so much so that it has reached a new critical stage defined by Lefebvre as a ‘critical zone’ to distinguish it from the industrial city. Lefebvre (2014, p.42) argues that “tremendous concentrations (of people, activities, wealth, goods, objects,

13

instruments, means, and thought) of urban reality” – or implosions – “and the immense explosion, the projection of numerous, disjoint fragments (peripheries, suburbs, vacation homes, satellite towns) into space” substantiate a society that has now been completely urbanised. Urbanisation has shadowed “places that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries” (Brenner & Schmid, 2014, p.162)8. Industrial landscapes as mines and harbours, transport and communication infrastructure as highways, shipping lanes, etc. but also “agro-industrial catchment zones and erstwhile ‘natural’ spaces (…) have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric” (Brenner & Schmid, 2014, p.162). As the reconstructions worked out by urban political ecology about the processes of socio-natural production clearly account, vast territories, landscapes, and environments are metabolised by the capital forms of agglomeration9. These socalled operational landscapes have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric.

What is urban?

In the urbanised society theorised by Lefebvre, even realities that once were remote – or rural – could be brought together and made productive (Schmid, 2014)10. Networks and information flows link the world with ever-greater density.

The entire planet – and not just the traditional city and its peripheries – becomes the “place in which differences know, recognize, test, confirm or offset one another” (Schmid, 2014, p.71). We get here to a theoretical cornerstone. Schmid (2014), paraphrasing Lefebvre, helped us to understand that particularities that in the rural society were mutually isolated, in the urbanised society evolved via mutual ‘understanding’ into differences. Particularities that “come from nature, from the site, from natural resources” and are “tied to local conditions” come into contact and “by this clash, the elements that survive no longer assert themselves separately from one another” (Schmid, 2014, p.71). Hence, the urban space is the place of confrontation implying an element of conflict. The planetary urbanisation, therefore, submits the overall planet and its various socio-spatial conditions – or the remaining particularities tied to local conditions – to a tension that is on the level of confrontation. As explained by Lefebvre (quoted in Schmid, 2014), the established relationship can then evolve in productive or unproductive arrangements. In the first case, differences remain isolated, irresponsive, and indifferent to one another – the result is marginalisation, segregation, and ghettoization. In the second case, differences get involved in dynamic dialectics and the “juxtaposition of different things” is transformed “into reactive opportunities” (Schmid, 2014, p.79). By extension, we could say that the confrontation posed by urbanisation between a given context and the ‘different’ had two ways out, either integration or indifferent isolation. In the light of the advocated IWM and its emphasis on context, this twofold trajectory had direct

14

implications on the water-urban dialectic and related arrangements. And yet, the current urbanisation process seems to head more in the direction of indifference and to not really leave a choice in the matter.

Generic city?

In the late 90s, Koolhaas (1995) provided an effective picture of what planetary urbanisation could bring about – unless it had already been done. He described the Ballardian atmospheres and practices of what he called a ‘generic city’. As Schmid (2014, p.68) well synthesised, the generic city was “a characterless city that ruthlessly evacuates everything authentic, dispenses with everything that lacks a function, and escapes the chokehold of the centre, the ‘straitjacket of identity’”. The generic city certainly pointed out the anachronism of the European architectural research and practice that still remained overly focused on identity and clutched at the context. Whether or not one disagrees, the generic city, more than a final truth, acts as a critical image backdrop for reading today’s urbanisation. The generic city is a non-exhaustive image. Among other things, it does not count that “complex interplay of peripheralisation and centralisation” are also undergoing. The reflection on the generic city was not meant to be a comprehensive picture of the planetary urbanisation after all. However, it crystallises current urban tendencies and goes still further. It is undeniable in fact that, driven by capital, “technology and industrialization have led to a universal rationalism, which is undermining the particularities, the specifics, of a given place or location” (Schmid, 2014, p.70). The progress of urban society – materialisation of global culture – goes along with an overall run-up to standard living conditions – no matter if eagerly wanted or passively accepted.

Rather, globally organised technological systems of both traditional and cybertechnological kind and largely inherited by the industrial city model is what actually makes this possible and what forms the very possibility for worldwide urbanisation to exist (Swyngedouw, 2003). This centralised and standardised infrastructure largely made of networked technologies and monopoly governance structures (e.g. Graham & Marvin, 2001), interacts little with the socio-spatial situations of a given context11. Its progress homologates encasing the specific and, concurrently, disregards the different so much so that it marginalises, segregates, and ghettoizes. It might appear paradoxical, but the ‘same all over’/ the ’identical’ makes the planetary urbanisation of innumerable extremely variegated landscapes. The consequence seems like the hiatus in the water-urban relationship doomed to become more profound.

15

Dilemma Paradoxically, again, the infrastructure conveying water and the services mediating it are not strangers to this ‘homogenising’ progress. Acknowledged or not by the proponents of IWM and ecological planning, universalised water systems and services is (still) the main stream beyond urbanisation. It is undeniable that counter water-related projects built around integrated principles pop up meeting city marketing targets, bringing credit to their administrations, and capturing the attention of magazines and research12. However, their impact on urbanisation – as a process – remains very limited. Instead, water infrastructure – of a traditional kind – “plays a pivotal role in the constitution of the ‘concrete city’” (Gandy, 2004, p.365). Urbanisation brings with it water related practices, services, and techno-scientific infrastructure of an industrial kind that, reflexively, are signifiers of the urban13. It is now clear that a dilemma lurks in the waterurban, and it seems irreducible (Figure 1). From the water vantage point, the ways ahead are water-urban arrangements that fit. The urban instead progresses reproducing universal water-urban arrangements that as never before continue to fuck context14.

arrangements that fit

water urban

arrangements that fuck context

Figure 1. The water-urban dilemma.

And design?

In this status of inner rupture that concerns the water-urban, what can design actually do? In the today planetary urbanisation, the question of ‘drawability’ of the urban materials arises as never before. Urbanisation progresses at a pace and through ‘sizes’ that design cannot really follow or control15. The problem of ‘drawability’ was already sensed at the middle of the nineteen century when planning was seen as necessary to bring “order to the fragmented form” of the industrial metropolis (Graham & Marvin, 2001 quoting Beauregard, 1989, 382)16.

Urban planning became the vector for a supposed coherent and unitary city predicated on the modern infrastructural ideal (Graham & Marvin, 2001)17. Nearly reduced to a technical matter, the design of these standardised systems was completely left in the hands of engineering18. Their implementation does not really require a design process to deeply tie them to the site, after all19. In the modernist tradition, standardised systems are often implemented by reducing the interaction with the site to a minimum or at most by adapting the site to the system instead of adapting the system to the site.

