Stijgend water, zinkende steden: De worsteling van Venetië en Rotterdam met het landschap van lagune en delta

Venice and Rotterdam: grappling with the landscape of lagoon and delta

Abstract

Since the turn of the century, high water levels in cities in coastal and delta areas have given rise to ever-increasing problems. It is not just the many cities in the ‘Global South’, burdened with inadequate defences against high water levels, that are having to contend with increased flooding. Even relatively wealthy cities in Europe and the United States, the damage wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005) and by Hurricane Sandy in New York (2013) still fresh in their minds, have good reason to be concerned. In Europe, as recently as November 2019, the Grande Dame of water cities, Venice, suffered its worst acqua alta (high water event) since 1966. Large parts of the city were under water for an extended period of time, with huge consequences not only for the city’s many art treasures and heritage structures, but also for the economy, the well-being and the habitability of the city.
Several months later, in February 2020, the Netherlands, dubbed by some ‘the safest delta in the world’, had to pull out all the stops in order to withstand the combined forces of high riverwater discharge and a spring tide at sea. For the first time, the many riverbed widenings carried out in the years 2005-2015 in the context of the national ‘Room for the River’ programme, were able to demonstrate their effectiveness. Largeparts of the river area, normally used for arable and livestock farming or as nature areas, were subjected to controlled flooding, thereby preventing the inundation of cities along the rivers.