Waterways and the Cultural Landscape
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Waterways and the Cultural Landscape

Francesco Vallerani, Francesco Visentin, Francesco Vallerani, Francesco Visentin

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eBook - ePub

Waterways and the Cultural Landscape

Francesco Vallerani, Francesco Visentin, Francesco Vallerani, Francesco Visentin

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About This Book

Water control and management have been fundamental to the building of human civilisation. In Europe, the regulation of major rivers, the digging of canals and the wetland reclamation schemes from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, generated new typologies of waterscapes with significant implications for the people who resided within them.

This book explores the role of waterways as a form of heritage, culture and sense of place and the potential of this to underpin the development of cultural tourism. With a multidisciplinary approach across the social sciences and humanities, chapters explore how the control and management of water flows are among some of the most significant human activities to transform the natural environment. Based upon a wealth and breadth of European case studies, the book uncovers the complex relationships we have with waterways, the ways that they have been represented over recent centuries and the ways in which they continue to be redefined in different cultural contexts. Contributions recognise not only valuable assets of hydrology that are at the core of landscape management, but also more intangible aspects that matter to people, such as their familiarity, affecting what is understood as the fluvial sense of place.

This highly original collection will be of interest to those working in cultural tourism, cultural geography, heritage studies, cultural history, landscape studies and leisure studies.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781315398440

Part I

Cultural visions

1 On the waterfront

Stephen Daniels
Water levels in academic scholarship have been rising recently; everywhere you look, there are studies of various forms of water, in wide-ranging environments and societies, across the spectrum of the arts and sciences. A range of topics from modernity to citizenship, once largely inland matters, are now on the waterfront, materially and imaginatively. Certain social developments contribute to this new aquatic scholarly sensibility, the crisis of water supply in expanding cities of the global south, and the rediscovery and gentrification of formerly working waterfronts, from docklands to canals, in the global north. Rising sea levels associated with global warming seep into the urban imagination. Landscape itself appears more liquid as a field of inquiry, with the traditional lexicon of rivers, coasts, lakes and marshes overspilling into a more liminal zone of waterlands and waterscapes, from where some traditional conceptual landmarks like city and country seem more amphibious. We all live in Venice now.
Everywhere on earth, no matter how wet or dry, by geographical definition, is within a river catchment, and encircled by a hydrological cycle, configuring social as well as physiographic forms, and we are now, in more cultural research, continually reminded of the role of water in the material and symbolic constitution of everyday life. While some of this recent research appeals to waterpower as a matter of non-human as well as human agency, conceived more as nature than culture, environment than landscape, it draws on and re-channels some older concepts of cultural and physical hydrology from river basins to valley regions, and some work done on traditional waterfronts, like seaports and canalsides. One critic has connected the current fascination with water to the wider global discourse of flows and circulation, in social as well as environmental matters, so-called “liquid times” (Baumann, 2007). A veritable spate of research at times, in which so many issues flow, across disciplinary as well as national boundaries, as a period of academic history I’m inclined to call these liquid times the Aquacene.
When I chose the title for this paper, I had in mind the waterfront as a zone of research as well as a physical place. I also looked again at the famous film of the name, On the Waterfront 1954, directed by Elia Kazan. It stars Marlon Brando, as an up-and-coming boxer, facing down organised crime which controls the union of New York longshoremen, but not until I viewed it again recently did I realise how much the movie stars the waterfront too. The Hoboken shore, with its docks, ships, warehouses and tenements, where the film was shot on location, in sometimes documentary style, appears more than a background, or even a stage, but a performative part of the drama. Most of the working waterfront is now gone, but you can still take a tour of locations, as part of the heritage of the lower Hudson River.