16

If design is now proposed to discuss/present what could contribute to exhume the context, then we come to an impasse. Ironically, the solutions worked out by urban planning to the problem of fragmentation of the industrial city were mainly portraying the cityscapes as ‘empty’ Cartesian spaces (Graham & Marvin (2001, p.47), quoting Nye, 1997, p.181), hence based on ‘command and control’ principles largely disregarding the context20. If the solution of urban planning was ‘fuck context,’ now that the problem of fragmentation and ‘drawability’ has skyrocketed, how could it be something else? For design, an option is to give up and leave the ground but with the illusion of ruling urbanisation. Then there are two other options, at least. The first is to ignore this awkwardness and be content with playing (now) as a counterculture. This would mean going on with (punctual) projects fully controlled and acting as pilots, or symbolic attempts of localised reconciliation or pure re-enactments. Otherwise – or in conjunction – the designer could give up control and tackle the challenge of exploring design processes and strategies that are on point. It would require one to become an “instrument of other forces” (Koolhaas, 1995a, p.513) and to team up with others – from engineering to politics – yet striving to figure design processes and strategies to integrate the materials of the site in arrangements that fit21.

This book intends to contribute to the line of studies from Lefebvre to Brenner that are concerned with examining urbanisation as process. In particular, it attempts to position design against the current water-urban dilemma so bound to the planetary urbanisation. The contributions assembled markedly take the design vantage point in the matter. The chapters articulate the variety of attitudes (analytical, conceptual, empirical, or projective) that design can take in order to tackle the challenges posed by today’s process of urbanisation and related arrangements of water. It aims to display primarily a portion of the constellation of urban forms that still reside beyond the universal rationalism of urbanisation22.

In the words of Schmid (2014, p.80), “the complete urbanization of society makes it possible constantly to recreate the urban.” Hence, urbanisation produces multifarious forms and manifestations and genuine materialisations of the process (Schmid, 2014, p.80). The traditional, diffuse, suburban, informal, and booming features refer to predicates of different kinds, and each one corresponds to specific socio-spatial conditions that are presented in the book23. Although the urban cannot be understood as a “bounded, nodal and relatively self-enclosed socio-spatial condition” (Brenner, 2014, p.15) anymore, in the book, these patterns are arbitrarily framed and temporarily torn from the planet24. This makes it possible to investigate the process with greater chances that the context and its peculiarities are still legible.

In addition, this book aspires to spell out that, seen from a comprehensive water perspective, in spite of the universal rationalism of urbanisation, diverse urban forms actually matter and pose complex specific design/ecological challenges. In other words, the urban form counts as well as the process behind

17

when it is confronted with principles of a sustainable management of water25.

Ecological studies corroborate this hypothesis providing “increasing evidence of the impact of urbanization on ecosystem function” (Alberti, 2005, p.186)26.

However, the ecological research tends to simplify the consideration of urban structures at a point that it often “fails to recognize the complex interactions between urban pattern and ecological processes that occur across multiple scales” (Alberti, 2005, p.186). The variety of cases assembled in the book should provide a notion of the vibrant landscape of forms and related water challenges produced by today’s urbanisation.

The posture of design in diverse water-urban conditions is at the forefront.

This is the ultimate purpose of the book. The collected design experiences offer a glimpse of the variegated spectrum of design approaches regarding water27.

Neither an optimum nor a formula will come of this work. However, the real contribution of design in relation to the water-urban dilemma should emerge: to which extent can design experiences bond to the specifics and challenges of a given context contribute to assemble heterogeneous elements yielding productive differences yet within a process of complete urbanisation of society?

Endnotes 1

2

3

4

5

18

The water-urban is here an extension of the socio-natural concept in use by urban political ecology. Accordingly, water is a hybrid, a ‘thing’ that embodies and expresses nature and society. As Swyngedouw (1999, p.4) acknowledges, in the socio-natural things “none of the component parts is reducible to the other, yet their constitution arises from the multiple dialectical relations that swirl out from the production process itself”. In this book, attaching the ‘urban’ connotation to the water hybrid, is an operation that meets two purposes. The first is to constantly recall the natural and social dialectic embedded in water, hence the socio-natural binomial.

The second is to emphasise the complete urbanisation of society claimed by Lefebvre (1970). In addition, the water-urban is a reminder that the urban society – or urbanised society – hinges on water resources.

The relief and its kinetic, to give one example.

As in grammar, the actant does not necessarily need to be the subject or to have an active role: actant’ is “a noun or noun phrase involved in the action expressed by a verb (Oxford Dictionary). Actively or not, the actant participates to the process. The expression ‘accredited actants’ while recalling the ActorNetwork-Theory (Latour, 2005), is meant to stress the process of change required – and implied by IWM – in order to accredit the participation of the context in the water arrangement.

With regard to the limited role of design, Gandy (2004, p.365) notes that “until recently, the understanding of technological networks and the “hidden city” had been largely left to engineers whilst other “visible” aspects of urban design were widely perceived as the traditional domain of architects and urban planners.”

In the Longman Dictionary, design is defined the “arrangement of parts”; and in the Oxford Dictionary, design is “the arrangement of the features of an artefact”.

It is well known the harsh criticism moved in the ‘60s by Jane Jacobs to this tradition of the ‘decentrists’ as defined by Catherine Bauer (Jacobs, 1961). What was contested was that the claims of the ‘decentrists’ for ‘nature’ in planning, afterwards re-worked by the modern movement, became the basis of modern city planning and architectural city design and hence the vessel for strategies of decentralisation, dispersion, separation of

cities, enterprises, and populations. The point raised by Jacobs is not ‘about nature’, however her plea is that decentralisation – originally raised also as reaction to the industrial city and as attempt to regain a live close to ‘nature’ – would have undermined the urbanity and social qualities attached to the dense city model.

6 McHarg (1992, p.V) argues saying that “a fit environment is defined as that where the maximum needs of a user are provided by the environment as found, requiring the least work of adaptation. Successful evolution contains a least work solution. The achievement of evolutionary success reveals syntropic fitness and health of species and ecosystems.

Excessive pathology and morbidity reveal entropic misfit – a system unable to find the fittest environment, unable to adapt it or itself.”

7 McHarg (1992) contests the viewpoint that positions nature to the foreground to be conquered vs. a view less certain of man’s place.

8 We take here the stance of Brenner (2014) when he criticises the empiricist, city-centric conceptualisation of urbanisation that, under the influence of the so-called methodological cityism (Angelo & Wachsmuth, 2014), reduces or twists the urbanisation process as the shift of the population from the countryside to the city. Brenner (2014, p.18) explains that the “planetary formation of urbanisation has blurred, even exploded, long-entrenched sociospatial borders – not only between city and countryside, urban and rural, core and periphery, metropole and colony, society and nature, but also between urban, regional, national and global scales themselves – thereby creating new formations of a thickly urbanised landscape whose contours are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to theorize (…)”.

9 The reconstructions of the processes of production of water flows respectively in New York by Matthew Gandy (2002) and in Spain by Erik Swyngedouw (2015) are among the most significant references.

10 Schmid (2014, p.76) acknowledges “at the same time, however, there is also a tendency for the elements to cut themselves off and separate.”

11 Recently, Coutard et al. (2014, p.92) pointed out “the development of ‘localised’, ‘decentralised’, ‘distributed’ or ‘alternative’ technologies” including connected, disconnected, pre-connected, and re-

19

12

13

14

15

16

20

connected configurations. Accordingly, the authors propose the notion of a ‘postnetworked city’ “to describe the forms of organisation of urban spaces associated with the hybrid assemblage of a myriad of emerging urban infrastructure configurations” (Coutard et al., 2014, p.92). Although the postnetworked city is not the mainstream and it does not necessarily mean the total shift to decentralised infrastructure systems only, the resulting hybrid socio-technical systems could have implications on the water-urban and hence incorporate the production of differing relations of urbanisation within the context.

