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LANDSCAPES OF WATER
Paola Vigan
The projects I will discuss are related to sev-
eral research and design experiences con-
cerning water infrastructure. Led in different
contexts, they have been the occasion to
bring together ideas, positions, topics, key
issues, and design approaches that slowly
construct a common experience of Europes
physical landscape as a research eld. This
rst statement seems banal but it requires
taking a step back to reconsider the actual
condition of the European city and territory.
One common idea is that European urban
and territorial fabrics are almost concluded,
after a long story of progressive densication
and networking. These projects explore, on
the contrary, the great changes that will af-
fect European territory in the future, starting
with problems related to water management,
agricultural reduction, and structural evolu-
tion. The themes are not any easier to handle
in the Italian state of Veneto than they are
in Holland or in other parts of Europe, and
many researchers are currently observing
them from different points of view. What is
sure is that Europes landscape is drastically
changing and is in need of new concepts
and visions.
A second common idea is that we, archi-
tects, urbanists, and landscape architects,
have to respond to changes with pragmatic
and operable solutions. This research takes
some risks in considering the existence of
Europes landscape over time, which is cru-
cial in reading and working at the scale of the
territory and also crucial when reecting on
the deep mutations of its basic infrastructural
support. The effort shows that time is not
working against design activity but is one of
its most important components, and that we
cannot think of actualizing such transforma-
tions without broadening not only our spatial
but also our temporal horizon.
A third quite diffused idea, related to the former
one, is that to provide solutions is an activity
that does not require an elaborate theoretical
approach and that design operations in par-
ticular are only the application of knowledge
formulated and established in other contexts.
The design approach reveals to what extent,
when working on the water theme, we are
confronted with concepts, ideas, and scien-
tic and technical paradigms, and nally with
ideologies, political projects that are histori-
cally and culturally based. To confront them,
we need to take a critical distance and re-
read them from a new, contemporary theo-
retical perspective, with the understanding
that changes in paradigms are occurring in
other disciplines: hydraulic and environmen-
tal engineers, for example, are today thinking
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2006 Brisbane
INTENSIFIED
INFRASTRUCTURE
Christina Tung +
Rodrigo Prieto
1 Air Trafc Patterns
2 Wind Patterns
3 Program
4 Sections
5 Experience
product, and goods must be ultimately
delivered safely and on time).
This project proposes an urban strategy
that ties together the dependent
synergies of various global industries
into a single water network. By having
one industrys waste output become
another industrys productive input,
we challenged the traditional water
paradigm through a stratication of
water purity and an intensication of
infrastructure.

In determining a site, the proximity of
the port and airport were considered
for their existing infrastructures. In
response to the decreasing amounts
of rainfall on Brisbane, we considered
future cloud-seeding locations that
could work in conjunction with the
airport. Where the optimal heights and
velocities of planes took place around
the site, we calculated the major
forces of the wind in the area. Because
much of Brisbanes park and preserved
land has been taken over by industry,
we focused on the borders between
industry and recreation to determine
how our proposal could change the
urban morphology at the local and
urban scales. Our site was a constant
negotiation between park, water,
industry, topology, and climate. At the
thresholds, we hoped to discover a
place for an opportunity for change.
We envision bringing to Brisbanes
harbor everything from a semiconductor
chip manufacturing plant,
pharmaceutical, synthetic gas, food
and beverage, and metals nishing,
to a single site where water types are
sorted, shared among opportunistically
driven partners and integrated back
into the urban fabric, sharing waters
with adjacent commercial, agricultural,
and public spaces. The impact of our
design in the face of todays water
scarcity and driving technologies will
gradually emerge a new modality of
metropolitan order.
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and acting differently than in the past, and a
new alliance is possible.
About Dispersion
The projects presented here deal with the
theme of requalication of a part of the Vene-
to Region diffused, fragmented, and con-
taminatedstarting with the complex system
of its water resources.
The territory of Veneto, like many contempo-
rary locations, is a place of paratactic com-
binations of a great number of paradoxes.
It is a mutating territory, like many European
territories of dispersion, where signicant
causes of crisis come to light that are modi-
fying the character traits of the diffused city.
