Going with the Flow: Water governance in the Netherlands

August 6th, 2013

Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times, United States

Some dozen years ago the Dutch government ordered Mr. Hooijmaijers to vacate the farmland that he and his family shared with 16 other farmers so it could be turned into a river spillway for occasional floods.

How the Hooijmaijerses and their neighbours responded to that government order, and how in turn the government dealt with their response, is a story that might now interest planners in coastal cities worldwide.

Officials, planners, engineers, architects and others have been looking towards the Netherlands lately. The Netherlands has successfully held back the sea for centuries and thrived. After the North Sea flooded in 1953, devastating the southwest of this country and killing 1,835 people in a single night, Dutch officials devised an ingenious network of dams, sluices and barriers called the Deltaworks.1,2

Water management in the Netherlands depends on hard science and meticulous study. Phrases like once-in-a-century storm are often thrown around. The Dutch, with a knowledge of water, tides and floods honed by painful experience, can calculate to the centimetre  and the Dutch government legislates accordingly  exactly how high or low to position hundreds of dikes along rivers and other waterways to anticipate storms they estimate will occur once every 25 years, or every 1,000 years, or every 10,000.

And now the evidence is leading them to undertake what may seem, at first blush, a counterintuitive approach, a kind of about-face: The Dutch are starting to let the water in. They are contriving to live with nature, rather than fight (what will inevitably be, they have come to realize) a losing battle.

Why? The reality of rising seas and rivers leaves no choice. Sea barriers sufficed half a century ago; but they’re disruptive to the ecology and are built only so high, while the waters keep rising. Those who now tout sea gates as the one-stop-shopping solution to protect coastal cities should take notice. In lieu of flood control the new philosophy in the Netherlands is controlled flooding.

The Dutch have pursued an aggressive and complex relocation strategy. While most citizens oppose top-down programs that impinge on personal and property rights, water safety trumps pretty much every other priority in a country where 60 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product is produced below sea level. Dikes are being lowered, spillways created. Many of the projects have faced legal battles and predictable public protests. People are being uprooted, lands repurposed. But the benefits are clear and widely shared.

Protecting the country from storms and floods isn’t treated here merely as a burden or a political football but as an economic and architectural opportunity. The local buzzword is “multifunctional.” The Dutch are putting retail and offices on top of new dikes, designing public squares and garages to double as catch basins for rain and floodwater, and constructing floating houses and reservoirs that create recreational opportunities. They have managed to improve public life, public space and the landscape at a fraction of the billions American taxpayers pay out for repairing hurricane damage.

The centrepiece of Dutch water management now is Room for the River, a decades-long $3 billion program.3 It consists of nearly 40 interlinked infrastructure projects to mitigate climate change along the rivers and waterways that weave through the Netherlands. One Room for the River project is the Overdiepse Polder, about 100 kilometres south of Amsterdam.4 It gets back to where we started: where the Hooijmaijers live.

Polders are reclaimed marshes, floodplains and other low-lying lands, surrounded by dikes. By lowering the dike along the northern edge of the two-square-mile Overdiepse Polder, the Bergse Maas canal will be able to spill in, diminishing the water level in the canal by a foot, enough to spare the 140,000 residents of Den Bosch, upriver, in the event of once-every-25-year floods. By displacing farmers, in other words, residents in that city can breathe a little easier.

Naturally the project didn’t go over well with the Hooijmaijerses and the other residents of the Overdiepse Polder when it was announced in 2000. But here’s where the Dutch example is instructive. The government did not ask for volunteers to leave. It made a decision, based on real numbers and the economy of the area. The polder would be used as a spillway. The farms would have to go. The farmers would be compensated, but staying wasn’t an option.

Rather than try to sue for more money or fight the plan, as farmers elsewhere did over other elements of Room for the River, the residents of Overdiepse Polder came up with a novel idea: Yes, the polder would become a spillway but the government should build a number of mounds along the southern edge onto which a half-dozen or more of the farmers could resettle. The mounds would be large enough (roughly 8 hectares) to accommodate new farmhouses and sheds, and high enough (7 metres above the level of the polder) to keep dry. There wouldn’t be enough room for 17 mounds, so some of the farmers would have to leave. Constructing eight mounds, as it turned out, was the right number.

Mr. Hooijmaijers organized the farmers. Negotiations were gruelling and took years. “Every farmer thinks he has the best farm in the world,” is how he put it to me. “We had been a village, a community, and then in a moment, when the government said, ‘You have to go,’ you become each other’s competitors,” Mr. Hooijmaijers recalled. “But we came together, and the government was very reasonable. It wanted to help.”

With the money the government paid to buy and eventually raze their old farmhouse, the Hooijmaijerses had a down payment for a new, modern farmhouse. “These things are not easy,” Mr. Hooijmaijers said, “but they work out if there is cooperation and participation.”

Another way to phrase it is that hard decisions need to be made to cope with rising waters and severe weather. Notwithstanding the obvious difference between a group of farmers on a Dutch polder and larger, more urban communities, good government makes those decisions while giving affected residents adequate knowledge and agency: the ability to make choices, and the responsibility to live by them. Politically that may be trickier than commissioning sea barriers or making dikes into boardwalks or redesigning waterfronts and neighbourhoods to accommodate floods and storms. But it’s necessary. And it may be the most important lesson that the Netherlands has to offer at the moment.

References:

1. Aerts, J. and Botzen, W. (2012) Climate Adaptation Cost for Flood Risk Management in the Netherlands. Storm Surge Barriers to Protect New York City: pp. 99-113. doi: 10.1061/9780784412527.007

2. Kind, J.M. (2013), ‘Economically efficient flood protection standards for the Netherlands’, Journal of Flood Risk Management, DOI: 10.1111/jfr3.12026

3. Edelenbos, J. et al. (2013), ‘Dealing with uncertainties in the Dutch Room for the River programme: a comparison between the Overdiep polder and Noordwaard’, in Warner, J.F. (eds.), Making Space For The River: Governance Experiences With Multifunctional River Flood Management in the US and Europe, IWA, London.

4. Roth, D. & Winnubst, M. (2009), ‘Reconstructing the polder: negotiating property rights and ‘blue’ functions for land’, International Journal of Agricultural Resources, Governance and Ecology, Volume 8, Number 1/2009, pp. 37-56

Michael Kimmelman is an author and columnist. He is the architecture critic for The New York Times and has written on issues of public space, infrastructure, and community development. The work presented here is a shorter version of an article by the same title that appeared in the New York Times on February 17, 2013. Michael can be reached at: mkimmelman@nytimes.com.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.