Notorious ‘water sensitive’ design projects are the urban pools fed by rainwater designed by Atelier Dreiseitl for Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (Dreiseitl & Grau, 2006) and the Water Square Benthemplein in Rotterdam designed by De Urbanisten (Boer et al., 2010).

As Schmid (2014, p.77) argues, “these networks are not distributed homogenously in space; there are holes and gaps in the mesh but also knots or nodes – that is, zones of intense interaction.” In the urbanised society, also what is cut off or segregated is part of the urban. However, when the techno-scientific apparatus overlooks a given place, it makes ‘feeling’ its absence.

“Fuck context” is a quotation of Rem Koolhaas.

In Bigness, or the problem of Large, Koolhaas (1995, p.498) acknowledges the emergence of “another species of architecture,” Bigness, something that it is “no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists.

Its subtext is fuck context” (Koolhaas, 1995a, p.502).

Koolhaas (1995, p.495) clearly stated “Bigness is ultimate architecture.” Between the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, “new infrastructures formed a cluster of mutations that induced another species of architecture” (Koolhaas, 1995a, p.498). This Big Building “can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture, or even by any combination of architectural gestures.”

The ‘drawability’ of the urban materials is not anew. Already at the beginning of the XX century, fragmentation and heterogeneity of the city of that time were questioning architecture. The elementary cognitive strategy conceived by Van Eesteren that assumed the unit as simplification of complexity (Viganò, 1999) was seen as a possible way out. In the critical zone of urbanisation argued by Lefebvre (2014), the complexity seems to be increased. Bigness, or

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

the problem of Large (Koolhaas, 1995) restates this issue, updating its size.

As recalled by Entrikin (1989, p.34 quoted in Graham and Marvin, 2001), it has been that same urban planning to help “to define the ‘vision of the progressive force of modernity’ through its attempts to impose systematically an ‘abstract space’ upon the complex social and lived spaces of the industrial metropolis.”

In practice, the Pierre Patte’s street section of the 1769 illustrating the street with its substructures (namely the sewage system), delivered the organisation of water flows to engineering. See also Gandy (2004).

Graham & Marvin (2001, p.52, quoting Gandelsonas, 1999, p.27) argue that “in many cases the disdain of leading architects and planners for the inherited cityscape, especially during the modernist period, was such that the tabula rasa was ‘the point of departure for the modernist city’ – a strategy aimed at the complete elimination of the premodern cityscape.”

The full quotation is “cityscapes, conversely, were increasingly portrayed as ‘empty’ Cartesian spaces – raw material for reworking through the new technological sublime as the systems ‘blasted through topography’” (Graham & Marvin, 2001, p.47, quoting Nye, 1997, p.181). A rooted desire for ‘command and control’ underlies design as an engineering profession. Instead of adapting to the context, architects often dream of determining the context.

Koolhaas (1995a) uses these expressions while envisioning a (new) beginning for architecture in front of the problem of Bigness.

We take here the stance of Brenner (2014, p.20) when he criticises the empiricist, citycentric conceptualisation of urbanisation that, under the influence of the so-called methodological cityism (Angelo & Wachmush, 2014), reduces or twists the urbanisation process as the shift of the population from the countryside to the city.

In the 50s, Lynch (1990) argued the use size, density, grain, kind of shape, and internal pattern as criteria necessary to determine the urban form. Conversely, Schmid (2014, p.80) considers that “the size, density or heterogeneity of a city no longer provide fruitful criteria in analysing the urban reality of today. The mixing of categories in use today for labelling the urban environment goes beyond the spatial connotation and confirms that the complete urbanisation of society demands “a radical shift in analysis from urban form

24

25

26

27

to the urbanisation process” (Brenner & Schmid, 2014, p.163, quoting Lefebvre). In this book, for the traditional case see Ranzato, “Brussels Urban-Waterscape,” for the diffuse urbanisation see Ranzato & Zaccariotto, “Diffuse Water in Città Diffusa”, and Nolf & De Moulder, “Grafting on the Water Landscape in the Dispersed Urban Territory of Flanders”, for the suburban see Moutitz & Hedgcock, “Reimaning the Relationship between Cities and Water: an Australian Perspective,” for the informal see Boniburini, “Conceiving Water Space in Kigali: Difficulties and Opportunities in Shaping the Informal City”, for the booming in Europe see Zaccariotto, “Oslo Water Sensitive City,” in the Middle East see Kornaropoulou, van der Salm, & Dirk Sijmons, “Arnavutköy, Istanbul,” in Asia see Sun, “Rediscovering the Water Network to Enhance the Pedestrian System of Shanghai.”

Brenner (2014, p.15) argues that the “many terms on offer for labelling the city-like unit in question (…) appropriately reflect the changing boundaries, morphologies and scales of human settlement patterns.”

For example, the principle of storing water onsite questions the availability of space.

This is directly linked to issues of grain (e.g. the ratio open/built-up space). The principle of reusing and recycling water as much as possible refers to the qualities of water and the prompt of activities for its use in a certain place. This has something to do with land use and both its steadiness and heterogeneity. Or again, making use of local resources concerns the availability of socio-natural resources in a given place. This is about size, scale, and density in addition to the issues of form already listed above. For a useful overview of these principles see Tjallingii (1996) and Ranzato (2011).

On the subject, Alberti (2005, p.172), quoting Forman & Godron (1986) argues that, “since urban development alters ecological conditions through physical changes, alternative urban patterns are expected to generate differential ecological effects.”

The situations presented are not comprehensive and other interesting design cases on the subject exist. In the book, the case of the shrinking city, among others, is missing. Similarly, in the informal case in Africa “Conceiving Water Space in Kigali: Difficulties and Opportunities in Shaping the Informal City” by Boniburini, and the booming case in Asia “The Role of River Network in the Reconstruction of Urban Pedestrian System”

by Sun, the design explorations are at a entrylevel; however, some recent design studies further tackling these situations exist. For the informal conditions, see the design research in Lima (Peru) by Nemcova et al. (2014) and the Pilot Project Agua Carioca in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) by Ooze (2016). For the Asian booming conditions, see Wang et al. (2010).

21

References ALBERTI, M. (2005) The Effects of Urban Patterns on Ecosystem Function. International Regional Science Review. [Online]. 28 (2). p.pp. 168–192.

Available from: http://irx.sagepub.com/cgi/ doi/10.1177/0160017605275160.

ANGELO, H. & WACHSMUTH, D. (2014) Urbanizing urban political ecology: a critique of methodological cityism. In: N. Brenner (ed.)

Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp.

372–385.

BOER, F., JORRITSMA, J. & VAN PEIJPE, D. (2010).

De Urbanisten and the Wondrous Water Square.

Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

BREEN, J. (2002). Design driven research. In: T. M. De Jong & D. J. M. van der Voordt (eds.) Ways to study and research. Urban, architectural and Technical Design. Delft: Delft University press, pp. 137–146.