I am referring to the specic mix of housing
and industry in an extended territory, usually
involving people living in a single detached
house and working in a small enterprise. This
model of diffusion and of development with-
out fractures (Fu, Zacchia, 1983) has been
described in Italy both by economists, soci-
ologists, geographers, and urbanists starting
from the end of the 1970s and especially
during the last 20 years (Indovina, 1990,
Secchi, 1991 and 2005).
The different paradoxes and elements of
crisis are deeply linked to the distinctive fea-
tures of settlement dispersion, a long-term
phenomenon that has invested a great part
of the Veneto territory, within which specic
infrastructural congurations were dened:
for instance, the diffused networks of water-
ways and roads. Isotropy is among the most
intriguing feature: an almost utopian, egalitar-
ian condition that is at the same time individ-
ualist, in which resources and opportunities
are uniformly and regularly distributed. Never-
theless, the isotropic territory reveals unsus-
pected rigidity, with themes of hierarchy and
difference. The same functional mix of small
productive complexes and housing, which is
typical of the incremental growth of the widely
dispersed micro-industries in Veneto, enters
into crisis when new mobility infrastructures
must be inserted: There the conict with the
waters and the lower sponge of roads and
built fragments explodes.
A paradox of void spaces also emerges in
this territory, particularly the paradox of the
still vast agricultural lands, which, except for a
few instances, remain marginal from an eco-
nomic viewpoint. Differently from other areas
of settlement dispersion like Flanders, where
the built areas reach percentages close to
60%, the Veneto plains cover important agri-
cultural extensions that still represent the larg-
est part of the territory. Despite this, and with
the exception of some strongly specialized
agricultural areas like those for chicory crops
or vineyards, the functional and symbolic role
of the agricultural landscape remains limited.
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2006 Dubai + Gold Coast
DUBAI IN EVERY CITY:
The Waterfront +
Speculative Real Estate
Aimee Chang
The marginal, even if extended, void requires
a new conceptualization that could invest
more sense and meaning to the possible
forms of public space related to the different
practices of the territory. The changing ge-
ographies of centrality relegate the traditional
forms of public spaces to tourist attractions,
or as peripheral and insignicant. My hypoth-
esis is that today the relations between the
fundamental elements of territorial support
and its uses are in a state of crisis, often de-
prived of any effective meaning whatsoever,
as if a hiatus had been introduced between
the lands infrastructure and its society. Not
only is there the crisis of what many per-
ceived as a model of territorial, social, and
economic organization, which obliges us to
rethink the existing relations between society
and territory, but the reasons for this crisis are
also enrooted in the here and now.
The idea of territory as infrastructure solidies
and becomes concrete in the fundamental
elements of its support: the natural and arti-
cial water regime and road systems. Through
these elements, we can read many of the
processes of rationalization that were real-
ized in the course of time, the various ideolo-
gies that inspired them, the various images
of modernization that were pursued, and the
crisis that affects them, and see a growing
distance between a support constituted over
a long period and society with its contem-
porary needs and desires. In what ways is
water a shared or a fought-over resource in
the dispersed territory of Veneto? How can it
participate in the construction of a new land-
scape for living?
About Water Rationalizations
In this context it is important to recognize
the various processes during which different
forms of rationalities have been posited in the
form of concrete infrastructure and objects.
Today, this transformation and modernization
process appears extraordinarily accelerated
and requires the development of new hy-
potheses.
Water includes natural and articial ows,
reclamation and irrigation devices, and drain-
ing systems. Water may not always be visible
but is the underlying reason for the construc-
tion of the territory around Venice. The institu-
tional representation of the metropolitan area
itself nearly coincides with the drainage basin
of the lagoon, the territory whose supercial
waters enter the lagoon of Venice or have
been deviated from it in the period of the Ve-
netian Republic. The empty space of todays
lagoon remains at the center of the territory
around, as it was when 16th-century hydrau-
lic sciences were born in Venice.
Rational here is used in the sense that so-
ciety decided in a specic historical moment
that a certain type of territorial modication
1 Dubai: Prototype 21st Century?
2 1960s Creek: Dubai
3 1990s - 1990s Expansion: Dubai
4 Projected Development of Waterfront:
Dubai
5 Fabricated Iconic Landscape: Dubai
6 Lot Selection: Dubia
7 Dubai in Every City: Gold Coast Australia
8 Queensland Australia Coastline: Gold
Coast
9 Surfers Paradise Coastline: Gold Coast
10 Canal Estates Coastline: Gold Coast
11 Fabricated Iconic Landscape: Gold
Coast
12 Lot Selection: Gold Coast
Homogenization of place is occurring
globally at the expense of local con-
text. Dubai is selling itself as the 21st-
century prototype global city, founded
on excessive consumption of mass
tourism and speculative construction.
