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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Channeling Politics: Shaping shorelines & cities in the Netherlands, 1990-2010 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8411r1dr Author Kinder, Kimberley Publication Date 2011 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Channeling Politics: Shaping shorelines & cities in the Netherlands, 1990‐2010 By Kimberley A. Kinder A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Watts, Chair Professor Teresa Caldeira Professor Jake Kosek Professor Richard Walker Spring 2011 Abstract Channeling Politics: Shaping shorelines & cities in the Netherlands, 1990‐2010 By Kimberley A. Kinder Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Berkeley Dr. Michael Watts (chair) Water‐oriented real estate development has emerged as a leading urban investment strategy over the past few decades. But business interests are only part of the story, and the political possibilities created when soil is turned into streams and lakes or when land‐ based construction is given an aquatic focus are vast. As this study of water politics in Amsterdam shows, bringing water back to the forefront of urban planning today is creating an entirely new spatial terrain of action in the city where ideas of class, nature, sexuality, and security collide in tenacious, sometimes troubling, and often inspiring ways. This study of changing land‐water relationships in and around Amsterdam between 1990 and 2010 accomplishes two objectives. First, at the empirical level, I tease out the many significant and surprising ways that water‐oriented urban development has become a hotbed of political maneuvering. Shoreline debates cut through some of the most contentious issues of the day, from welfare restructuring and anti‐gay violence to monument preservation and global warming. I explain that, while these shifts are partially emerging through professionalized planning sectors as expected, they owe much to the elusive and quotidian interaction of residents, activists, and passers by with houses, vistas, parties, relics, cameras, and neighbors that, by happenstance or design, have recently begun circulating through the watery spaces of town. And I show that long‐overlooked institutional and cultural dependencies stemming from bureaucratic specializations and urban lore significantly shape the opportunity structures surrounding water, a phenomenon that helps explain the high degree of informal water‐oriented investment taking hold in Amsterdam as elsewhere. Second, from a theoretical perspective, this empirical study of water politics in Amsterdam shows that these re‐appropriations of water in urban life are radically altering some of the most fundamental expectations about the essence, meaning, and import of cities, both as a lived reality and as an epistemic category. Long‐standing assumptions about the places of freedom in the city, the embodied casings of urban history, and the relationship between town and country no longer hold. The empirically rich chapters in this book explore these three issues in turn and, in so doing, explain how, why, and to what political ends watery spaces in the city once thought dangerous, degrading, and irrelevant have come to appear habitable, luxurious, and profitable, or vice versa. Financial acknowledgement: This material is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0903073. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 2 Chapter 1: Pandora’s Box: Making water, making cities Part 1: Water, Jurisdiction, and Informality 16 Chapter 2: The Last Free Bits of Town: Water, boats, and dwelling in Amsterdam’s legal shades of gray 33 Chapter 3: Whatever Floats Your Boat: Canal festivals and the making of a gathering space Part 2: Water, History, and Real Estate 50 Chapter 4: Piss off with that Canal: Heritage, gentrification, and the almost making of urban water 70 Chapter 5: The City on the IJ: Nautical tales of yesteryear in the home harbor of tomorrow Part 3: Water, Biophysicality, and City Building 91 Chapter 6: “The Last Free Bits of Town” Water, boats, and dwelling in Amsterdam’s legal shades of gray 109 Chapter 7: Make Room for Water: Urban expansion in a warmer, wetter world Conclusion 129 Chapter 8: Making Water, Making Cities: The braided channels of social change 140 References i INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter 1 “PANDORA’S BOX” Making water, making cities … it can never be overemphasized that the period between 1550 and 1650, when the political identity of an independent Netherlands nation was being established, was also a time of dramatic physical alteration of its landscape. In both the political and geographical senses, then, this was the formative era of a modern, Dutch, nationhood. In the subsequent historical consciousness of that people, those two processes were inseparably linked together. (Schama 1987:34) It has been said that God made the land, but the Dutch made Holland. Histories of the Netherlands almost invariably open with descriptions of a wet and marshy landscape, and of the shovels and pumps that turned this mud to gold. If you believe what you read, this multi‐millennial process of conquering land from sea is central to the emergence of Dutch nationalism, democracy, and imperialism. Mid‐20th century schoolbooks celebrated these heroes of the polders alongside their cousins, the merchant captains of the high seas. This watery past remains an important symbol of Dutch identity on the international stage. The American‐invented story of little Hans Brinker with his finger in the dike, the miniature windmills and wooden clogs sold to tourists by the boatloads, and the 17th century landscape paintings displayed in museums around the world; these water‐inspired elements stand in to outsiders as caricatures of quintessential Dutchness. But is this fact, or is it fiction? “Water identity has had its day, and it’s not today.” Sociologist Justus Uitermark (2009) expressed sentiments shared by many academics and cultural critics. As he told me, the folklore connecting water and Holland is an invented and relatively young tradition. Conquering‐the‐sea narratives carried more weight in the 1950s as the final curtain fell across the Dutch colonial empire than it held in the 1650s at Amsterdam’s imperial peak. And these narratives carry even less weight today. “Few people in the Netherlands have an articulated idea of water,” he said. “It’s probably important, but only at a subconscious level. People don’t think about it.” Poldering, a landscape technique used to reclaim salt marshes in the region, remains common practice. But Uitermark describes it as trivial, uncontroversial, and culturally insignificant. Managing water, he said, is a practical affair, not an ideological commitment. “Water folklore doesn’t determine the identity of the Netherlands anymore” (Uitermark 2009). Despite such declarations, asking Amsterdammers about water today opened a Pandora’s Box of political intrigue. In recent years, national climate change policies put technologies of flooding and floating center stage. Sustainable development visions twinned wetland mitigation with metropolitan ascent. Water amenities heavily influenced real estate profitability and regional competitiveness. Proposals to change water’s route through town pitted neighbors against each other in near‐violent class conflicts. Central city canals became prized spaces for collective engagement. And the growing popularity of 2 living afloat displaced old‐timers from their self‐built homes. Despite assertions of irrelevance, evidence of water’s continuing social import in the Netherlands abounds. This study of the legality, historicity, and materiality of water in the Netherlands explores the role surface water is made to play in ongoing political debates about Amsterdam and Amsterdammers. As with all relational spaces, cities are constantly in transition. Discourses of sustainability, information economies, and individual responsibility are popular planning tropes guiding urban development today, alongside austerity, inequity, and informality. Within this regeneration matrix, as the following chapters will show, water wears many hats. It is a hydrological force carrying the consequences of global warming and ecological degradation into people’s living rooms. It is a highly prized real estate commodity but also a deeply feared agent of community disruption. And it figures as a fiercely guarded, quasi‐regulated frontier holding out promises of marvelous profits that can only be realized at high social prices. Taken together, these cultivated intersections between water, nature, economy, and liberty connect water management decisions to many of the most potent urban redevelopment dynamics shaping cities at the turn of the 21st century. As the lines between wet spaces and dry ones are reconfigured, new paradigms of personal freedom, collective heritage, and environmental health come into being. These linkages mean that questions about water are rarely benign. Rather, as this study shows, water narratives in the Netherlands over the past two decades sliced through the heart of political discussions over environmental health, market competitiveness, and community vitality. But by debating these political issues through the language of water, partisan