BRENNER, N. (2014) Introduction: Urban theory without an outside. In: N. Brenner (ed.)

Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 14–30.

BRENNER, N. & SCHMID, C. (2014) Planetary urbanization. In: N. Brenner (ed.) Implosions/ Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 160–163. [First published in: Brenner, N. & Schmid, C. (2011).

Planetary urbanization. In: M. Gandy (ed.).

Urban Constellations. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 10–13.]

COSGROVE, D. (1990) An elemental division: water control and engineered landscape. In: D. Cosgrove & G. Petts (eds.). Water, engineering and landscape: water control and landscape transformation in the modern period. London: Belhaven Press, pp. 1–11.

COUTARD, O., RUTHGERFORD, J. & FLORENTIN, D. (2014) Towards hybrid socio-technical solutions for water and energy provision. In: J. Y. Grosclaude, R. K. Pachauri, & L. Tubiana (eds.)

Innovations for Sustainable Development.

Delhi: TERI Press, pp. 91–100.

DREISEITL, H. & GRAU, D. (2006) Wasserlandschaften - Planen, Bauen und Gestalten mit Wasser. Basel: Birkhäuser.

ENTRIKIN, J. (1989) Place, region and modernity. In: J. Agnew & J. Duncan (eds.) The Power of Place.

London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 30–43.

FORMAN, R. & GODRON, M. (1986) Landscape ecology. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

GANDELSONAS, M. (1999) X-urbanism: Architecture and the American City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

GANDY, M. (2002) Concrete and clay. Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

22

GANDY, M. (2004) Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city. City.

[Online]. 8 (3). pp. 363–379. Available from: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/126167/.

GRAHAM, S. & MARVIN, S. (2001) Splintering Urbanism. Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.

GREGOTTI, V. (2008) Il territorio dell’architettura.

4TH Ed. Milano: Feltrinelli.

HARVEY, D. (1989) The condition of post modernity.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

JACOBS, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

KENIS, A. & LIEVENS, M. (2014) Greening the economy or economising the green project?

When environmental concerns are turned into means to save the market. Rev. Radic. Polit.

Econ. pp. 1–37.

KOOLHAAS, R. (1995a) Bigness, or the problem of Large. In: R. Koolhaas & B. Mau (eds.) S,M,L,XL. New York: The Monicelli Press, pp. 494–517.

KOOLHAAS, R. (1995b) The Generic City. In: R. Koolhaas & B. Mau (eds.) S,M,L,XL. New York: The Monicelli Press, pp. 1238–1267.

LATOUR, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social – An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

LEFEBVRE, H. (2014) From the city to urban society. In: N. Brenner (ed.). Implosions/ Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 36–51. [First published in: Lefebvre, H. (1970). From the City to Urban Society. In: Lefebvre, H. The Urban Revolution, pp1-22. University of Minnesota Press.]

LEFEBVRE, H. (1970) La révolution urbaine. Paris: Gallimard.

LYNCH, K. (1990). The Form of Cities. In: T. Banerjee & M. Southworth (eds.) City Sense and City Design. Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch.

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 35–46.

[First published in: Lynch, K. (1954) The Form of Cities. Scientific American. 190 (4). p.pp.

54–63.]

MCHARG, I. (1992) Design with nature. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

MITCHELL, B. (1990) Integrated water management. In: B. Mitchell (ed.) Integrated water management: international experiences and perspectives. London: Belhaven Press, pp.

1–21.

MONSTADT, J. (2009) Conceptualizing the political ecology of urban infrastructures: insights from technology and urban studies. Environment and Planning A. 41. p.pp. 1924–1942.

NEMCOVA, E., EISENBERG, B., POBLET, R. & STOKMAN, A. (2014) Water-Sensitive Design of Open Space Systems: Ecological Infrastructure Strategy for Metropolitan Lima, Peru. Revising Green Infrastructure. [Online].

CRC Press, pp. 355–384. Available from: http:// dx.doi.org/10.1201/b17639-23.

NYE, D. (1997) Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture.

Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

OOZE (2016) Agua Carioca. [Online]. 2016. Available from: http://www.ooze.eu.com/. [Accessed: 20 December 2016].

PETTS, G. (1990) Water, engineering and landscape: development, protection and forestation. In: D. Cosgrove & G. Petts (eds.)

Water, engineering and landscape: water control and landscape transformation in the modern period. London: Belhaven Press, pp.

188–208.

RANZATO, M. (2011) Integrated water design for a decentralised urban landscape. University of Trento.

SCHMID, C. (2014) Networks, borders, differences: towards a theory of the urban. In: N. Brenner (ed.) Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: Jovis, pp. 67–80. [First published in: Schmid, C. (2006). Networks, borders, differences: Toward a theory of the urban. In: R. Diener, J. Herzog, M. Meili, P. de Meuron, and C. Schmid (eds.) Switzerland: An Urban Portrait. Basel: Birkhäuser. p.pp.163-173.]

SWYNGEDOUW, E. (2003) Book Review. Splintering urbanism. Progress in Human Geography. 27 (1). p.pp. 130–131.

SWYNGEDOUW, E. (2015) Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

SWYNGEDOUW, E. (1999) Modernity and Hybridity: the Production of Nature: Water and Modernization in Spain. Paper presented to the Water Issues Study Group, SOAS, University of London, 1999.

TJALLINGII, S.P. (1996) Ecological Conditions.

Strategies and structures in environmental planning. Wageningen: Institute for Forestry and Nature Research.

VIGANÒ, P. (1999) La città elementare. Milano: Skira.

WANG, P., LAWSON, G. & LIU, B. (2010) Water Sensitive Urban Design and its Application to Landscape Projects. Chinese Landscape Architecture. [Online]. 26 (174). p.pp.

88–91. Available from: http://eprints.qut.edu. au/33294/3/33294a.pdf.

23

Part 1

Designing for Diverse Urban-Waterscapes

25

Marco Ranzato and Giambattista Zaccariotto

Diffuse Water in Città Diffusa

Summary The città diffusa of the Veneto, in Northeast Italy, is a well-known European ‘territory of urban dispersion,’ facing serious water quantity and quality issues today1. During the economic growth of the second half of the twentieth century, the urbanised countryside progressively consolidated into a città diffusa - a city of dispersion - a fine-grained amalgam of urban and agricultural activities.

The particular mix and fine-grained character of città diffusa’s social and spatial structures were of strategic importance in its development. However, during development, the water system was rationalised and it disregarded these features, instead, it followed a centralised model in principle suited for a dense urban context. This water management is geared for great inflow-outflow regulations. It now shows its limitations because it routinely suffers major problems of flood, drought, and pollution. Through a case study of the small settlement area of Ponzilovo (Verona) and a ‘water sensitive’ design approach based on guiding models and scenarios, this chapter questions whether the dense interpenetration and diversity of land uses offer opportunities for establishing closed-loop water circuits, as advocated by the Integrated Water Management model, and, in turn, for addressing spatial concerns specifically in relation to diffused urbanisation.

27

Introduction main urban centre surface water spring area Ronco all’Adige case study area Veneto Region

0

28

50

100

150

200

250

Figure 1. (Top) The Veneto Region in the frame of the Pianura Padana Valley, Italy.