Dubai is presented by its architecture
as consumable, replaceable, dispos-
able, and short-lived. And architects
are propagating this unsustainable, ex-
ploitative, and repressive phenomenon
in cities worldwide!

Is this all that architecture has to offer
society today?
Gold Coast is Australias fastest-grow-
ing city in terms of population growth
and construction. 42km of natural
coastline has been expanded by a
factor of 10 along manmade canals
to construct the most expensive real
estate in the state. The morphology
of the seascape and landscape is so
fabricated that you cannot distinguish
between the natural and constructed.
The type of waterfront real estate de-
velopment taking place in Dubai can be
found in other emerging cities around
the world. There is a Dubai in every de-
veloping city!
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ence helps to reveal the conditions in which
a new economy of small and medium enter-
prises are initiated along the grid.
If in the middle wet plain the problem is to
expel the water, in the dry plain it is to bring it
in to provide irrigation, avoiding its immediate
inltration into the water table. In a beautiful
map by Anton Von Zach, made at the be-
ginning of the 19th century, a system of ca-
nals was represented as an interconnected
mesh. During the 1930s, the continuous
mesh was transformed into a network of
concrete canals, a tree structure in which the
relation between vegetation and water was
lost, and the accessibility to the cultivated
elds was limited. This transformation was
also the consequence of a wider project of
industrialization: a new alliance between big
industry, which needed electricity and power
to develop the new petrochemical pole of
Porto Marghera, and the farmers of the dry
plain. Big dams were built in the mountains
that needed important engineering works,
and part of the water was given to new in-
dustrial agriculture developed out of a desert
of gravel in the dry plain, depriving the Piave
River of almost all its water. The landscape
changed: The earth canal with trees on both
sides disappeared or remained only as a
fragment, and the new network of concrete
reduced the agricultural richness and biodi-
versity of the area with a strong simplication
of traditional associations. The comparison
of the two structures, the mesh and the tree
structure, on a contemporary map, shows
the conict between the two different ideas
of rational use of water. Onsite, the contrast
is even more striking: One discovers the con-
icting relation between them and the dif-
culty in making them work together.
About Centrality and Public Space
Starting from the complex system of waters
and from the need of a safer territory, our de-
sign research explores the possibility of giv-
ing more space to the water, both for stock-
ing it and to prevent ooding. It envisages the
integration of low-lying, cultivated land along
a river, or abandoned gravel pits turned into
water reservoirs and canals in a new system
of open spaces for public and collective
practices. How does centrality match with
the idea of a dispersed territory? In an iso-
tropic territory, is a dispersed system of water
storage more rational then one big basin?
The roughly 700 hectares called Pr dei
Gai are a natural depression that can have
an important role in guided ooding opera-
tions on the Livenza river. Its tributary, the
Meduna (an alpine river, different from the
Livenza, which is a quiet river that originates
from a spring), has very dangerous oods,
and when it reaches the main river the force
of its waters obstructs the owing of the Liv-
was useful and started a process of improve-
ment. Different layers are stacked upon one
another, often reversing the point of view and
the idea of what had to be considered ra-
tional: large or incremental investments, as
in the Roman aggeratio or in its pervasive
and continuous modication over centuries;
exercises of collective and individual power
to reach collective or individual scopes, as
in the transformations of the industrial and
agricultural models; and the expression of
changing ideologies.

In a very short and simplied overview, one
can recognize three main moments of ratio-
nalization in strict relation with the geological,
topographical, and hydrogeological features,
following which we can divide the plain into
three strips from north to south: the dry plain
of gravel crossed by alpine rivers; the middle
wet plain below the spring line; the lower wet
plain up to the lagoon. The rst important
rationalization was the Roman centuriatio:
Starting from the 2nd century B.C., it devel-
oped simultaneously as a drainage system,
plot subdivision, and road infrastructure.
