Project New Dutch Waterline and Project Arcadian Landscapes

Abstract

Fifteen years have passed since the start of the national project New Dutch Waterline, presented as an illustrative example of a renewed approach of which spatial design was cross linked to heritage, for it described in the Nota Belvedere (Feddes, 1999). From 1815 until 1940 the New Dutch Waterline was one of the major defence lines, both a system of waterworks for inundating, as well as series of forts, casemates and other military defence objects. In the 1990s the process of revitalisation started as a national project. Spatial planning, public participation and legal protection of single objects -fortresses and so on-, defined areas of interest and the large scale impact was addressed. The basic idea was the use of the cultural history of this area as the backbone for current large scale challenges (Luiten e.a., 2002). Can this approach be of use for other spatial challenges which are related to areas of high historic impact, heritage landscapes? This contribution explores both the spatial characteristics of the New Dutch Waterline as well as the process of this national project and to compare it to other another heritage landscape, like the many estate landscapes in a project Arcadian Landscapes. In the seventeenth century, rich merchants constructed estates and country houses in the wealthy and strongly urbanised province of Holland, consisting of a luxurious house with design garden in the vicinity of the city and other estates, creating estate landscapes (Verschuure, 2013). This paper compares the New Dutch Waterline to the estate landscape and explore if this could benefit from the protection of estates and areas around cities that are in the process of strong urbanisation. It asks for preservation and re-use of estates in a larger scale.