On land-water interface in Europe
Since we are looking at sea level rise and the different ways we can address land-water interface, I thought it’d be a good idea for me to ask my friend who’s currently in Belgium to help me understand how the Europeans think about water and what their land-water interface looks like. It augmented my understanding of canals and has definitely inspired some ideas that would’ve never occurred to me if it weren’t for this talk we had. I’d like to share some of this with the rest of you.
The first picture worthy of discussion is the use of floodgates to control the water level, but more importantly, the use of smaller channels so that smaller boats can get through the passage without having to go through the timely process of the gate opening up. Most of the water is blocked by the flood gate in the even of a flood and the smaller channel allows access 24/7 through the gate. Another factor that is quite interesting to me, is the fact that there are traffic lights on the water. This might be because I’m Canadian have never seen anything like this before but the Canals in Belgium, along with a lot of other European countries really act as active roads for its inhabitants.
These next two pictures really speak to the canals as a public space. Although this is the not the case in North America, it is legal for people to drink alcohol publicly in Belgium. Which makes the canals a perfect gathering place on the nice day to have a couple of beers with your friends. Unfortunately due to the pandemic, the bottom picture seems empty, but according to my friend, it’d usually be packed on a bright sunny day like that. Humans are intrinsically attracted to the water. We can see this in a lot of the classic landscape projects like Paley Park in NYC. Simply having a water element in a public space will always attract people to it. Perhaps this kind of waters edge intervention can be implemented in the bay area. I really think that it’ll be a success because the weather is so much warmer in California than Belgium and I’m sure people wouldn’t mind features that further connects them with the SF bay.
On the note of public space, we were talking about how one might incorporate a beach into this wall and he sent me this picture of an artificial “beach” that was done as an installation in Paris. I thought this was an ingenious way to have places where you can sun-tan and hang out while also not break the integrity of the river prevention mechanism (in this case the flood walls). It also offers an the interesting phenomenon of prospect of refuge where the visitor’s attention is forced onto the river while the wall shields their flank.
Another thought I had while looking at this image is extending the length of Riverwalk itself. If we were to imagine the space above without the makeshift beach, it would be a very wide space. This flexible space would allow for a myriad of programming/installations and would be a great asset to the city!
The last picture I’ll talk about is the concept of living on the water — not in floating houses but on boats. Apparently it is very common for people to permanently live on their boats somewhere along the many canals of Belgium. In fact, in this picture you can see that the second closest boat is actually a hotel. This may be a viable way to provide housing units without tapping into the already precious and crowded lands of SF. Perhaps infrastructure could be built to support these house-boats all over the bay and inhabitants have the freedom to travel between sites to live where ever they want in the Bay area.