Along the middle wet plain, the centuriatio
turns at different angles to accommodate
slopes that allow water to ow away from the
impermeable ground.
In the 16th century, the second big attempt
to rationalize the waters, the great diversion
of rivers entering the lagoon, was started by
the Venetian Republic in order to avoid lling
the protective water surface with sand and
gravel brought from the northern mountains.
Rivers were displaced to the east and west
of the lagoon and new canals were built in
an incredible effort that is at the origin of the
new science of hydrology. This moment also
marks the entry of Venice into a new phase
of globalization, more interested in land and
agriculture than in sea commerce. The out-
come of the long debate opposing the rea-
sons of the land to the reasons of the sea
came out in a new phase of rationalization.
In the 1930s, the third moment of rational-
ization, during the Fascist period, big works
of reclamation invested the low wet areas
around the lagoon with procedures of pol-
derization not unlike the Dutch ones. The
works were strong enough to change com-
pletely the physical and ecological character
of the land, using complex systems of dikes,
ditches, and pumping stations, to create new
areas for industrial agriculture.
Each rationalization created its own land-
scape: The aggeratio attaches a drainage
system to a network of roads, rows of trees,
and cultivated elds divided by minor draining
lines. More recently, in the last four decades,
it has also organized a landscape of houses
and industries along the roads, and its pres-
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WATER AS
COMMODITY FOR
TRANSNATIONAL
CORPORATIONS
Aimee Chang
2 20th C Global Capitalization: networked
3 Development Doppler
1 16th C Mercantilism: functional pattern
of pointless ows
4 Access to safe drinking water
5 Urban populations with access to safe
drinking water
6 Transnational corporate territory
7 Nestle pure life territory
In the capitalist market, the ability
to operate at all scales within world
cycles and networks has been taken
advantage of by transnational corpo-
rations. Global localization is a neo-
Fordist strategy of downsizing to ex-
ploit peripheral economies within the
world system.
International institutions like the World
Health Organization are ltering world
territory into archipelagoes of con-
structed criteriahere, by urban pop-
ulations with access to safe drinking
water. This archipelago is further de-
ned by developing nations and has
become a strategic territory for occu-
pation by Nestl Corporation.
Nestl created a multisite concept to
answer the needs of emergent coun-
tries people waiting for healthy water
by manufacturing and distributing wa-
ter locally in those nations. The rst 12
sites of production have vastly differ-
ent infrastructural landscapes, yet the
same blueprint factory was dropped in
all those locations to produce a bot-
tled water with the exact same mineral
composition and taste.
Capable of global deployment, Pure
Life bottled water achieves autonomy
at the expense of local homogeniza-
tion.
100%
75 - 99%
50 - 74%
25 - 49%
0 - 24%
MARITIME ROUTES
MARITIME CITIES
HANSEATIC TOWNS
EMAAR
NAKHEEL
SUNLAND
DEVELOPER HEADQUARTERS
LINK
SECONDARY PROPERTIES
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enza, which then goes back, inundating the
plain. The depression, immediately north of
the conuence, could play a role in reducing
the risk of ooding, but Pr dei Gai is also
a vast grass surface along the river around
which are located small centers, linear settle-
ments, dispersed industrial activities, agricul-
ture, and old Venetian villas transformed into
four-star hotels. Existing dikes and paths are
the frontier between this large and almost
empty area, today ooded one or two times
a year, and the rest of the territory. The hy-
draulic project will transform this depression
in an anti-ooding basin for which it is neces-
sary to separate the basin (the depression)
from the river by way of a new dike and a
new canal. This means that the Livenza river
will split into two parts with different speeds,
which can create interesting conditions for
new ecosystems. The construction of canals
and dikes (a strip about 60 meters long) can
reach a ground balance.
What If? What would happen if the effort to
retrot the natural depressions became the
beginning of a contemporary park?
What If? What would happen if Pr dei Gai
were considered the center of this territory
instead of a marginal site?
Starting with these scenarios, we can see
ideas developing for a space that integrates
and reinterprets the engineering transforma-
tions.
