Haringvlietdam, a beautiful operative landscape

Abstract

Due to the major flooding disasters particularly in the Southwest region, the Delta works were needed in order to protect the people and the land. During the Delta works a lot of water infrastructures were built in the area as technical solutions, such as the Haringvlietdam. The Delta Works brought safety and made the area more accessible. However, nowadays we realized some negative effects as well, since ecosystems were damaged and lost.

Additionally, the climate is changing and in the future the sea level will rise. Due to storms and heavy rainfall rivers will have higher peak discharges. These changes will have considerable consequences for the Southwest Region and therefore innovative long term solutions need to be designed so that the area stays protected.

In this specific framework, it could be argued that the protection of coastal landscapes from flooding disasters is traditionally approached by engineering perspective that often resulted in negative impacts on local ecology and ecosystems. As well as massive mono-functional infrastructures that act only as intermediate space without culture and program value.

Taking this in to account, it could be indicated that there is a strong need to incorporate landscape architecture and ecological services in coastal protection. For this reason, the design assignment of this graduation project is the partial opening and slow transformation of the Haringvlietdam to an operative landscape infrastructure along with the creation of a group of islands for protection.
It is important to slowly transform this area in such a way that people will be part of the development and can profit from it. The design should be considered as an open ended slow process towards an adaptive coastal self-sufficient region.

This slow process, would give people the time to realize what would change and understand the future possibilities of this area and could develop a self-sufficient region which is producing energy from alternative resources (water, wind, sun), producing aqua agriculture that is consumed domestically or is exported to other countries, attracting tourism to the extended coastline (islands) and providing a unique experience both for the residence of the region and for the visitors.