Overview
The Berkel River originates in Germany and winds its way into the Netherlands, passing through the Achterhoek region until it reaches Zutphen, where it merges with the IJssel. Historically, the river’s seasonal floods reshaped its meanders, leading humans to intervene as early as the 13th century with canalization to control flooding and improve navigation. One of the first major landscape changes occurred in 1886 with the privatization and division of ‘markegronden’ (common lands), accompanied by drainage efforts to enable intensive farming. By the 20th century, additional drainage through state-led land consolidation, canalization, weirs, and sluices further altered the river’s landscape and water flow.
Today, water management of the Berkel River in the Netherlands reflects new ecological, cultural, and social priorities, with multiple stakeholders engaging in restoration projects to restore the river’s natural meanders and cultural heritage. Actors such as the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, Rijn en Ijssel Waterboard, municipalities, landowners, and citizen groups (e.g., ‘Drinkbare Berkel,’ ‘Gelders Landschap en Kasteelen,’ and ‘3rd Berkel Company’) are key players in these ongoing transformations. These efforts have prompted ongoing negotiations regarding the landscape management of the Berkel, which has created tensions between the different actors, as each group pursues its own vision for the Berkel River’s future. My research on the Berkel explores how diverse interpretations of riverine territory, both past and present, have reshaped the landscape through contested design and re-design efforts influenced by power dynamics.
Research summary
PhD researcher: Catalina Rey Hernández
The management of riverine landscapes has been usually based on top-down processes of landscape design, territorial planning and related social-material transformations. These processes directly affect riverine communities and livelihoods, triggering local confrontations with -and adaptations to- the imposed designs and related forms of socio-material ordering. In this context, this research aims to better understand: a) how design representation result from power relations, struggles and negotiations, b) how these visualizations elicit grassroots reactions and struggles that challenge and aim to transform these representations, and c) how once translated to new materialities they act upon and transform existing socio-material relations in diverse ways. In this paper we focus on the contestations around large-scale mining and hydropower projects in the Yanuncay river and the Kimsakocha wetlands (Ecuador), in addition to the struggles around projects of re-designing the Berkel river (Netherlands). The research builds on insights from the hydrosocial territories conceptualization, sense of place scholarship, concepts of oral and visual narratives, and notions of counter-cartographies theory to better understand the role of ‘designs’ and ‘(re)presentations’ in the contestation and transformation of riverine spaces in which a multiplicity of actors try to create a specific social, technological and environmental order (a hydrosocial territory).