The new canal, the new dikes, the bridges
and paths, and the humid areas have been
the starting point to design the relations be-
tween Pr dei Gai and its surrounding terri-
tory. Two main hypotheses come in to play:
The rst accepts the new dikes congura-
tion and explores the patterns of interaction
between the interior and the exterior of the
new ooded area; the second reverses the
engineering concept and proposes to use
the new dikes to frame the built areas instead
of the river and the ooding basin. The water
can nd new spaces between the built ar-
eas protected by new dikes, which can also
become places to live and work. A process
of phyto-depuration of white and grey water
can be integrated along the dikes to solve
the lack of a proper sewage system in some
parts of the area. Although the second ap-
proach enlarges the concern of ooding to
a wider territory, it is important to note that
both environmental and hydraulic engineers
agree about its rationality. From the spatial
point of view, the two concepts dene alter-
native congurations of extraordinary inter-
est, in both cases based on the design of
border and cross devices that mediate the
relation between the living areas and the
ooded ones. In both cases the grassland
of Pr dei Gai, crossed by the Livenza river
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enza, which then goes back, inundating the
plain. The depression, immediately north of
the conuence, could play a role in reducing
the risk of ooding, but Pr dei Gai is also
a vast grass surface along the river around
which are located small centers, linear settle-
ments, dispersed industrial activities, agricul-
ture, and old Venetian villas transformed into
four-star hotels. Existing dikes and paths are
the frontier between this large and almost
empty area, today ooded one or two times
a year, and the rest of the territory. The hy-
draulic project will transform this depression
in an anti-ooding basin for which it is neces-
sary to separate the basin (the depression)
from the river by way of a new dike and a
new canal. This means that the Livenza river
will split into two parts with different speeds,
which can create interesting conditions for
new ecosystems. The construction of canals
and dikes (a strip about 60 meters long) can
reach a ground balance.
What If? What would happen if the effort to
retrot the natural depressions became the
beginning of a contemporary park?
What If? What would happen if Pr dei Gai
were considered the center of this territory
instead of a marginal site?
Starting with these scenarios, we can see
ideas developing for a space that integrates
and reinterprets the engineering transforma-
tions.
The new canal, the new dikes, the bridges
and paths, and the humid areas have been
the starting point to design the relations be-
tween Pr dei Gai and its surrounding terri-
tory. Two main hypotheses come in to play:
The rst accepts the new dikes congura-
tion and explores the patterns of interaction
between the interior and the exterior of the
new ooded area; the second reverses the
engineering concept and proposes to use
the new dikes to frame the built areas instead
of the river and the ooding basin. The water
can nd new spaces between the built ar-
eas protected by new dikes, which can also
become places to live and work. A process
of phyto-depuration of white and grey water
can be integrated along the dikes to solve
the lack of a proper sewage system in some
parts of the area. Although the second ap-
proach enlarges the concern of ooding to
a wider territory, it is important to note that
both environmental and hydraulic engineers
agree about its rationality. From the spatial
point of view, the two concepts dene alter-
native congurations of extraordinary inter-
est, in both cases based on the design of
border and cross devices that mediate the
relation between the living areas and the
ooded ones. In both cases the grassland
of Pr dei Gai, crossed by the Livenza river
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Dubai + Gold Coast
DUBAI IN EVERY CITY
Aimee Chang 2006
1 Tower typology
2 Generic Suburban Sprawl: Dubai
3 Generic Suburban Sprawl: Gold Coast
4 Dream Home Selection Matrix: Choose
a plan + elevation
5 Q1 Typical Floor Plan
6 Q1 Jewel Floor Plan
7 Climate Zone: passive heating + cooling
8 Local labor and materials: red cedar +
rosewood
9 A jewel in the jewl box: The Palm Deira
and The Palm Trump
10 Unit Selection Matrix: Choose a bar-
code, Standard Marketing Graphic, unique
architectural unit
11 Entry
12 Bedroom
We live in a world of bipolarity: of the
global village and the peripheral node;
of total domination and pluralizing an-
thropology; of the traditional and the
contemporary; of the constructed and
the natural; of designing an icon for a
city at the desk of an architect in an-
other country.
Dubai is one outcome of this bipolar-
ity, where the poles remain at their
extremes. There exists, however, the
potential for crossbreeding in archi-
tecture to produce something new.
Global systems are not taken at face
value, but eaten, digested, and repro-
duced as something alternate to and
capable of feeding back on the sys-
tem.