Elaboration from B. Secchi and Viganò (2006).

300

350

400

450

Figure 2. (Bottom) A portion of the città diffusa in the Veneto Central Area.

Source: Marco Ranzato.

500km

Towards the end of the twentieth century, researchers (e.g. Indovina, 1990; Secchi, 1991; Piccinato, 1993) described the emergence in the Veneto Region, Northeast Italy, of a specific urban system, a diffuse organisation of agricultural and urban activities (dwelling, services, agricultural fields) with different spatial morphologies and densities of fine grain2. The Veneto urban system, named città diffusa, “works like a compact city without having the same concentration and density characters”3 (Indovina, 2009, p.131). In urban history, this was a major change in the definition of what was urban and became a conceptual category adequate to deal with the complexity of current outer urbanisation in Europe (Dematteis & Governa, 2001).

In Veneto, favourable conditions of landform, climate, and water resources have been key factors contributing to the long-term dispersed inhabitation. For centuries, the pervasive and dense surface water networks – together with the road networks – have been the carrying structures of many land use activities (Bevilacqua, 1989; Bianchi, 1989; Viganò, 2008b) (Figure 1). However, along with the consolidation of the urbanised countryside into a city of dispersion (Piccinato, 1993), water problems such as floods, droughts, and pollution have multiplied, both in magnitude and type4. In the future, the water-related problems of the region could be exacerbated by forecast changing climate conditions (Zandonella et al., 2013; Pasini et al., 2012). This situation will compound the effects of the recent economic recession, whereby the micro and medium companies that since the second world war have been ruling the regional economy, are today mired in stagnation (see the regional resolution n. 552 of 15 April 2014, Regione Veneto)5.

The urgent question relating to the region’s water arrangements that fit the peculiarities of città diffusa comes at a time when a paradigm shift in water management is occurring. The alternative model being pursued is Integrated Water Management (IWM) (Mitchell, 1990). Integrated Water Management insists on a more ecological approach with comprehensive understanding of the water cycle as well as “identification and inclusion of all relevant systems and system interactions (environmental, economic, cultural and social)” (Painter & Memon, 2008, p.231). Accordingly, water resources should be managed carefully, reducing consumption while increasing reuse and recycling, at the lowest scale possible (Novotny, 2008; Tjallingii, 1996). The shift requires the provision of physical space for the storage of water as a prerequisite for its reuse and recycling.

Our hypothesis follows, that small-scale, mainly decentralised, and multifunctional water systems for water provision and collection fit the specific strongly decentralised character of città diffusa’s spatial structure (Figure 2). In terms of the IWM model, its dense interpenetration and diversity of land uses become key spatial conditions for setting up closed-loop circuits of water. These very diverse land uses require and release water flows of different qualities.

29

Supporting continuity, accessibility, and legibility, the reactivated network of ‘kamps’ can also serve as a frame for future developments inside the blocks. Instead of the usual filling with autonomous housing units, the urban densification should start from the preservation and definition of qualitative collective open spaces interconnected from block to block (Figure 6 & 7). In terms of process, the municipality can play a strategic role. The insides of the urban blocks are currently composed of several private properties. In most cases, these are designated on the land-use map as ‘reserve for housing extension.’8 It means that these cannot be developed until the municipality decides, on a case-by-case basis, to change the legal status. This pending situation gives the municipality the control and the possibility to take the initiative. It can invest in the reactivation of the “kamp” as blue-green and soft-mobility infrastructures and once the insides are equipped and framed by the new collective space structure, change legal status in order to launch development.

In other words, by capitalising on the existing system value of the ‘kamp’, one could envisage a process of transformation that while using the second order of the oversized perimeter blocks, does this in such a way that weaves into the fabric a new structure for Zonhoven. As warp and woof, first and second order, the existing and the new, the road based and the water and soft mobility based nets can generate a denser, more complex, and integrated fabric over time. With a bit of imagination one could envision that, over time and a few investment cycles later, the current first and second orders reverse roles. It follows then that if the system of Zonhoven inverts, that the soft mobility network, interwoven with the water network and ecological corridors, will become the main spatial structure of the municipality. Sandwiched in between the reactivated blue-green structures of the Middle Ages, the monotone and individualistic suburban layer of the second half of the twentieth century would aggregate, while reserving place for commons, porosity guaranteed. Is this the suburban revisit of Split and Diocletian’s palace one is left to question.

Conclusions This chapter addresses the issue of spatial design and water management in the diffuse Flemish city. More specifically, it questions how the new preventive and decentralised water policy measures can take place in the dispersed forms of the Flemish city and contribute to its (re-) development. From the case study of Zonhoven, at least two lessons can be drawn.

First, it points out the fundamental role of water in the Flemish urban structure. While major historic towns are all clearly bound to the river system, Zonhoven shows a sample of diffuse urbanisation that is based on the water.

In this case, the micro-topographical features inherited from an indigenous drainage system served de facto as a support for the (predominantly incremental)

78

Figure 7. Before/after impression along one of the reactivated drains of the ‘kamp’ structure. © Christian Nolf.

79

Figure 3. (Top-left) Schematic reproduction of the 2009 Istanbul Masterplan (urban (dark grey), agricultural (light grey) and forest areas (hatched), restrictive offset zoning around the water reservoirs) overlapped with the newly projected Third Bosporus bridge (white dashed line). The new highway will cross what the masterplan determines as protected natural zones in the north, putting these resources under pressure.

Figure 4. (Middle-left) Taking into account urbanization tendencies and growth management methods in Istanbul, the projected future growth (black pattern) will likely keep clear of the highest protective zoning (outlines) defined by current regulation, but sprawl over low resistance natural areas.

Figure 5. (Bottom-left) Istanbul 0 5 10 km topography: a collection of water catchment areas (white lines) forming a regional version of the “city-on-sevenhills.� The coastal zones discard to the sea, while the inland basins form the water reservoirs that provide the city with drinking water.

Figure 6. (Top-right) The Ridge City as a potential alternative development pattern (black pattern): an urban fabric containing the natural landscape in its core.

Figure 7. (Bottom-right) ArnavutkĂśy municipality. White line: Sazlidere basin.

0

5

10 km

103

In the event that rain falling on the Maelbeek was moved as far as possible above ground, surface water would fill the overall urban landscape. Discreet open-air water lines would permeate the slopes of Quartier Vijevers Van Elsene and Quartier Flagey-Malibran. Streams would equally follow streets and cross inside of building blocks. Alongside the waterlines, temporary spaces for water – small-sized, inside the building blocks, and medium-sized, in the public space – would occur.

Together with the wide pond of Étangs d’Ixelles, they would merge ‘to wet’ the urban landscape.

Maelbeek. In particular, the text clearly shows how water played a pivotal role unequivocally manifested in the landscape (Figure 3). Besides that, the account of de Pauw highlights that, under a historical perspective, unthinkable shifts – as for instance the vaulting of the main river of the valley – occur beyond the day-to-day scepticism and inertia to change.

