Waterway Systems and Adaptation in European Industrial Landscapes

Industrialization has profoundly shaped landscape, sociality and lifestyles in the last three centuries all over Europe, imposing its necessities, rhythms and priorities over the land, the people, the communities. At the same time, in most cases industrialization had to adapt its development to the effective abundance and distribution of local resources, taking into consideration firstly the availability of water, with its strength, power and unpredictability, an then the limited changes in water-related land morphology that the territories were actually able to support. Water has indeed been canalized, collected and redirected for human purposes since the beginning of time (Campbell, 2012; Strang, 2005), but in the era of industrial revolution the growing scale of visionary projects rises to a paradoxical proportion: connecting inland lakes to distant seas, bringing distant rivers to flow towards one other, making dry cities reachable via water channels, by boat and barges, everything seems possible in an enthusiastic hype of landscape reconfigurations obtained through the terraforming action of water; a reconfiguration that remains imprinted on the land still today.