Dutch Deltas

Dutch Deltas

Author: Werner Scheltjens

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-07-14

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9004273077

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In Dutch Deltas, Werner Scheltjens examines the emergence, functions and structure of the Low Countries’ maritime transport system between ca. 1300 and 1850. Scheltjens introduces the delta as a suitable geographical unit of analysis for understanding the regional economic origins of communities of maritime transporters. The author proves that changes in maritime trade networks and in the structure of regional economies entailed a process of specialisation, which led to the emergence of ‘professional’ maritime transport communities and the development of an integrated maritime transport market with Amsterdam and Rotterdam as its main centres. Dutch Deltas offers the first comprehensive study of the economic geography of the Low Countries’ maritime transport sector and its long-term development between 1300 and 1850.


The Dutch and Their Delta

The Dutch and Their Delta

Author: Jacob Vossestein

Publisher: Xpat Scriptum Publishers

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789055947881

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All over the world, people learn in school that the Netherlands is a country that lies below sea-level. Dikes, polders, windmills and wooden shoes are well-known icons of this unusual nation, while its sturdy dams and storm surge barriers also enjoy world fame. But how does it all work? How can a country exist under such circumstances and even be prosperous? One would expect the Dutch to panic about climate change but they don't seem to be; how come? This book will tell you all about it, both in words and photos, striking a balance between developments in the past, the present and the future, steering clear from both generalizations and too much technological detail. Whether you are an expat, tourist, or far-away individual who has taken an interest in the country, this book will offer fascinating insights into how a society can function at sea level.


Delta Urbanism: The Netherlands

Delta Urbanism: The Netherlands

Author: Han Meyer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-08

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1351178024

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Delta Urbanism is a major new initiative that explores the growth, development, and management of deltaic cities and regions, with the aim of balancing various goals in a sustainable manner: urbanization, port commerce, industrial development, flood defense, public safety, ecological balance, tourism, and recreation. This book is a detailed history and overview of how one low-lying country has developed the policies, tools, technology, planning, public outreach, and international cooperation needed to save their populated deltas.


Origin of the Dutch coastal landscape

Origin of the Dutch coastal landscape

Author: Peter Vos

Publisher: Barkhuis

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 949143182X

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The topic of this book is the Origin of the Dutch coastal landscape during the Holocene. ­ The landscape evolution is vizualized in series of palaeogeographical maps and the driving mechanisms behind the environmental changes are discussed. The practice to make palaeogeographical map reconstructions in the Netherlands developed after the Second World War when a lot of regional geological and soil scientific mapping programs were carried out by government institutions and universities. These maps show when and how the surveyed sediments were formed. The palaeogeographical map reconstructions are subsequently used for the understanding and modelling of the long-term coastal evolution, coastal-management issues, landscape-archaeological purposes and for education and public information reasons. Geoarchaeological investigations play an important role in this study. Geological and palaeo-environmental data from archaeological excavations (‘key sites') provided essential information for the palaeolandscape reconstructions. In the presented regional- and local-case studies of this book, examples of these sites are shown.


Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty

Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty

Author: Vincent A. W. J. Marchau

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-04

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 3030052524

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This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.


Deltas and Humans

Deltas and Humans

Author: Thomas S. Bianchi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-10-03

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0190627719

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Humans have had a long relationship with the ebb and flow of tides on river deltas around the world. The fertile soils of river deltas provided early human civilizations with a means of farming crops and obtaining seafood from the highly productive marshes and shallow coastal waters associated with deltas. However, this relationship has at times been both nurturing and tumultuous for the development of early civilizations. The vicissitudes of seasonal changes in river flooding events as well as frequently shifting deltaic soils made life for these early human settlements challenging. These natural transient processes that affect the supply of sediments to deltas today are in many ways very similar to what they have been over the millennia of human settlements. But something else has been altered in the natural rhythm of these cycles. The massive expansion of human populations around the world in both the lower and upper drainage basins of these large rivers have changed the manner in which sediments and water are delivered to deltas. Because of the high density of human populations found in these regions, humans have developed elaborate hydrological engineering schemes in an attempt to "tame" these deltas. The goal of this book is to provide information on the historical relationship between humans and deltas that will hopefully encourage immediate preparation for coastal management plans in response to the impending inundation of major cities, as a result of global change around the world.


Restructuring Cultural Landscapes in Metropolitan Areas

Restructuring Cultural Landscapes in Metropolitan Areas

Author: Yuting Xie

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-12-07

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 9811907552

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This book introduces a ten-year-long design research project in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China, based on international cooperation studios, design workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Netherlands. This research adapts the existing methods of Landscape Character Assessment (UK), Historic Cultural Landscape Elements (Germany), and Dutch Polder Typology to mapping, describing, and classifying landscape character areas and types at the three scales of regional, municipal, and local. Furthermore, to connect research with design, we developed a typological approach of generating specific measures for the networked polder landscape. This research bridges the gap of a missing landscape characterization method for the conservation, transformation, and critical reconstruction of historic cultural landscapes in a metropolitan context. The book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners interested in the topics of cultural landscape in transition, methods for landscape characterization and typology, and a research-by-design approach in interdisciplinary projects of landscape architecture, urbanism, and regional planning.


Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design

Complexity, Cognition, Urban Planning and Design

Author: Juval Portugali

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-05-19

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 3319326538

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This book, which resulted from an intensive discourse between experts from several disciplines – complexity theorists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, urban planners and urban designers, as well as a zoologist and a physiologist – addresses various issues regarding cities. It is a first step in responding to the challenge of generating just such a discourse, based on a dilemma identified in the CTC (Complexity Theories of Cities) domain. The latter has demonstrated that cities exhibit the properties of natural, organic complex systems: they are open, complex and bottom-up, have fractal structures and are often chaotic. CTC have further shown that many of the mathematical formalisms and models developed to study material and organic complex systems also apply to cities. The dilemma in the current state of CTC is that cities differ from natural complex systems in that they are hybrid complex systems composed, on the one hand, of artifacts such as buildings, roads and bridges, and of natural human agents on the other. This raises a plethora of new questions on the difference between the natural and the artificial, the cognitive origin of human action and behavior, and the role of planning and designing cities. The answers to these questions cannot come from a single discipline; they must instead emerge from a discourse between experts from several disciplines engaged in CTC.


Negotiating Water Governance

Negotiating Water Governance

Author: Emma S. Norman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1317089162

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Those who control water, hold power. Complicating matters, water is a flow resource; constantly changing states between liquid, solid, and gas, being incorporated into living and non-living things and crossing boundaries of all kinds. As a result, water governance has much to do with the question of boundaries and scale: who is in and who is out of decision-making structures? Which of the many boundaries that water crosses should be used for decision-making related to its governance? Recently, efforts to understand the relationship between water and political boundaries have come to the fore of water governance debates: how and why does water governance fragment across sectors and governmental departments? How can we govern shared waters more effectively? How do politics and power play out in water governance? This book brings together and connects the work of scholars to engage with such questions. The introduction of scalar debates into water governance discussions is a significant advancement of both governance studies and scalar theory: decision-making with respect to water is often, implicitly, a decision about scale and its related politics. When water managers or scholars explore municipal water service delivery systems, argue that integrated approaches to salmon stewardship are critical to their survival, query the damming of a river to provide power to another region and investigate access to potable water - they are deliberating the politics of scale. Accessible, engaging, and informative, the volume offers an overview and advancement of both scalar and governance studies while examining practical solutions to the challenges of water governance.