7 5

6

4

Landform

3 b 2

1

a

Contour line Contour line Major in valleys and plateaus Majorspace spaces in valleys and plateaus Maelbeek Maelbeekcatchment catchment 0 0.5

2km

b

a

The Maelbeek is a narrow, elongated stream valley generated mainly by quaternary violent water deluges (de Pauw, 1914). The alluvial plain of the Maelbeek dips gently to the north towards the Senne River Valley and in about 7 kilometres changes from an altitude of 70 metres in the South to 20 metres in the North (Figure 4). Towards its end part, in the Northeast, the secondary small Josaphat Valley – formerly called Kattepoel – pours into the Maelbeek Valley. In the most flat parts of the alluvial plain, small parks, public squares, and infrastructural strips are located. This is the case of the ensemble Abbey of La Cambre-Ponds of Ixelles-Place Flagey (Figure 4, detail 1), the ensemble Place Jourdan-Park Leopold-Place Jean-Rey (Figure 4, detail 2), Square Marie-Louise (Figure 4, detail 3), Place St-Josse (Figure 4, detail 4), Place de Heuffalize (Figure 4, detail 5), Park Josaphat with the football fields’ area (Figure 4, detail 6), and the railway line Brussels-Namur (Figure 4, detail 7). The slopes surrounding the valley are generally steep especially in the south and central parts where on the hilltops altitudes range between 70 and 110 metres above sea level. Micro plateaus are located mainly on hilltops and a few more times on the hillside to encircle the valley. They often accommodate representative public buildings, parks, and lavish residential or office neighbourhoods. The most relevant flat spots are the one that at the South East accommodates the Military buildings of the Caserne Lieutenant Général Baron de Witte de Haelen and the Campus of the ULB and VUB universities (Figure 4, detail a; between 90 and 80 metres above sea level), and the one that on the west side accommodates the European Quarter (Figure 4, detail b; between 70 and 60 metres above sea level)16.

Urbanisation

Built-up Built-upspace space ‘Intruders’ ‘Intruders’ Maelbeek catchment Maelbeek catchment 00

158

Figure 4. (Top) Maelbeek Valley: topographic relief and wide areas in valleys and plateaus.

0.5 0.5

2km 2 km

Figure 5. (Bottom) Maelbeek Valley: builtup space and ‘intruders’ (interpretation from Studio 011, 2011).

In the Maelbeek catchment area, urbanisation is ubiquitous (Figure 5). The area of the Maelbeek watershed represents an extended section of the first urban belt of Brussels that was mainly urbanised from the end of the XVIII/beginning of the XIX century by the ambitious industrial Brussels’s bourgeoisie – also including artisans, merchants, etc. These elites, in order to get out the “frenetic life of the centre” (Heymans, 1998, p.17) – settled on the sides and tops of the hills surrounding the historical centre (see Figure 2)17. That is the reason why the urban tissue of the Maelbeek is mainly composed by the architectural typology

159

The water sensitive apparatus would sensibly increase water infiltration, especially over the plateau1. The infiltration performed by trenches and streams running along the streets plus the detention devices hosted in the green public spaces would add to the penetration associated with unpaved surfaces. The low infiltration in the slopes would be partially compensated by the penetration carried out by the ditches slowly descending along the contour lines towards the pond in the valley.

Sybrand Tjallingii

Epilogue: Designers’ Dreams and Urban Water

To urban designers water can be a source of inspiration. This book is a good illustration that focuses on the water world of Brussels. It presents contributions about the role designers play in shaping water use and visible water in urban environments in different parts of the world with different stages and forms of urbanisation. At first sight, the plans and projects discussed here are very different; yet, they share a concern with the role of rain. This is not self-evident for urban designers. What is so special about this focus? To throw more light on the special character of this approach, it is interesting to compare it with the more traditional ways designers are looking at water that may be described as dooms or dreams.

Dooms often dominate the debate about water, framing it as a safety issue.

In 2004, water was the leading theme of the International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam. The curator, landscape architect Adriaan Geuze, chose The Flood as the title of that year’s exhibition. It demonstrated the tendency to focus on the role of water in climate change and sea level rise. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presents the images of big floods to stress the urgency of the issue. In Bangladesh and some other deltas of the world, the situation is dramatic. It is urgent to prevent floods and the media love to frame the story of water in that way. Doom thinking is drama and drama cries for heroes. Designers can be these heroes if they build landmark dams, storm surge barriers, and other big projects.

However, water is more than great building projects.

309

Dream thinking is different. In this approach, designers take water as an aesthetic element and celebrate the beauty of waterfalls and fountains and use lakes and ponds as mirrors reflecting the architecture of the city. Design with water becomes the creation of a work of art. The issues of drainage and dealing with stormwater, drinking water, and wastewater are left to the engineers who prefer to solve these problems by underground solutions, invisible and not disturbing the street level view. In urban practice, designers and engineers often work in different departments and professional worlds, even speaking different languages when they talk in images or numbers.

This book discusses plans and projects that try to bridge the gap between these professional worlds. They do not fit with dooms and dreams stories.

Stormwater and water pollution issues are not life threatening dramas and do not ask for heroes. However, these issues are urgent and do have their dreams. Water, in these dreams, however, is much more than an aesthetic element. Designers use their imagination and creativity to generate integrated solutions for practical problems. They seek collaboration with engineers and other professionals and with local residents. Beauty is certainly an important element in the design of streets, green spaces, squares and parks, and of the urban landscape as an ensemble. However, the design solutions should first and for all fit to the local landscape, to the local residents, to the specific situations of the urban system, and to the position in processes of decision making and financing.

This fit is what makes the plans discussed in the first part of this book so different.

They are designed for climates asking for different answers to drainage and storage issues because they have different seasonal rhythms. Sometimes the heavy rains create problems requiring better drainage in the dense informal settlements on the steep slopes of Kigali in Rwanda. In other cases, as the Veneto and the Western Australian coastal plain, the dry periods cause a serious water shortage requiring answers for storage. In the area of Zonhoven in Flanders, there is storage of rainwater in groundwater facilitated by infiltration into the sandy hills. In the plan for Arnavutköy in Istanbul, the valley is kept free from buildings and used for water storage. In Oslo, the valleys with mills once developed as the industrial backbone of the city. The plans show how a redevelopment can turn them into a backbone of the drainage system combined with the green infrastructure of the city. In all these plans, we see how they fit into the urban fabric resulting from the interaction between the nature and culture of the specific situation.

In the process of urbanisation, the growth of paved surfaces causes peak runoff problems asking for improvements in drainage and storage. In Kigali, where informal growth is most important, planning for water in the urban system is still in the beginning stages. In Shanghai, planning has been dominant but limited attention has been put to water and there is now a desire to revitalise previously

310

unused river spaces for rainwater drainage and storage. The Australian experience showed how urban planning practice developed a new approach that integrated water issues in the design of the new suburbs: thus, water sensitive urban design became an example for many other cities. The designers of a new expansion of Istanbul integrated not only urban development but also agriculture and nature conservation. They took the water cycle as a carrier of this integration, using the treated wastewater of the ridge city to feed agriculture on the slopes of the valley and in turn using the bottom of the valley as a storage lake. In the same way the Veneto and Flanders cases focus on more than the city. In these città diffusa landscapes, the plans discuss ways to reintegrate water in multifunctional settings that combine housing, industrial development, and agriculture. In all these plans, we see how they seek to generate solutions that fit the local history and situation. That is what makes them different. However, they share a common research by design drive to create a new role of the rain.

