European Landscape Architecture Practice 2000

abstract
making or remaking NL
This lecture is not about blasphemy, it is rather about strategies of stirring
processes.
As you know, the Dutch reclaimed a lot of land from the sea and they drained
and occupied former wetlands. So there goes the saying that God created the
world and the Dutch created Holland. The Dutch did not need the Creator to
make their space to live, they just had to fight against the natural powers for it.
So to speak, these powers could rather be seen as a kind of test, God put the
Dutch through.
Nowadays more diverse forces have to be controlled, monitored and planned.
Next to the classical issue of taming water and nature, a strong market economy
and a highly differenciating society need to be governed as well.
Different strategies got involved to get a grip on these powers ‘society’, ‘market’
and ‘nature’ throughout the last 50 years. These strategies were always a mirror
of the prevailing mentalities and hence have changed to a great extent with the
transition of the former agrarian to information society.
The shifts in thinking are based on growth of individual emancipation and
liberalisation and manifest in spatial strategies. So the changes are about
expanding boundaries in thought and in space. This lecture deals with three
strategies and the way ‘the one’ and ‘the other’, means: the issue to be controlled,
relate to each other. The three following diagrams illustrate the shifting boundaries
related to the strategies.
The first strategy is separation.
Separation can especially be seen in in space and society.
As per the latter in the Netherlands a strong coherence existed in religious
communities, which differed strongly from each other and hardly mixed. They all
had their own churches, schools and media- that was called the’columnization’
of society –a perfectly separated society!
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