THE CANAL STORY

Abstract

Canal du Midi, a revolutionary man-made waterway and trading route from the XVII century, is one of the oldest canals of Europe and is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since when 1996 (UNESCO, May 12, 2022). The waterway was initially created to strengthen the king’s power and to stimulate the economy, by creating a connection between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic. In the second half of the 19th, the competition from the railway, followed by the impacts of WWⅠ and WWⅡ caused the decline of the trading role of the canal. Finally, at the end of the 1980s, the freight transport on the canal definitively stopped.
“The South Canal is clearly an exceptional example of a designed landscape” (Heritage, 2022), says UNESCO World Heritage, this grant water system shows the most innovative water management achievement of the time. The construction of the canal combines ingenuity and aesthetics by taking advantage of the natural water flow and the geographical and architectural elements of the land it crossed. Next to that, a wide range of specialized knowledge from Roman tradition to the latest scientific development was used in its construction. The project had brought enormous benefit for the region and the whole country of France. Today, the canal provides a unique perspective to review the relationship between artificiality and nature, modernity and the past.
However, the canal faces difficulties to adapt to its role of a landscape icon that attracts worldwide tourism and has difficulties to keep its role as a source for irrigation. In fact, the Canal du Midi is a rigid, long, quite narrow water structure, with many waterworks that need constant maintenance and have limited accessibility. Therefore, to overcome marginalization, it is essential to identify its values; “aspects of culture which are inherited by the present and which will be preserved for the future” (Upen, Oct 18, 2018).
The thesis proposes a discussion from the perspective of landscape architecture, if and in what way a large-scale historical site can become the spill of a sustainable landscape transformation. Central to the research is the use of the concept of the landscape narrative: Narratives are there in landscapes, intersect with sites, accumulate as layers of history, organize sequences, and inhere in the materials and process of the landscape (Potteiger & Purinton, 1998). And to envision the canal as an element, that can create a more adaptive and robust network to stimulate the sustainable development of the region by using three narratives: water as culture, water as infrastructure, water as nature.