This is also the challenge for the Maelbeek Valley in Brussels, the focus of the workshop and the starting point for this book. The second part of it demonstrates the rich variety of ideas.

The name Maelbeek stems from the many mills providing the hydropower to a number of small factories and breweries that also use the water. In the middle ages, the valley looked like a system of streams and bypasses that connected a chain of ponds, many of them also used as fishponds. Leloutre described the transformation of this chain of ponds into a chain of civic centres during the process of urbanisation in the 19 th and the 20 th century. The Maelbeek Valley became the area of many representative buildings of Brussels as the capital of the country and the capital of the European Union but as a continuous valley it almost disappeared. The urban structures dominate and the result is an urban landscape where the fragments of the valley play a minor role. In some places, such as the ponds d’Ixelles, the valley is still visible. Here, the strength of the valley as an aesthetic element that is a carrying structure of the urban landscape is evident. However, even here, the valley no longer carries the urban ecosystem.

The rainwater now runs through a collector pipe that combines rainwater and wastewater. To solve the persistent problems of heavy rainstorms, both in water quantity and quality, the collector system is expanded by expensive underground bassins d’orage, but these basins are not sufficient to cope with the extreme peak events whose frequency is expected to increase with climate change. We cannot exactly predict the magnitude and frequency of these peak rainstorms in the future, but even if we could, the construction of an underground system that could adequately cope with them would be far too costly. Surface waters with fluctuating water tables are certainly part of the solution and here emerges a promising combination with the redesign of squares, green spaces, and parks.

The transformation will be far-reaching and very expensive and therefore it certainly requires a long and difficult process of decision-making. There is no role

311

for a designer as a big hero because this is not a doom scenario with one urgent problem that can be solved in one big solution. However, there is a role for the dreams of designers who generate concrete proposals for the discussions that go with the decision-making processes. The role of the rain asks for many decisions for an expansive list of small projects at numerous levels, starting upstream, in the valley but also starting upstream on every roof. Then, the projects to be designed follow the chain through backyard gardens, sidewalks, streets, squares, and green spaces down to the parks in the valley that have the best capacity for storage. Thus, the heterogeneity of the urban landscape is the basis for new designs.

The valleys in Brussels also created heterogeneity in the social topography of the city. In valleys such as the Maelbeek, we see how public buildings and houses for the wealthy occupied the hills leaving the bottom of the valleys for people with lower incomes. Thus, most water problems are manifest in the downhill situation but solutions start in the uphill parts of the neighbourhood. In Brussels, this has generated a bottom-up initiative called bassins solidaires, stressing the need for solidarity between the uphill and downhill residents in the valley. One pilot project in the municipality of Forest demonstrates the possibilities and the difficulties of this approach. However, it is vital to see how an approach of many small projects can be combined with a process of learning in which the schools and the university can play a role.

The workshop and the research that followed demonstrated the feasibility of this approach: generating proposals for a participatory decision-making process.

These research-by-design options try to find a way to use the still existing morphology of the valley to combine a design for civic beauty with solving water problems by creating room for the rivers and for the role of the rain. This is working with nature in the tradition of Frederic Law Olmsted’s design approach for the Emerald Necklace in Boston in the late 19 th century. The present conditions are, of course, completely different but the working with nature approach is still valid and urgent, and will lead to new solutions for the role of the rain in Brussels and in other urban landscapes.

312

Contributors Marco Ranzato, editor, is a researcher at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and co-director of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design. His research focuses on expanded understanding of ecological design, processes of horizontal urbanization, as well as on coproduction, focusing in particular on co-production of water, energy, and waste services and co-design.

Olivia Adamska graduated in architecture at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta of the Université libre de Bruxelles. She presently works at Bruxelles Environnement, the institution responsible for the Environment in the Brussels Capital Region.

Andrea Aragone is an urbanist. In 2015, he graduated from TU Delft with a master’s thesis on the socio-spatial potential of the public realm and the processes that occur between different communities in the Matonge district of Bruxelles. As a member of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design since 2012, he has worked on the relationship between water dynamics and urban transformations. In 2016, he worked at drafting the regional master plan for the cities of Durrës, Shijak, and Vorë in Albania as an in loco expert for the environmental assets.

Ilaria Boniburini is an architect and scholar with experience in public spaces, the right to the city, and African urbanism. After working as Senior Lecturer in urban design at the University of Rwanda she joined the University of the Witwatersrand, as a post-doc fellow, in September 2015.

Andrea Bortolotti is an architect and currently a PhD candidate at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Faculté d’Architecture La Cambre-Horta in Brussels. His main research topics concern urban metabolism and the relationship between urban design and ecology. Since 2011, he has been a member of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design.

Pauline Cabrit graduated in landscape architecture at the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux. She is currently part of the team of the Charleroi Bouwmeester, an independent organisation providing planning design support to the local municipality of Charleroi.

314

Simone Conz obtained a bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning from IUAV University of Venice. He started working with Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design in Brussels during his time at KU Leuven as a visiting student. He has then obtained a master’s degree from Politecnico di Torino with a thesis based on the Latitude research project “Reducing Boundaries”.

Siyu Liu studied architecture conservation at Tongji University in Shanghai. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Concerned with the interaction between the living environment, preservation, and social problems, Siyu is interested in how designers can engage with vernacular design in developing countries.

Marta De Marchi is a landscape architect and a PhD candidate in Urbanism at IUAV University of Venice. Her field of research concerns the Sustainable Food Planning and the food related territorial transformations. Since 2012, she has been member of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design.

Bruno De Meulder is Professor of Urbanism at the University of Leuven (Belgium) where he is program director of MAHS/MaUSP and head of RUA (OSA), the Research Group Urbanism and Architecture. He combines the historical investigation of urbanism with urban design explorations in dynamic contexts of change.

Catalina Codruta Dobre is a PhD candidate at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Her on-going thesis investigates the transition of urban water systems towards a Water Sensitive City. She is actively involved in the organisation of design workshops regarding the implementation of sustainable water management practices in urban areas. In 2015, she received the Green Talent Award offered by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for her interdisciplinary research on sustainability.

Bianca Fanta is a freelance landscape architect and has worked with EspacesMobilités office in Brussels since January 2016. She has a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Liège (Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech) and a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Engineering from the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

315

Martina Gentili is a PhD candidate at the Gran Sasso Science Institute in L’Aquila and a guest researcher at the OTB department of TU Delft. She works on the relationship between planning, housing, and illicit practices. As a member of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design, she is working on “Ilot d’Eau,” a co-design project that explores bottom-up solutions for water management in dense urban areas.

Roberto Genna is an architect and urbanist working as a freelancer with the Belgian office BUUR since 2013. He studied architecture at IUAV University of Venice. After graduating in 2012 he started working with Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design, exploring issues of urban and territorial development in relation to hydraulic risks, economic and social issues.

David Hedgecock is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Curtin University, Western Australia. He is internationally recognised for his work on the initiation and implementation of the concept of water sensitive urban design. He was instrumental in the development of water sensitive policy and guidelines for the State of Western Australia.

