In
a
number
of
projects
and
proposals,
architects
and
urban
planners
are
working
with
water
instead
of
against
it.
There are more ways to work with water than mitigating flood impacts. Architects and urban planners are reevaluating all the ways cities interact with water, from transport to recreation to energy to drinking water, and their ideas have the potential to fundamentally alter cities the way the car did in the 20th century.
“We need to acknowledge that the water is eventually going to do what the water wants to do, and shift our approach, as human populations living on the Earth, from one of trying to dominate nature to one that acknowledges the power of nature and works in synchrony with that,” says Elizabeth English, Water Institute member and associate professor at the Waterloo University School of Architecture. “We’ve already set ourselves down this path of dams and levees and water control systems, and it’s really hard to turn back. But we don’t need to keep replicating that. We don’t need to make the situation worse. It’s time to step back from the approach of control and fortification.”
Read the full story in Smithsonian Magazine.