The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 bron The Low Countries. Jaargang 7. Stichting Ons Erfdeel, Rekkem 1999-2000 Zie voor verantwoording: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001199901_01/colofon.php © 2016 dbnl i.s.m. 12 photo by Stephan Vanfleteren. Shapes of Landscape The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 13 Landscape and Space in the Low Countries Reflecting the Differences between North and South It is no coincidence that the first part of Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (La méditerranée, 1966) is entitled ‘The Role of the Environment’. In this work he describes the physical geography of the area: geological development, coastlines, mountains and flatlands, soil and basins. But he pays much more attention to physical geography and how people deal with their physical environment; how and why they started to engage in fishing and agriculture in a particular place; how, why and where they drew political and cultural frontiers across the landscape and at the same time organised cross-border transport; where and why they built towns and cities and how they catered for the surrounding countryside. In short: how a physical landscape became a cultural landscape. For Braudel and many other historians, sociologists and philosophers, the cultural landscape is the point where mankind and the natural elements come together; the scene of the battle between man's urge to civilise and nature's unruliness. A landscape therefore reveals history as well as geography. Landscape lends history The ‘Afsluitdijk’. This dike turned the Zuiderzee into the IJsselmeer: from sea into lake. a spatial dimension because it bears the traces and impressions of the past, and those traces and impressions of a past civilisation are precisely what give the landscape a historical dimension. The landscape of the Low Countries is no different. Flanders and the Netherlands both bear the marks and scars of the past. All along the coastline from Diksmuide to Delfzijl and far inland, especially in the Netherlands, the landscape is defined by the struggle against the sea, while the political, cultural and economic history of the Flemish towns is set in stone in towns and cities such as Bruges and Ghent. Deventer and The Hague breathe the Hanseatic mercantile spirit and the spirit of early political citizenship. The former coastline of the Zuiderzee and the mining regions of Belgian and Dutch Limburg bear witness to a closed chapter of economic history. The Westhoek and Breendonk, the Waalsdorpervlakte and Westerbork show the scars of a recent military past. Landscape, according to Ton Lemaire, is therefore an explicatio culturae: the history of a culture and the culture of a people are stored and ‘laid out’ in the cultural The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 landscape.1. The landscape lays bare our cultural history - a history which is more than a fossilised and silent past. We remember that The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 14 The Flemish open-air folkmuseum in Bokrijk. history; we cherish, relive and reinterpret it - and we choose to do that in places which are important to us in cultural-historical terms. And when we cannot do that, we visit and remember elements of historical landscape - architectural heritage in particular - which we were in danger of losing, and have brought together as relics. Families, for example, pay Sunday visits to open-air folkmuseums in Arnhem, Bokrijk or Spakenburg in search of their history. Grandfathers explain to the youngsters what a flail is, or a fishing smack; veterans tell the young about the Dodengang entrenchment in Diksmuide; guides in Ghent relate the history of the Gravensteen castle to visitors. Commemoration is often a matter of conservation: historians local and national fight for the preservation of old mines and the villages of the Zuiderzee. Ecologists and environmental organisations fight for the landscape along the Scheldt. Our history is contained in the landscape; if we preserve our landscape, we preserve our culture too. Landscape as a contemporary creation Landscape is more than a historical and cultural creation: we form the landscape every day, and try to mould it to our own requirements in the eternal struggle between nature's unruliness and man's urge to civilise - or should we call it the urge to take control? The theme of the struggle has changed over time. Flood defences, of course, are still important, but the financial and technological resources with which we tackle the problem in the Low The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 15 Countries make a disaster increasingly unlikely. That is, unless we become overconfident. Building on the flood plain of the River Maas is asking for trouble, as we saw recently in the Netherlands after the floods of 1993 and 1995. Or unless we become careless: drainage channels should be regularly maintained, as we saw in 1998 in Flanders - also after flooding. Nature is quick to punish forgetfulness. During the