Sotiria Kornaropoulou is an architect at 51N4E since 2006, where she has been busy with architectural and urban projects in Belgium, the Netherlands, Albania, and Turkey. She has also prepared and presented multiple publications, exhibitions, and lectures at home and abroad. In 2013-14, she led two thesis studios for the Urbanism & Strategic Planning master program of KU Leuven.

Géry Leloutre is an architect and urban designer in Brussels (Karbon) and is a teacher on the Faculty of Architecture of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

He is a PhD candidate in Urbanism at ULB and IUAV University of Venice, and at the same time he is co-coordinating doctoral research in DR Congo (Kinshasa).

Alessandra Marcon is an architect and urbanist working at Obras office of urbanism and architecture in Paris. She studied at IUAV University of Venice and Marne-la-Vallée School of cities and territories in Paris. Her field of research concerns water issues in European fragile landscapes. She has been a member of Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design since 2012.

Luisa Moretto is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She has a background in architecture and holds a PhD in Analysis and Governance of Sustainable Development from the University of Venice.

316

Mike Mouritz (Dr.) is an executive at the City of Canning in Perth, Western Australia, where he works on urban renewal projects. He is on the board of the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, which fosters research and development of transitions to more water sensitive practices.

Christian Nolf is Lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning and Design in XJTLU (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University) in Suzhou, China, where he co-directs the Research Institute of Urbanization and coordinates the MSc in Urban Design.

He holds a PhD in Engineering, Science, & Architecture (KULeuven & UHasselt, 2013), has been a tutor in the European Masters in Urbanism, and a lecturer in Architecture at Antwerp University.

Marie Pire is a landscape designer. Graduate from the National School of Landscape of Versailles, she is dedicated to the subject of urban waters, specifically rainwater. Having specialized in urban hydrology, she conceives “Floodable towns” and “Fertile cities” where the presence and the weaving of the water generates different ambiences, vast biodiversity, and real identities.

Dirk Sijmons was one of the founders of H+N+S Landscape-architects in 1990.

He received the Rotterdam-Maaskant award in 2002. English book publications include: Landscape (1998), Greetings from Europe (2008), Landscape and Energy (2014), and Moved Movement (2015). Sijmons was appointed first State Landscape Architect of the Netherlands (2004-2008). Recently, he was the curator of IABR-2014 Urban-by-Nature. Until 2015, he was Professor of Landscape Architecture at TU Delft.

Maëlle Thueux is a landscape architect. She approaches and questions the issues of large-scale urban developments within Perspective, a Brussels planning office.

Involved in citizen projects of allotment and urban compost, she also experiments in small-scale urbanism through the Transition Movement.

Sun Tongyu holds a PhD from the Tongji University of Shanghai. He is currently Vice Dean at CAUP Tongji University, leader Professor at Institute of Urban space, honorary Professor of Intelligent Urbanization at Co-creation Center for High Density Region, and he is also the director of design division four at the Tongji Design Institute. His main research field is urban design and architecture design.

Sybrand Tjallingii is a Dutch urban planner with a background in landscape ecology. His PhD Thesis Ecological Conditions (TU Delft 1996) analysed ecological strategies in urban planning. He retired as an Associate Professor in 2006.

Presently, he works in teaching, research, and consultancy. Water is a central theme in his work.

317

Jaap van der Salm studied Landscape Architecture at Wageningen University and has worked as a landscape architect for H+N+S since 2010. There he focuses mainly on large-scale water related national and international projects. In his projects, Jaap combines solutions for flood safety with ecological, recreational, and urban development.

Xiaoyu Wu majored in Architecture at Tongji University, Shanghai, focusing on Energy & Thermodynamic Architecture. Wu worked as an intern at Kengo Kuma & Associates (Tokyo) and Atelier L+ (Shanghai). She is currently finishing a MSArch double-degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US. Yixin Xu has a bachelor’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Tongji University in Shanghai and a MSArch from Pratt Institute Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design in the United States.

Zhao Yang majored in Landscape Architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai in 2015. He then obtained a master’s degree in Landscape Planning from Tongji University. From 2016, he started a dual master’s degree in urban design at the Technical University of Berlin.

Giambattista Zaccariotto is an Associate Professor at AHO Oslo, consultant at Asplan Viak, Design and Research Foundation Norway, and visiting professor at EMU IUAV. He studied at IUAV University of Venice and TU Delft where he also received a European PhD in Urbanism in 2010. He is co-editor of the books Scarcity in Excess, The Built Environment and the Economic Crisis in Iceland (2014), and Landscapes of Water (2008).

Each contribution to this book went under an in-house double-blind peer review process.

The scientific committee included also experts in visual design.

Scientific Committee Sybrand Tjallingii (TU Delft, NL – EMU) Luisa Moretto (ULB, BE) Richard Ashley (University of Bradford, UK) Maria Chiara Tosi (Iuav, IT) Dirk Sijmons (TU Delft, NL) Meredith Dobbie (Monash University, AUS) Daniele Tonon (Fabrica, IT) – visual issue Davide Fornari (SUPSI, SWZ) – visual issue Visual Essays, Drawings concept Topography: Marco Ranzato, Marta De Marchi, Roberto Genna /Axonometry: Marco Ranzato, Roberto Genna / Water System: Marco Ranzato, Roberto Genna, Marta De Marchi / Landscape Section: Marco Ranzato, Pauline Cabrit / Small Section: Marco Ranzato, Alessandra Marcon / Water basin scheme: Marco Ranzato, Federico Gobbato / Perspective: Marco Ranzato, Andrea Aragone

Workshop Water vs. Urban Scape? Exploring integrated and decentralized arrangements of water in the Brussels Capital Region Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta – Brussels, 14-22 July 2013 Organizing Institutions Faculty of Architecture La Cambre Horta, Tongji University, Latitude Platform for Urban Research and Design Coordinators Marco Ranzato (ULB), Fabio Vanin (Latitude Platform) Teaching staff Olivia Adamska (ULB/IBGE), Catalina Dobre (ULB), Geoffrey Grulois (ULB), Julie Martineau (ULB), Marco Ranzato (ULB), Didier Vancutsem (ULB), Sybrand Tjallingii (TU Delft – EMU), Pauline Cabrit (Latitude Platform), Alessandra Marcon (Latitude Platform), Marta de Marchi (Latitude Platform), Roberto Genna (Latitude Platform), Fabio Vanin (Latitude Platform), Tongyu Sun (Tongji University), Zhang Xuewei (Tongji University) Students Soraya Ghezelbash, Antoine Mazy, Bruno Reis, Liu Siyu, Zhao Yang, Wu Yuhe Marie-Astrid Bécu, Cynthia Deckers, Zhang Haochen, Wang Qi, Maëlle Thueux, Wu Xiaoyu, Xie Yixuan Bianca Fanta, Kevin Gaule, Léo Jaouen, Liu Xiaochang, Xu Yixin, Mao Yujun Arnaud Bendele, Zheng Chun, Chen Dijia, Pang Lu, Arnaud Giraud, Benoît Suzanne Invited lecturers Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin (TU Delft), Dirk van Peijpe (De Urbanisten), Bas Smets (Bureau Bas Smets)

318