Might an architect critically appro-
priate a dominant culture through
stealth occupation of existing market
modals?
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and the Rasego humid area, can be today
interpreted as the empty center of a wider
diffused area, where a rural society used to
meet for village ftes and animal fairs.

The second research project, above the
spring line, concerns the dry plain, where the
need to prevent ooding goes together with
the necessity to irrigate the cultivated elds
proting from the presence of hundreds of
gravel pits.
What If? What would happen if all the gravel
pits in the Treviso province were to be uti-
lized as basins for ood prevention for excess
uvial ood waters and as reservoirs? The
quantities that come into question are rele-
vant. Almost 80 million cubic meters of water
could be collected within the new basins
representing about half the capacity that the
Vajont dam held (150 million cubic meters).
After the terrible tragedy of the Vajont dam-
break in 1963, the utilization of the Piave riv-
ers water (for electric energy and agriculture
irrigation) went on, as if the available quan-
tities had not changed, and the diminishing
of a river that was increasingly lacking water
continued, especially in the summer months.
Today the water decit of the Piave river, which
comes out of the balance between use and
resources, including vital minimum runoff, is
50 million to 60 million cubic meters. The
holding capacity of the existing gravel pits
could instead be sufcient for guaranteeing
the necessary water for agriculture in periods
of drought, signicantly reducing the drawing
of river waters in the more delicate periods of
the uvial ecosystem. This would also avoid
the drawing of waters from the mountain ba-
sins during the summer months, when they
are frequented by many for recreational and
sports activities.
Ultimately, within this scenario, the ques-
tion and the proposal for the reuse of the
abandoned gravel pits translate into an ex-
traordinary opportunity to rethink the territory,
its landscape, its construction modalities,
and the activities that today directly involve
it. The pits, the canals that connect them to
waterways, the pathways that would run their
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Morton Bay
TRANSBOUNDARY
WATERS
Clara Abecassis 2006
1 Combined distribution of primary river
basins
2 Wind ows into Morton Bay
3 River ows into Morton Bay
4 Sand Extraction from Morton Bay
5 Site Plan
6 Site
7 Completion of the 4.6 km seawall exten-
sion at the Brisbane Port, Aug 2004
A regional map indicates the areas that
have been investigated as part of the
SEQRWSS. While consideration is be-
ing given to the specic areas covered
by the Council of Mayors (SEQ) mem-
ber councils, where relevant, a number
of signicant cross-boundary connec-
tions have been taken into account
with adjacent local governments.
Principal Reasons for Sand Extraction
Commercial: Ongoing commercial ex-
traction for use mainly in concrete and
concrete products
Development: Large-scale extraction
for development of capital projects, in-
cluding ll requirements for the expan-
sion of the Brisbane Airport
Shipping and Port Access: Navigational
channel maintenance works and capi-
tal dredging undertaken by the Port of
Brisbane Corporation to maintain des-
ignated minimum channel depths and
to provide safety for navigation
Water Filtration: For use in rapid sand
water ltration to provide further fresh-
water sourcing for Brisbane and its
surrounding communities
5
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length, the tree-lined strips, the enhanced
embankments, rest points, wooded areas,
sports and recreation facilitiesall these
could comprise the layout for a networked
park area that could innovate public spac-
es within an extended territory. There are of
course certain precise conditions to con-
sider: the problem of hydraulic security, the
changes in irrigation techniques, the abun-
dance of the gravel pits, factors that pres-
ently constitute the possibility for a collective
and effective territorial project.
The Merotto gravel pit recuperation project
is therefore interesting in a number of ways.
Its planning resulted in three important objec-
tives. First, to help ensure the availability of
water for agriculture during the summer and
periods of drought, as shown in the previ-
ous scenario; second, to mitigate against
the ooding of the river Meschio; third, to
test the possibility of enriching the phreatic
stratum (direct improvement of the reservoir
bed). Its introduction here, into an exgravel
pit that is already in a very advanced state of
renaturalization and constitutes an extremely
interesting biotype from a naturalistic point
of view (CBSP, 2003), is even more intrigu-
ing. The water table ows from northwest to
southeast; it is located between nine and
ten meters below surface level, and different
types of habitat have developed within the
gravel pit, including wet woodlands of white
willow (Salix alba) and black poplar (Populus
nigra), reeds, and wetland habitation, which
constitute a rare element of biodiversity in the
higher dry plain, together with mesophytic
grasses over large edge areas. Among other
considerations, geological surveys around
the gravel pit show that the trees manage to
grow in an area of notable adaptation to the
under-soil where building rubble, concrete
chunks, and even plastic material can be
found to a depth of approximately 1.8 me-
ters.
