Series of columns: How do you see the future of the Dutch polder landscape?
7 - Dreaming up a Post-Modern Polder
Jusuck Koh, Director Wageningen University and Research Centre
Postmodernism as a paradigm of thought and attitude applies not only to the necessary reinterpretation of "logical" approach (whose logic? Human's nature?), but also reassessing viable human relationship with nature, land/landscape and even culture.
If past polder landscapes are the products of winning land, creating places of human at the exclusion of water by damming and draining, the stake is no less than our existential security (defense for survival) and the economy, gaining the maximum land with minimum cost. Thus control and efficiency, in other words, "ordering" has been the main principle of shaping the land: "Landschap". Landschap then became a water controller, storage and processing machine. The expansion of polder landscape, accelerated with industrial technology lead to Modern polder, thus to Modern Landscape with Euclidean geometry, greater power to build, control and modify the land, rationally and/or equitably, both in terms of subdivision for drainage and ownership of land.
Children and design and engineering professionals grown up in such a polder landscape become not only convinced of our power to control and defend, but also enjoy the clarity of the landscape, the aesthetics of straight line, and even gain a sense of satisfaction that comes with domination, not unlike Kings in the French Baroque gardens. A small straight line on 1:50.000 scale map, becomes an alee, a monument. And it is easy to draw such a small line. And then this landscape has been "aestheticized" by Modern designer as functional and pragmatic, even when the resultant landscape was not always functional and practical. Straight, no nonsense line and geometric form became a sign of functionalism. And this is also how modernist architects aestheticized the functionalism too, to the degree of considering flat roofs and boxes as functional.
Post-modern polder is then not about control but about negotiation, not about separation from water, but about re-integration and "re-coupling" of land with water for a happy marriage. It is certainly not about Euclidian geometry and linear process but about fractal geometry and cyclic process. It is not about functionalism of civil engineering which lost its civility, or of cultural technology which lost culturedness.
The resulting aesthetics of Post-modern landscape then is not for "distanced", "distemic" or aerial view and immediate effect for elite with power; it is rather for "engaged", "proxemic" and mediate experience of many ordinary people on the ground in their daily, repeated experience, particularly the people who keep their mind without losing their heart.
The resultant economy of such post-modern polder is not that of market oriented, commodity-based, short term economy of special interests groups but that of environmental, human, even evolutionary economy of long-term and inclusive community. Thus the economy becomes synonymous to ecology and community. Just as pre-industrial polder was by, for, and of community.
Polder then becomes once again community and habitat. Our landscape is then not just for machine for production, but place for living, loving and learning as well as working.
Industrialization has appropriated the term "plant" for the manufacturing site (i.e. petrochemical plant). But landscape, as much as it is made of plant as well, is a living and creative agent and place. It is not just plant, not just a machine.
The dream for the post-industrial poldering is then not to deny the earlier contribution of industrial polder making, but to call upon a new architecture of intelligent, sensitive, resilient, living polder. Given changing global ecological conditions and changing position of Dutch agriculture in global economy, we must be responsive and responsible for a butterfly effect of polder-making upon elsewhere in time and space. Post-modern polder must then not only for community of us, but for community with the others, nature. And in such polder, town and country, creation and recreation would no longer be separated but integrated. And in such polder-making, the role of landscape architects would become increasingly indispensable.
Jusuck Koh