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Carola Hein Editor Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage Past, Present and Future Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage Carola Hein Editor Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage Past, Present and Future Editor Carola Hein Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment Technical University Delft Delft, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands ISBN 978-3-030-00267-1 ISBN 978-3-030-00268-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00268-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019934522 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this book or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. This work is subject to copyright. All commercial rights are reserved by the author(s), whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Regarding these commercial rights a non-exclusive license has been granted to the publisher. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publi- cation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Andrew Davies Photography, used with permission of Ryhope Engines Trust, all rights reserved This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword by Giulio Boccaletti That the world may be facing a water crisis is an idea now firmly entrenched in global discourse. The World Economic Forum has ranked the risks associated with water as among the highest to global prosperity. The UN has declared 2018–2028 as the Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development. Indeed, the symptoms of the current moment point to a society that has not come to terms with its own water insecurity: chronic scarcity and over-extraction are the norms in about one-third of the world’s basins. Some twenty million people per year are displaced by natural catastrophes caused by water, an amount comparable to that of war. Billions do not enjoy safe, reliable access to water in their homes. As the human population tripled over the last forty years, the number of animals in freshwater systems—such as fish, amphibians, and birds—has dropped by more than three-quarters. It is predicted that the risks to both people and nature will worsen as climate change modifies the hydrology of the planet. What makes any discussion about water complicated is that it carries multiple economic, legal, political, and cultural values. Water is a public good; at times, it is a private good; it is often a resource held in common. Access to water and sanitation is a human right. In some cases, water is subject to public trust, in others to private ownership. Its most complicated attribute is its delivery, which has very little to do with the substance itself. And protection from excessive quantities of water is likewise essential. A society’s water security is a product of its landscape, infras- tructure, and institutions. Because the impact of choices about these key issues may last over long periods of time, often outliving generations, cultural values, and even economic systems, the historical record is not simply instrumental to our under- standing of how water issues have evolved over time: it is an essential component of the architecture societies used to manage water, whether they realize it or not. Framing water as heritage defines it as an object of study and positions it for preservation. Adaptive Strategies to Water Heritage is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the world’s water heritage. The broad scope of the papers in this volume reflects the pervasiveness of water-related issues across societies, as well as the universality of solutions. The methodological heterogeneity it embraces, which v vi Foreword by Giulio Boccaletti lies at the boundary of conservation practice, historical analysis, anthropology, and sociology, accurately reflects the multi-disciplinary nature of the issue. The relationship between society and its water landscape is dialectical and deeply contextual. Wrestling with it, examining it to understand our water past, and recognizing its role in defining our present are essential to preparing for what is to come. Giulio Boccaletti Chief Strategy Officer and Global Managing Director for Water, The Nature Conservancy London, United Kingdom Giulio Boccaletti is the Chief Strategy Officer and Global Managing Director for Water at The Nature Conservancy. He has been an academic and an executive in the private sector, and has spent the last fifteen years working on water issues at the intersection of public policy, economic strategy, and the environment. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Environment and Natural Resource Security. Foreword by Henk Ovink The future is rapidly changing, the present is in high-speed transition, and com- plexity is increasing every day. Complexity is in the challenges we face, in their interdependence across political boundaries, in the systems—environmental, social, and economic—we use to organize ourselves, and our personal interests. Challenges are at all levels exacerbated by climate change, increasingly and always worse every day, every year. If we add up the numbers, the future looks bleak: every year a new record in rains, droughts, floods, migrants, economic, environ- mental, and humanitarian destruction and despair. More deaths, conflicts, extreme events, and dollars lost. These extremes become more and more extreme and impact on the world’s vulnerable places ever more harshly. The future is here, grounded in the past. Can we learn from the past to help us tackle our future? Learning from the past—so easily said, so hard to do. It is tempting to look back to the past and simplify the world, to imagine that things were once simple and focused. This is where populism looms, in its nostalgic longing to control, to surveil, to quash disturbing surprises. But looking back and simplifying do not give us a clear picture of history, nor an honest perspective on our future. Learning from the past does not mean we only look back, but that we also look ahead. Using history and our capacity to understand, we learn to value the past. History is the broker between us and the past, our aid as we try to explore and exploit that past, to use it to help us leapfrog into the future. We need an equal, just, and sustainable society that takes care of the planet, of everything and everyone, and leaves behind no one. The UN Agenda 2030 sketches out this path forward, littered with chal- lenges and barriers—none of which is easy to overcome. We will have to reinvent ourselves a multitude of times. Yet, this change can only come when we, collec- tively, embrace the past as a perspective on the future. Learning from the history of water is one of the most amazing journeys one can take: To see, to know, the course of the river, a drop of water, humankind’s inventions and interventions for managing water in nature and in our cities. Amazing deltas dotted the planet, mitigating water extremes long before we had to learn the words climate change. For centuries before the ecological crisis, water-wise and water-rich cities proliferated, where water was an equal partner, vii viii Foreword by Henk Ovink where it was celebrated and valued. It is this capacity of water to unite, to bring together the multiple values of society—environmental, economic, social, and cultural—that stands out as an inspiration to us to understand the past in order to learn for the future. Valuing water means bringing together all interests that have to do with water. It means embracing all partners and their perspectives, protecting all our sources, building trust and capacity, learning and empowering, innovating, testing, and investing. The interdependencies and complexities of climate change demand a compre- hensive approach, cutting through silos, vested interests, and political positions. Our planet, our cities, our built systems have all the core values and principles of complexity we need.

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