The consequences of abandonment are
that the gravel pit is today an extremely at-
tractive setting, which the project maintains
while working for its partial transformation.
For example: The central woods and the
grassy escarpment need not be completely
modied while, conversely, the pit can be
transformed into a veritable ecological test-
ing ground as well as a place for recreation
to be inserted within a more ample context.
The idea advanced here is for a reservoir ba-
sin that draws off effusions from the irrigation
canal, south of the gravel pit, and from the
northern new canal during the Meschio ood
periods, while the woodlands at its heart are
to be maintained. Pathways, jetties, and wa-
terside rest stops can all enhance the area
and make the vicinity comfortable, in passing
down through the different elevations towards
the low woods where part of the grassy es-
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TRANSBOUNDARY
WATERS
Clara Abecassis
carpment creates a natural arena.
The various design hypotheses for the new
canal resulted from a broad debate between
hydraulic engineers and designers that con-
fronted the issues concerning oodwater
management and territorial redevelopment.
Progress was made from a complete sepa-
ration of the two aspects (the hydraulic work-
ings ensured by a ood-overow pipeline and
a surface trench that supercially resembles
a traditional water network) towards the idea
of a canal connecting the river to the gravel
pit with variable and articulated cross-sec-
tions, more coherent both to the scope of
maintaining open-air water and to the actual
situation of settlement dispersal. The variable
sections allow the canal to adapt to differ-
ent situations, taking advantage of its capac-
ity for expansion and only having to reduce
itself to a pipeline in the stretches deemed
necessary. The new feature introduced into
the countryside landscape claries the con-
nection between the gravel pit and the river
via the creation of linear parklands with hedg-
es and clearings: a new (territorial) scale for
public space.
As I have already written, the paradox of
public spaces in the territories of dispersion
is clear, revealing at the same time the crisis
of traditional urbanity, of the modern concept
of public space and the limits of a strongly
individualized way of life. A weak structure of
small squares, roadside churches, and mod-
ern facilities, often in marginal and discon-
nected areas, is dispersed throughout the
territory. In recent years, much investment
has been made to requalify public spaces
within a traditional urban framework, often
inventing them where they had never existed
and in competition with new places of con-
sumption. The modern welfare city, highly
standardized and isotropic, has found it dif-
cult to represent the peculiar mix of rurality
and urbanity of the Venetian territory, and has
remained a predominantly functional space.
Public space is something larger. It is an in-
frastructural space that individuals cannot af-
ford on their own. Yet it is a social space that
we consider our own. It is related not only to
urbanity or to the modern idea of welfare but
also to larger symbolic representations. In a
metropolitan region such as Venice, where
more than 70 percent of the land is still cul-
tivated (producing only 2.8% of GDP), the
ideal can be neither Times Square nor a vil-
lage community space. In the European dis-
persed territories, along the isotropic network
of water and asphalt, minimal and large-scale
projects can produce denser environments.
Flooding areas, former gravel pits, new for-
ests, irrigation devices, canals and public
transport nodes are materials and places
with which and in which to reformulate the
concept of public and public space. They
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2006 Bangladesh
RURBAN
AGGLOMERATIONS
Fatou Kine Dieye
Much like blood, waters hydrologic
cycle ensures the health of man and
the growth of civilizations around the
world. Throughout history, large cit-
ies have always relied on water as a
pivotal element in their development.
Water is not only an essential resource
for human development but also often
considered a primary factor for eco-
nomic prosperity and a guiding force
in determining the rituals of everyday
life. Due to climate change, population
growth, and increasing urbanization,
our most important resource is now
being threatened.
are dispersed elements that could support
todays different activities connected to an
extended use of the territory, to new forms of
collective representation and free time. They
are not related to an idea of center and pe-
riphery but to the construction of a eld of
horizontal conditions for contemporary prac-
tices and ecology.