last fifty years, the emphasis has been on organising the landscape so that it can accommodate every citizen, every industry and all our infrastructure, while preserving a habitable environment which has space for agriculture and, if possible, ‘green’ areas. These demands are not unique to the Low Countries; they are priorities in physical planning throughout Europe. The Low Countries, however, are something of an exception in that these requirements have to be met with a population density of 400 / km2, high levels of income and welfare, and high-technology economies and unsurpassed mobility. In this already ‘crowded’ space, more housing is needed for increasingly smaller households, more industrial areas while many old sites are irremediably damaged by pollution, more roads and railways and new and larger airports, more recreation areas. In addition to all that, we demand real ‘natural’ landscape which - and this is an example of true human arrogance - we then proceed to remould.2. All these claims on space, when that space is already so densely occupied, lead to tensions and conflicts. This is certainly the case with all forms of new travel and transport infrastructure; throughout Europe there is a drive to provide faster links for road traffic, and particularly for faster air and rail travel. For the Low Countries this means above all the expansion of Schiphol The Maas flood plain near Rotterdam. The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 16 The Diegem cloverleaf near Brussels National Airport. Airport and - for the moment less controversial - the development of the Belgian airport at Zaventem on the one hand, the building of track for the TGV on the other. In the Netherlands there is also the construction of the Betuwe route. Given the existing massive pressure on the available space, it is no coincidence that precisely these new demands should have given rise to all manner of conflicts, not only between ordinary people and the govemment but also between different government bodies. For these large-scale infrastructural projects currently serve as a focus for the many conflicting claims on space. Consequently, they also provide an incentive for experiments in new methods of participation and decision-making. At the same time it has to be made clear that by reason of their international nature these projects are actually beyond the capacity and competence of the individual countries. Landscape and space in the Netherlands and Flanders So the landscape, already ploughed up and changed so many times over the centuries, has to be reconstructed again; rearranged and adapted to the needs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anyone who is familiar with Flanders and the Netherlands will know that they approach this problem very differently - in almost contradictory ways. As a result, the two historical landscapes are becoming even more distinct. From a satellite only one natural frontier is visible in the landscape of the The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 17 Schiphol Airport in 1995. Low Countries: the east-west band of major rivers. Although the course of the rivers has hardly shifted since the last Ice Age, the historical importance of the unruly rivers for the Dutch landscape cannot be exaggerated. The second frontier, the political border further south between the Netherlands and Belgium (and between the Netherlands and Flanders) is not visible from a distance. Furthermore, the areas of the Kempen, Brabant and Limburg, which are the most important in terms of homogeneous physical geography, extend across both sides of the national border. But from here physical geography and cultural geography diverge: the state border, not visible at a distance, is unmistakable to anyone who cares to take a closer look. No-one travelling by train between Essen (Flanders) and Roosendaal (the Netherlands), or by car between Antwerp and Breda, could fail to see where the border lies. As the Flemish writer Geert van Istendael says, you can tell where the border lies by the appearance of the houses on either side - the windows, curtains, doors, roofs, paint and even the colour of the bricks are different. The differences are even more noticeable if one takes a walk from Slenaken in the Netherlands to Teuven in Flanders - a distance of less than one kilometre. Tidy Dutch houses done up with a sense of orderliness and beauty give way to sloppily-maintained Flemish houses with built-on kitchens, extensions, aviaries and rabbit hutches, all descending in a visual line to the dustbin. Neat, precisely-measured driveways in two colours of stone give way to patches of tarmac and very uneven patches of gravel for parking the car. The sharp white lines at the side of the road fade into nothing.... The way in which houses and roads are maintained is also explicatio culturae. The Low Countries. Jaargang 7 18 Cluttered building - note the extensions to the houses - in Klemskerke, Flanders. The Netherlands: Wieringermeerpolder with Lely pumping station and the three main canals.