Waterways: landscape and environment

In Peter Coates’ recent book A Story of Six Rivers, History, Culture and Ecology (Coates, 2013), we are reminded that director Kazan returned to a waterscape in his 1960 film Wild River, revisiting the idiom of progressive documentary films of a generation before about the engineering of the Tennessee River as a social project, to provide electricity and prevent soil erosion. A Story of Six Rivers: is one of two landmark volumes published recently about the cultural matter and meaning of waterways. The other is The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity and the Urban Imagination by Mathew Gandy (2014). Gandy is a geographer by profession and Coates a historian, if, as with the best work on water, their books cut across disciplines, as they follow some common themes, particularly about the role of the arts, notably film and photography, in representing waterways, even as they are impelled, as a matter of principle, to look beyond or behind the camera lens, or the poem or painting, to the creative agency of nature, through the lens of liquidity. In both books, we are reminded that water is a medium as well as a material, through which we can look, and reflect, on other matters in the making of modernity. Coates and Gandy focus on urban nature, the role of waterways in a range of cities, if their perspectives are in a sense reversed. Gandy’s book is a story of six cities, or set of six city narratives, along a range of urban watercourses. In Coates’ book, cities are situated in terms of their river valleys. We visit Mumbai, Turin, Lagos, Liverpool, Vienna and London, and in both Los Angeles and Berlin.
Coates and Gandy are remarkable guides to understanding the new waterfront in scholarship, because they draw critically on some longer-standing views of hydrography, including historical discourses of river basins, and a reservoir of older myths, allegories and mythologies
Rivers symbolise nature’s awesome powers. Yet they are also a sinuous blend, the collective product, not just of geology, ecology and climate, but of economics, technology, politics and human imaginings. The lifeblood of communities, they provide habitat and sustenance (river of life).
(Coates, 2013, p. 15)
Coates’ book moves beyond the waterway to explore the wider world of the river valley, or catchment, indeed draws on a traditional genre of topographical writing, the river portrait, exploring the various cultural associations, episodes, anecdotes and images, that make up a river narrative. There is a fluency to the stories, correspondences between the flow of the Danube and the movement of Strauss’s Waltz of that name, and the mellifluous alliteration of the subheadings, ‘Delightful Danube’, ‘Musical Mersey’. Visitors on the Magical Mystery Tour in Liverpool unconsciously echo pilgrimages to the source of the Blue Danube. We are reminded that there is more to Mersey musicality than the Beatles. Former deckhand, pop singer Billy Fury, is now firmly part of the waterfront heritage, his statue erected as part of the cultural redevelopment of the former docks.
One river in his book appears an exception to matters of urban nature, indeed to offer a view of non-human agency, and a romantic view of the wild river. The Yukon river features on the book cover illustration, an aerial photo of the braided channels across the vast expanse of the Alaska Flats. The site of an unrealised grand scheme to dam and float a reservoir, the photo is an image of post-1960s ecological aesthetic virtue, naturalistic in impression, going with the flow. Glacial in origin, solid with ice for most of the year, clouded in silt when it melted. Here is a long, major river, with no major city – unless we count the coastal connection with San Francisco for the Klondike gold rush.
The cover illustration of Matthew Gandy’s book The Fabric of Space presents a contrasting icon of waterways, great pipes snaking through modern Mumbai, used as walkways by the local population – as if the modernist inside-out design the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its exposed pipework, has been followed in matters of civil infrastructure – it also recalls the historical hydro-infrastructure of cities such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, before concealed plumbing.
If we trace the flow of water through urban space, the metaphorical and topographic dimensions to cities take on new and sometimes unexpected dimensions. We encounter not only entanglements between human agency and the material reconstruction of cities but also unpredictable aspects to nonhuman agency, such as the epidemiological dimensions to the different hydrological terrains of modernity or the unforeseen properties of construction materials.
(Gandy, 2014, p. viii)
This quotation is a passage, in both textual and territorial ways, the portal to an adventurous intellectual and geographical navigation through urban modernity. We never lose sight of some familiar material and intellectual landmarks – indeed structure as well as flow is a key co-ordinate, material infrastructure as well as some theoretical and historical structures concerned with passages of modernity, not least the remapping of modernity through water power, both the power of the stuff itself and the power of the various authorities who store and channel it. We are on the urban waterfront, in all its places and forms – standpipes and buckets as well as reservoirs and lidos, sewers and culverts – each of the six cities is seen through its characteristic infrastructure for water.
The book begins in Paris and ends in London, almost as polarities of hydromodernity. Paris exemplified both rational planning of water control, in monumental sewer construction, and the hydrophilia of impressionist art, from bathing to boating. In London, by contrast, every hydro-engineering scheme, from embanking to barriers, seems undermined by fears and fantasies of flood, not so much from incoming sea levels as from rising groundwater. The more they were culverted, the more the Thames tributaries have haunted the imagination; the Thames barrier only serves to raise the spectre of muddy flood, estuary England.
Gandy returns us to some of the sources of urban modernity as a cultural formation, the moment of modernism in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe, when the very speed of progress, and material transformation, enhanced an interest in the primeval, part of modernism’s return of the repressed, to deep time and ancient myths, in the elemental world: earth, air, fire, water. There is a brief reference to the great passage on water in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, tracing the passage of municipal water supply through Dublin, which is worth expanding (Gandy, 2014, p. 20). This is an exchange between Leopold Bloom, “water drawer, lover of water” who is filling a kettle to make the tea, and Stephen Daedalus, who distrusting “all aquacities of thought”, refused it. As Bloom pours the kettle, Joyce describes the flow of water from reservoirs, aqueducts and mains, to the turning tap, ranging far in space and time, with some send up of geography books of the time, to take in capes and bays, cloudbursts, artesian wells, lagoons and atolls, watersheds and, glaciers and tidal estuaries, “its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic and hydrometric instruments” (Joyce, 1992, pp. 783–786).
Reading these books, I am reminded of some of the pioneering hydro-landscape work of Denis Cosgrove, particularly on Venice and its inland territory, the Terraferma (Cosgrove, 1993). Water and water power were central to Cosgrove’s charting of urban modernity in the sixteenth century, including the development of cartography and geography as forms of representation, but as in the Venetian landscape it is a medium and source for matters like food supply, disease control, capital and labour systems, consortia, estate management and state formation, – and above all trying to connect principle with practice, cosmic ideas with mundane reality, a material imagination. Water power here, as elsewhere, was political power, a matter of conflict and struggle.
Cosgrove’s book The Palladian Landscape explored these matters in some depth, but I want to draw attention to a work that is not remembered as much, Water, Engineering and Landscape (1990). On the cover is a late sixteenth-century illustration of a water-lifting machine from a book by Agostino Ramelli, part of a discussion of projects of Venetian hydrology, of “interventions in the hydro landscape” to ensure production and circulation. But the book is a wider-ranging one, in terms of place and approach, bringing together a range of staff from one geography department at Loughborough, physical and human geographers of various kinds, studying various places, Zimbabwe, Quebec, the English Fens, the French Sahara, and various themes, river restoration, hydro-electric power, ditches and drains.