About isotropy and modernity: some
provisional conclusions
The projects described above are part of wid-
er research that observes the Veneto region
and its emerging paradoxes starting from its
main infrastructural layers: water and asphalt.
They dene isotropic conditions inside the
territory. The hypothesis is that the hydrau-
lic regime and the road system must be in-
vested with new relationships and meanings:
The great image of isotropy is here consid-
ered a fundamental element for the design of
a contemporary territorial support. Although
the territory is not perfectly isotropic, and cer-
tainly not homogeneous, isotropy remains a
reference, an extreme and ideal goal.
Our main research question is threefold:
What remains contemporary in the past pro-
cess of rationalization? Is isotropy a gure of
contemporary and future rationality (in other
words, is isotropy a useful condition inside
a process of modernization)? Which new
conditions have emerged to make it possible
to conceive a new project of isotropy? I am
conscious of the emphasis put on loaded
terms as rationality or modernization and the
need to clarify them: The project of isotropy
is, at the same time, the acknowledgement
of territorial specicity (the Venice metropoli-
tan area); a scenario to be investigated in its
manifold consequences; and a design hy-
pothesis that can be concretely elaborated:
It puts forward a new possibility of being
Modern.
The rst element supporting the hypothesis
of a new Modernity comes out of the terri-
tory itself: Some of the transformations we
read through deep insights and descrip-
tions innovate the vocabulary of space and
coexistence; they show original paths to
modernization that are not a banal repro-
duction of traditional ones (Vigan, 2001,
2004). Often these situations elaborate,
as has been the case in many territories of
dispersion in Europe, specic conditions of
development, in contradiction with the proj-
ect of Modern Urbanism, mixing what had to
be separated; dispersing where things had
to be concentrated; using heterogeneity as
an absorbing tool, instead of homogeneity;
being incremental instead of planned. Espe-
cially in the beginning, at least in the Italian
case, this new territory has been the condi-
tion and the support for a soft and diffused
economic growth; social and economic mo-
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2006 Bangladesh
RURBAN
AGGLOMERATIONS
Fatou Kine Dieye
1 It takes a village...
2 Sample superstructure
3 Arial view of Bangladeshs largest cities
4 Flow
5 Cost of Water Filters and Pumps
6 Ganges Delta
The idea behind the project is to think
of water-resource management as the
determining factor in urban and com-
munity development, viewing water as
a cultural symbol and a primary force
in human development. This proposal
introduces a new type of urbanism,
one in which resource management
and social networks are the driving
force behind economic prosperity.
Using the model developed by Mu-
hammad Yunus for Grameen Bank,
the proposal relies on a micronance
structure as a means of organizing
new type of rurban development.
4
5
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bility have been high, much higher than in
traditional urban conditions. An entire territory
has changed, superposing a new layer on
the old structure that is not contradictory to
it but more intense. Where dispersion was a
phenomenon of long duration the dispersion
simply became more evident and society
changed radically.
A second element of my hypothesis of a new
Modernity is related to the important infra-
structural changes we are now facing: The
rethinking of the water system in the cases
presented above is only one of the possible
events. In the recent past, with very few ex-
ceptions, the realization of hard infrastruc-
tures has always been divided into sepa-
rated elds (civil engineering and hydraulic
engineering, for example), following a full set
of distinct paradigms and often invoking the
supposed neutrality of technique. A new al-
liance is today urgent among different elds
of knowledge and technology; the change in
paradigms is crumbling the modern plaster
and designing new possibilities of sharing
images and visions of the future. The micro
histories of the redesign of Pr dei Gai and of
the Merotto gravel pit are one of the possible
results.
The third and nal element, related to the pre-
vious onethe important infrastructural tran-
sition we are passing throughconcerns the
need of a new and collective project in which
a change in paradigms and concepts can be
used to reach a shared vision. In the case of
the dispersed territories of the Veneto region,
the paradox of isotropy can be reversed into
a new project starting from the water sup-
port: investing in infrastructures both on the
local and the general level, starting from the
complex water system and reconnecting it to
the rest of the territory, to the contemporary
practices.
New forms of modernity, inspired by a shift
in paradigms, by new conceptualizations,
and by a different form of rationality (Dryzek,
1987) are one possible consequence of the
deep modernization processes occurring in
our epoch.
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