Trent waterscapes

In the rest of this chapter, I will address the major river of the English Midlands, the river Trent, as a cultural landscape. It is a river I know well, in a particular stretch, having lived by, walked along and cycled along for the many years I have lived in Nottingham, the main city of the Trent valley. Its inclusion here is not just a matter of local knowledge but because the Trent valley, as a cultural landscape, raises some major issues of hydrographic history, heritage and representation.
The Trent is a major national as well as regional waterway, the third longest in England, after the Thames and Severn, over 170 miles, draining much of the Midlands before it flows into the Humber estuary and the North Sea. Historically it has proved significant as both a commercial routeway and an informal cultural boundary between northern and southern England. It is a literary river, featuring in nationally known works, plays and novels, including Shakespeare’s play Henry IV Part One, and two major novels, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot and Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence. But compared with the Thames and Severn, and many smaller waterways, it has a lower profile in the visual arts. In part this is because for much of its length it is not conventionally scenic and often visibly elusive on the ground, with few commanding viewing points, does not own its own estuary, and its major navigation passes through what is now one of the less visited, more unfashionable, parts of England. Visitors to Stoke on Trent would be hard pressed to find the river of its name, now largely hidden from view, and the city of Nottingham was built over a mile from the river, in part because of the vicissitudes of its flow, subject to shallows and silting and sudden as well as seasonal flood.
In contrast, one of the tributaries of the Trent, the Derwent, has a more clearly defined cultural profile, in part a reflection of its physical profile as a more upland river, and a clearer narrative of development, or at least a rich field of sites and events within a relatively contained catchment (including a subterranean field of mines and caves) from which it is possible to show, reveal and imagine compelling graphic stories, reaching well beyond the valley, taking in global networks of trade and production associated with its cotton industry (see Chapter 6). The Derwent Valley is a compressed, conventionally scenic valley in its upper reaches, now the Peak District National Park, flows past Chatsworth, one of Britain’s best-known mansions and landscape parks, has a long industrial history, including tourist industry, and now industrial heritage, centred on the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Cromford, one of the earliest cotton mill complexes of the Industrial Revolution. The river then flows through Derby, birthplace of the eighteenth-centur...

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